Xu's prior imprisonment extends to the Democracy Wall period of 1979-80 when activists of the Red Guard generation tested Deng's return to power with a burst of publications on free speech and labor and peasants' rights. Maybe even more revealing was the ten-year sentence given Zhang Shanguang for telling a reporter about farm revolts within Hunan province. Excess taxation and inventive new fees from local officials, and further confiscation of land for new factories to benefit well-connected cadres have repeatedly led to resistance and bloody suppression. If some welcomed plans to prune four million state cadres as reducing the number of leeches, in the opening stages the number of administrators has actually risen, with most cuts affecting the working class. Layoffs from state bureaus and dismantled state enterprises mainly affect women workers.
Women concentrate at all levels the experience of the working class.
Under such circumstances it is predictable for a class society to disguise class differences, and nationalism is one card to play. Hence China's solidarizing with Milosevic. This is the very opposite of the nationalism of the May Fourth Movement. The authority of old Chinese maps, not national self-determination, rules government policy in nominally autonomous areas. Yet some brave journalists raised the question of supporting Kosova even after the embassy bombing and brought up the danger of playing the nationalist card.