The Chinese Communist Party’s tanks on Wednesday rolled on the streets to scare Henan bank protestors amid large-scale protests in the province by bank depositors over the release of frozen funds.
Reports claiming Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA’s) tanks are on the streets to protect Banks (Rizhao, Shandong Province) emerged, reported local media.
The incident comes in the light of the Henan branch of the Bank of China declaring that people’s savings in their branch are ‘investment products’ and can’t be withdrawn, added the media.
It is a grim reminder of the horrific June 4, 1989 – Tiananmen Square massacre when Chinese leaders sent in tanks and heavily armed troops to clear Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where student protesters had gathered for weeks to demand democracy and greater freedoms.
The crackdown, which killed hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters, is shunned in classrooms and strictly censored in the media and online.
Despite promises that depositors in China’s Henan villages will get their frozen money back in batches with the first due on July 15, only a handful of depositors have received the payments, posing a serious question on whether banks have anything to spare.
On July 10, more than 1,000 depositors gathered outside the Zhengzhou branch of the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, to launch their largest protest yet.
As per the notice by Henan Provincial Financial Supervision Bureau, some bank depositors in Henan villages and towns were supposed to get their deposits back on July 15.
However, non-mainstream media believe that only a very few handfuls of depositors have made these payments. Chinese state media has also not posted anything about the repayment.
Non-mainstream Hong Kong media also believes that at such a time when stability is emphasized most and stability is in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s interest, allowing such incidents to get bigger (such as the Zhengzhou bank protests) shows that these banks really do not have money to spare, at least not until the issues are resolved.
A good chunk of revenue for the local governments comes from leasing land, especially to real estate developers and since so many projects are lying unfinished, many construction companies have not bought land again, affecting the local government’s revenue.
Meanwhile, a video was circulated online a few days ago in which Beijing’s Tsinghua University professor Zheng Yuhuang said that 2022 is a difficult year for China — 4,60,000 companies in China closed down in the first half of 2022, and 3.1 million industrial and commercial households were written off, enterprise liquidation soared 23 per cent year on year, 10.76 million college graduates have entered the society, with great employment pressure, and 80 million young people are unemployed.
As per the media reports, the reason why the suspension of loan repayment by homebuyers is not being dealt with immediately is that except for those senior officials directly in charge of urban construction and real estate, almost every successful real estate developer is the white glove of some of the other powerful family of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) elite, just like Evergrande’s (one of the largest property developers in China) Xu Jiayin, and Zeng Qinghong’s (CCP politician) niece Zeng Baobao directly engages in real estate to make money.
Ordinary real estate developers also have to bribe government officials at all levels in exchange for their development. If the top leaders of the CPC want to investigate the corruption in unfinished buildings and real estate, they may have to de facto use the knife inwards.
During the large-scale protests in Henan province by bank depositors over the release of frozen funds, white-clothed men, who are suspected to be from the Chinese People’s Armed Police Force, suppressed the protests in front of the Zhengzhou People’s Bank of China (PBoC) office, local media reported.
Hundreds of depositors have staged several demonstrations in the city of Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, but their demands are being ignored by the Chinese authorities.