Introduction:
Chinese authorities on Sunday violently dispersed a peaceful protest by hundreds of depositors, who sought in vain to demand their life savings back from banks that have run into a deepening cash crisis.
History:
Since April, four rural banks in China's central Henan province have frozen millions of dollars worth of deposits, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of customers…
Anguished depositors have staged several demonstrations in the city of Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, over the past two months, but their demands have invariably fallen on deaf ears.
Last month, Zhengzhou authorities even resorted to tampering with the country's digital Covid health-code system to restrict the movements of depositors and thwart their planned protest, sparking a nationwide outcry.
The Protest:
On Sunday, more than 1,000 depositors from across China gathered outside the Zhengzhou branch of the country's central bank, the People's Bank of China, to launch their largest protest yet…. The demonstration is among the largest China has seen since the pandemic, with domestic travel limited by various Covid restrictions on movement.
…most protesters arrived outside the bank before dawn -- some as early as 4 a.m. -- to avoid being intercepted by authorities. The crowd, which included the elderly and children, occupied a flight of imposing stairs outside the bank, chanting slogans and holding up banners.
Police Response:
Across the street, hundreds of police and security personnel -- some in uniforms and others in plain clothes -- assembled and surrounded the site, as protesters shouted "gangsters" at them.
The face-off lasted for several hours until after 11 a.m., when rows of security officers suddenly charged up the stairs and clashed with protesters, who threw bottles and other small objects at them… security officers dragged protesters down the stairs and beat those who resisted, including women and the elderly…
The protesters were hurled onto dozens of buses and sent to makeshift detention sites across the city -- from hotels and schools to factories, according to people taken there. Some injured were escorted to hospitals; many were released from detention by the late afternoon, the people said.
The headline of this article and so many others conflate private business and local governments with China/CPC/Xi/whatever else, and in a way that never happens with "United States" or even "Joe Biden", "Trump", etc (obv). They cop to it unceremoniously in the body text, but most people will just gloss over that because 1) no one reads past headlines 2) no one reads articles 3) it drops "Zhengzhou authorities" in passing as if :lmayo: :farquaad-point: care or know what means. "China" as the evil government is the takeaway.
The writers can't conceive and won't disclose of anything but total dictatorship, often one-man autocracy so most reading won't consider the absurdity of one guy or an inner clique of, idk, 30 strongmen domineering over 1/5th of humanity and ordering (minimum abetting) the brutal crackdown of "hundreds of depositors" outside a bank in a provincial capital as opposed to a local government over 1000 miles from Beijing in a unitary but devolved system (similar to the UK but more substantive & extensive). And as /u/dead pointed out, China is working to get the deposits back from these private banks. If we're gonna read the national government as China, then China is trying to fix this, by opposing capitalistic banks.
Please give me some link to read further so I can forward it to the China hating family members who keep posting this.
I don't have anything in particular relating to devolution of powers, it is frustratingly difficult to search for. There's not many good rundowns that aren't Chinese state media, unfortunately. It is hard to find lib-friendly sources beyond dry, academic articles. This UN site is sparse but positive.
I do have an al-Jazeera article documenting that the police have arrested suspects involved with the bank though https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/7/11/chinese-police-arrest-suspects-in-bank-scandal-behind-protests
It's MSM, so naturally they have a section claiming protests are rare with dissent being tightly controlled and so on and so forth... Thankfully it is at the end; most of the article shows that the government is putting the bank to justice.
NATO countries do this all the time with countries they don't like. Anything that goes bad is immediately the fault of the leader they don't like. Even if the issue was the fault of a smaller municipality.