BEIJING — The signs of discontent are small but unnerving in an authoritarian country where public demonstrations are not permitted.
Laid-off toy company workers smash windows and computers and overturn police cars in Guangdong province. Employees of a liquor company in Harbin travel to their company's Beijing headquarters to demand back wages. Taxi drivers, as many as 20,000 of them, scuffle with police in protests that have spread into seven provinces.
Even the police have gotten into the act. Auxiliary officers surrounded a Communist Party office last week in Hunan province to demand higher wages, said the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
As China's economy hits the skids, such protests have been sporadic and usually involved fewer than 100 people. But in recent weeks, they have cropped up across the country like brush fires.
"Definitely, this is the most serious problem we have seen since 1989," said Zhou Xiaozheng, a professor of sociology at People's University in Beijing. "You have millions of college students who can't find jobs. . . . You have migrant workers who have lost their jobs at factories and don't have land to go back to."
It is counterintuitive that a global financial crisis that started with the excesses of Wall Street should be undermining the Chinese Communist Party. But academics such as Zhou believe that the economic crisis could present the leadership with its biggest political challenge since the student protests at Tiananmen Square nearly two decades ago.
To a large extent, China's fiscal problems pale next to those of the United States. The unemployment rate is not expected to top 4.5%, compared with the current 6.5% in the U.S. Although the World Bank recently slashed China's growth forecast for next year to 7.5% from more than 9%, even the lower figure keeps it at the top of the pack.
The problem is that ordinary growth might not be enough for a system that's been sustained by double-digit gains over the last five years. New York University economist Nouriel Roubini predicted last month in a widely quoted newsletter that without 9% to 10% growth, China is headed for a "hard landing."
Security in growth
It is the conventional wisdom that Communist Party rule has survived into the 21st century because of the nation's extraordinary economic growth. China watchers often speak of an implicit bargain between the people and the party: Give up demands for democracy and free speech and we'll make you rich.
