Shanghai police break up "maglev" train protest

[Doctor Cynic]

Source: Reuters

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Police broke up a demonstration against a planned extension of Shanghai's high-speed "maglev" train line on Sunday, pushing and dragging dozens of protesters off one of the city's most crowded shopping streets.

Officers cordoned off part of Nanjing Road as they prevented a repeat of Saturday's demonstration there by hundreds of people, Shanghai's largest public protest since thousands took part in sometimes violent anti-Japanese demonstrations in 2005.

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=487e845c-7ebc-401e-9369-d88eeead5924&k=3755

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Some videos have surfaced on Youtube showing the protest, and you don't need to know Chinese to understand what's going on:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=tooodou

[Warpy]

1. Since reports of protests over urban renewal

and other projects that are destroying homes to make way for modernity for the new rich in China are getting out, I think we can multiply all this stuff by at least a thousand. China is getting very close to another revolution.

Life is still cheap in China, but eventually they'll reach a critical mass of lives destroyed and all hell will break loose. They are one natural disaster away from "losing the mandate of heaven" and having all hell break loose all over the country.

The Tangshan earthquake signaled the end of the Communist experiment and a move to a centrally planned capitalist economy. Now that ordinary Chinese have found out how wonderful unregulated capitalism is, who knows what they'll come up with next?

They're one major typhoon, major flood or earthquake away from finding out.

[oldtime dfl_er]

2. I wonder

Certainly the mass exodus of humans from the countryside into the cities is creating unprecedented problems in those cities, and yes, life is cheap as hell, and yes, the hutongs and neighborhoods are being destroyed on a massive scale - so large that by the time a map of a city is printed it's no longer correct - but the country is still ruled pretty heavily by the government. The Olympics shouldn't have been given to China this year, I think that was a major mistake. They aren't ready for it.

But a new revolution? Probably not any time soon.

[Warpy]

5. Socio political upheavals follow natural disasters in China

because that's just their core belief system, their way of doing things for millennia.

They were just lucky that the upheaval after the Tangshan quake was a peaceful one and confined to the inner circle of government.

The next one will be fire in the lake, for sure.

[tomreedtoon]

3. If only it were true.

Like any Communist country, the ones with the guns ultimately decide.

I've been hearing the reports about the place where the Olympics are to be held. It sounds like a toxic waste dump - AFTER their supposed clean-up.

It would be nice to imagine the Chinese people rising up against this at the Olympics, making a massacre that would make the Atlanta and Munich Olympics look like a rainy day by comparison. But I'll bet the Chinese government won't let it happen, or at least won't let it be televised.

[Javaman]

4. Is this the same monorail that went through north haverbrook and ogdenville? nt