Chinese citizens are starting to stand up for their rights, and they are doing so collectively. Over the past couple of years, increasing numbers of grass-roots-based rights campaigns have been taking place across the mainland, both in cities and rural areas.
These have been prompted by a wide range of issues, all related to the growing problems of social injustice, economic inequity and poor governance that have come in the wake of two decades of economic reform.
Citizens have been voicing their protests - in an organised way - against such abuses as land requisitions without compensation, forced evictions of residents to make way for urban redevelopment, and the siting of polluting factories in heavily populated areas.
Worker unrest has typically been prompted by excessive working hours, unpaid wages and lack of overtime pay, unsafe working conditions, and forced redundancies following factory 'restructuring' (often mere asset-stripping exercises) that have seen managers become wealthy overnight.
This loose but broad-based social movement - involving, by the government's own estimate, tens of thousands of collective protests in which several million citizens have taken part each year - is being referred to on the mainland as the wei quan, or 'rights defence', movement. In fact, it deserves to be better known as China's emerging civil rights movement.
The new movement's strength lies in its avoidance of political rhetoric and focus on issues of social justice, livelihood and local governance. This has allowed it - in contrast with the mainland human-rights movement which government repression has largely succeeded in marginalising in recent years - to win broad support from the local communities where wei quan struggles are under way.
