An old adage in security comes to mind when I read news like this:

Ordinary Chinese people who feel unfairly treated by China’s one party state have virtually no way of gaining recourse. In their frustration some turn to violence and the preferred method is often some sort of bomb. Explosives are relatively easy to come by in China, unlike firearms which are very tightly controlled.

The adage says if you build a dam, the water will still want to flow around it so long as you remain lower than where the water comes from. If you raise yourself above the water, it will stay in place.

From another perspective, modern combat has come a long way from a romantic concept of the past where poor villagers were helpless and needed some kind of hero to save them. Clearly even the disenfranchised benefit from advances in battle technology, especially if they know how to use organic means/compounds to make weaponized materials. Swordsmanship, marksmanship and the like become less relevant when you only need to be able to press a button or light a fuse to achieve an objective.

And so the response to this transition in risk (greater threat) can not simply be overwhelming force (shock and awe) since history has proven that the force of distributed and reroutable threats are not deterred by dams, this just shifts them to other points of the same low-lying vulnerability. A more compelling strategy would be to change the levels by actually working to alter the political topography…should the farmers lose the feeling or incentive that they must have things a different way, the threats will subside to a more natural position.