Might Cuba’s military draw parallels to China’s plight in regards to unemployed ex-servicemen?
The Economist features an article detailing the predicament be facing China’s PLA and leadership’s concern over such a destabilizing situation.
The following excerpts illustrate the case in point:
Over the past couple of years protests by demobilised soldiers have become a potent challenge to local governments trying to keep the lid on unrest during a period of wrenching social and economic change. The unrest has embarrassed the ruling Communist Party, which came to power militarily and might have fallen in 1989 but for the army’s crushing of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
The ex-servicemen’s main grievance is the difficulty of settling back into civilian life. Most soldiers from towns are assigned jobs in the civilian sector when they leave the army. But this has become increasingly difficult because of the dismantling of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in recent years and the resentment of surviving SOEs at having ex-soldiers foisted on them. Rural soldiers—the bulk of the non-officer ranks—are being sent back to villages where there is next to nothing to do.
In Yantai around 2,000 ex-soldiers gathered in mid-July outside the local legislature to demand better benefits. They also wanted to make the point that the toothless legislature should be doing a better job of supervising the government. The Yantai authorities responded unfavourably. Activists say that police have stepped up surveillance of their homes and that plainclothes officers often follow them. Police broke up your correspondent’s meeting with a group of ex-servicemen, on the pretext of a passport check.
[…]
Given the army’s vital importance to the maintenance of party rule, the official press is especially reticent about publicising unrest among ex-servicemen. Chinese academics rarely mention the topic. But in an article that appeared in the spring edition of China Security, a quarterly published in Washington, DC, Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said that demobilised soldiers could act as a “bond” to bring together isolated disaffected groups. Mr Yu said ex-servicemen in the countryside, who he said numbered 20m, had the “social capital, organisational, networking and mobilisation capabilities to be the bridge between workers and peasants”. In the southern province of Hunan, he said, veterans had formed an “anti-corruption brigade” including laid-off workers, peasants and intellectuals of 100,000 members. This number is unverifiable, given the underground nature of any such movement.
[Photo: The Economist]
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