China is under the dual pressure of the global financial crisis and changes to its domestic economic environment. Maintaining social stability is a difficult task. If local governments don't handle mass incidents well, it may result in social disharmony. Social conflicts have increased of late, and the rising trend of mass incidents across China reflects that.

Just last Friday, dozens of people were injured and 10 vehicles damaged in a clash between urban management officials and hundreds of residents of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province.

Official figures show the number of mass incidents in 1995 was just more than 10,000. But it increased to more than 60,000 in 2005. The most prominent examples of recent years are the Weng'an and Longnan incidents. In July 2008, the family of a teenaged student in Weng'an county of Guizhou province disputed the official cause of her death. Not satisfied with the local public security bureau's explanations, her family members and thousands of other people went on the rampage and brought Weng'an to a standstill for a couple of days.

Four months later, more than 30 residents of Longnan, Gansu province, went to the local government office with complaints on housing, land and livelihood issues. Within a short time, more than 2,000 people gathered at the office and soon the incident turned into mass action. These two are just a few of the many cases - the proverbial tip of an iceberg - of social conflicts.

Mass incidents have not only increased in number, but also in intensity. This is partly because more and more people are becoming aware of their rights.

From a sociological point of view, mass incidents show that social conflicts cannot be controlled for long. The more they accumulate, the more intense they will become, and their destructive power will be wider and deeper.

Local governments have to pay more attention to the phenomenon. Giving more recognition to public power is, of course, more important than just seeking to strengthen administrative power to suppress social conflicts.

But some local officials still don't know how to respond to mass incidents. As a result, some local governments make the mistake of using hard power to suppress them. They tend to treat all the people involved in mass incidents as troublemakers and even criminals. Such an attitude infuriates the aggrieved public further.