ABSTRACT
Rapid economic development is highly destabilizing, and in China, accelerated economic growth accompanied by far-reaching social change, is generating widespread protests. Intensified commercialization and commodification of land, labor and agricultural products, rapid urbanization, enormous capital construction and public works projects, and rural industrialization, are all occurring within the context of a poorly regulated market, a weak legal and tax regime, a pliant environmental monitoring system, and a political system that favors powerful officials and the nouveaux riches and usually ignores or suppresses, rather than responds sympathetically to, social grievances. Breakneck economic growth has facilitated environmental degradation and health problems, excessive or illegal taxes imposed by local cadres, widespread official corruption, failures to fulfill contract obligations, and the all-toofrequent confiscation of collective rural land which is sold by local governments to developers at astronomical profits.
