No, it looked to me that you were just trying to avoid actually going off and reading up on the poll tax riots.
In England, because China had no poll tax that I could see.
There's a pattern here. Across quite a range of threads, this poster seems to do a very similar thing: make some ludicrous claim, then back away or qualify it as people point out the gaping holes in the logic, before wandering off somewhere else and repeating the performance. Sometimes without actually wandering off somewhere else.
Freakydave, you seem to be subscribing to the authoritarian notion that riots are purely a criminal thing perpetrated by bad people. While that might go on, there simply aren't enough "bad people" as a proportion of any given population to be likely to result in civil disturbance big enough to be called a "riot". So, when a riot happens, it's because a significant enough proportion of the people affected have had enough, see no recourse to "polite" opposition as being effective, and take to the streets.
And, more often than not, even that isn't a riot - the rioting is usually triggered, having already been taken to the flashpoint, by heavy-handed attempts to control the dissent. We've seen plenty of that in the US - peaceful protestors shot, tear gassed, beaten, or hauled into unmarked vans. When you start doing that, you effectively radicalise a proportion of the hitherto peaceful protesters, and that logic that says "get what you want by asking nicely" goes out of the window for even more people.
You don't have to be "in favour" or "against" riots - in the same way you don't have to be in favour of or against rain, the milk going off, or coastal erosion - these things simply happen, as part of the dynamics of the system, whether you approve or not. What can be done - and what people like you and TomUS seem to be studiously trying not to confront - is to ensure that the conditions for that level of civil unrest aren't met, not inveighing against it when they are and the inevitable happens. It's the socio-political equivalent of going outside and impotently shaking your fist at the sky as the rain comes down.
Yes, it is possible to reduce the likelihood of a riot occurring at any given point, usually by a combination of very heavy policing and suppression. But that's a tradeoff - as the examples from China show - because that suppression might postpone the inevitable, but when even that isn't enough, the only option is to suppress even more brutally, as the underlying pressure for change increases, added to by the outrage that the attempts to suppress the initial outrage has generated.
And, as kabbes points out, most of the important social changes that we have seen have arisen because of civil unrest (including rioting). And, whether it's poll tax riots in London, or Chinese protests at corrupt local officials, it's exactly the same pattern: sufficient of the population became angry at what was happening that they opted out of the conventional social discourse and went onto the streets. It doesn't matter which country (or century) you are in, because these things are embedded in our psyches, and emerge as "groupthink" when sufficient people with similar grievances find themselves together. In the case of the poll tax riots, it was because repeated attempts to challenge what was widely felt as an unfair and regressive tax on the poor were dismissed and ignored, to the point that the only way to express the grievances became violence. And it worked - the Poll Tax Riots were instrumental in forcing Thatcher to back down (somewhat) on her plans, and were ultimately one of the major reasons why she began to lose her grip on power.
Because that's what riots do. Sure, there was lots of politicians doing the "criminal elements" bullshit and inveighing against lawlessness, but they knew perfectly well what had happened, and - despite the public condemnations - they knew that there was no alternative to the problem but to make changes.
To some extent, all politics is probably a balance between taking the piss out of your citizenry, but not doing it to the extent that they end up pissing on you.
I don't imagine you'll even bother to read much of the above, far less use it to inform yourself. But at least I know I've added my voice to those of others who have painstakingly tried to explain matters to someone who seems to take pride in his naivety and cluelessness. There's only so long that people are going to do that, before they start simply telling you to fuck off, though. Think of it as a very small-scale example of how riots happen...and when half your posts are met with replies of "Cunt", you can consider yourself at the Urban equivalent of the Molotov cocktail-throwing stage
www.oregonlive.com
