[MUSIC] There are several key social groups who participate in politics. Some leading intellectuals generated debates about important issues in newspapers around 2005. They lead these discussions and, lot's of, there are about 50 of them, and people read their articles and then discussed them. But the party decided that, in the end, the party should be the one determining the key issues to be discussed, and not intellectuals. As we've seen before, the students began to participate in politics on university campuses as early as 1980. They got involved in anti-Japanese protests in the mid 1980s. In 86, 87, they had debates in salons, these debating groups on campuses, in universities. And then in 86 through 87, and then into Tiananmen Square, the students were very active group. So, really active in the 1980s. Journalists have continued to be quite active in Chinese politics. They are keen if you talk to them, you'll discover that they really care about social issues in China, and they want to highlight those social issues. They're very interested in writing stories about corruption. And they are willing, at times, to risk their lives to bring attention to some of these socioeconomic problems. For example, coal miner's death or land confiscations, journalists will go out and write stories and report about it, and they actually are taking a risk that their lives may be threatened because of it. Another very important group in politics, I've mentioned before, is really the peasants, and the whole issue of their collective land, their collectively owned land being confiscated, and then the value of the land changing dramatically. The peasants only get maybe one to 10% of the final value of the land, and then they're left with no means of income. And so we've seen peasant activism become a really top, a really key phenomenon in China, and as the slide actually says right here, 50%. Remember I showed you that there are 180,000 to 185,000 protests in 2010, and we estimate that 50% of all those protests were actually about land disputes. Second to environment, and then elections, and corruption. Another group is lawyers who take up the issues for the apartment owners we know in Shanghai, for example, the apartment owners formed associations to try and get back, get better treatment from the landlord. And lawyers took up their cases, and took them to court. Unfortunately, some of those lawyers got arrested. A final group that we'll look at is dissidence. And one could ask why does someone become a dissident? Well, they become a dissident for several reasons. One would be for religious and cultural conflicts. So we find that people who are motivated by Christianity, or people who have gotten in the Falun Gong spiritual movement. Those people have been pushed into becoming dissidents. Ethnic independence is a very important issue for Tibetans or Uighurs in Southern and those people will take on or become dissidents and try and take on the state. We see legal rights, consciousness improving very much in China. And, therefore, the lawyers, again, the lawyers and the journalists, many of them will cross the boundary, cross the line, but they continue to take up these causes, even though they know that they will treated harshly by the Chinese state. But, we can sort of think about it as, this has become their profession. To be a human rights lawyer, to be a journalist and go out and write about corruption, very often you take huge risks, but people are willing to take those risks. Now, what do we know about the numbers of dissidence? Well, there's no publicly available name list. We probably estimate that the numbers would be in the thousands. Prominent ones include people like Wei Jingshen, who has twice been arrested, won the Nobel Prize, the Peace Prize. Also an artist by the name of Ai Weiwei. He's quite famous, spent a lot of time in New York. These are two of the more famous dissidents, and we've seen the numbers though go up. We're talking about thousands of underground churches and some of the priests of those churches will become dissidents, and also we've seen cult trials in 2014. One data set that I found online referred to 1,555 cult trials in 2014 alone.
