Just five weeks after being elected to a historic third term, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) suddenly faces cracks in the facade of unchallenged authority that he so successfully presented to the world at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
For groups of protesters, apparently without central coordination, to take to the streets across China and to social media, and for some to explicitly call for Xi and the CCP to stand aside, is a seismic shock.
The echoes with Iran are superficially present, even if the two political cultures and the proximate causes of the unrest are entirely different. Equally the rush to compare these protests with those of 1989 is tempting, but wrong, as it has been previously during numerous bouts of dissent over the past two decades.
However, many observers detect two unique factors about the current protests.
In 1989, the protests were largely confined to Beijing, but these demonstrations are much more geographically diffuse, and with an apparent knowledge of what other cities are doing.
Second, there is a sense that the proximate cause — Xi’s unending hallmark “zero COVID” policy — is enough to bring people on to the streets, but also resonant enough to pose wider questions about how the Chinese state operates.
So COVID-19 provides a frame for workers in Zhengzhou, for students across dozens of campuses and for the people of Urumqi, the capital of the remote region of Xinjiang where the deaths of 10 people in a high-rise apartment block fire have been blamed on COVID-19 restrictions delaying firefighters.
In Urumqi, social media showed Chinese communist officials pleading for patience after being berated for the COVID-19 lockdowns that have lasted in some cases for months. Social media, however controlled in China, is a combustible new element.
One of the difficulties for the government is that compliant local officials, worried about retribution from above if an outbreak occurs, have imposed stringent controls, and yet have no real power over a centralized policy that offers no timetable for the cycle of lockdowns and protests to end. The sight of maskless spectators from around the world enjoying soccer in Doha, Qatar, is even more galling for a country that, it seems uniquely, cannot after three years live with the virus.
The Chinese government says this is because it prioritized life over the economy, keeping deaths below 6,000 compared with millions in the West.
Nevertheless, in response to the public impatience, the Chinese National Health Commission on Nov. 11 published a 20-point plan to refine some virus controls, such as reducing quarantine periods and easing restrictions on close contacts of confirmed cases, raising hopes for ordinary Chinese people that life and their daily income would return nearer to normal. It was hardly a plan to go for herd immunity, but it implied a relaxation of the policy of eliminating rather than living with the virus. It might also put China back on the path to growth.
However, the expected easing has not happened. On Wednesday last week, China reported nearly 30,000 new locally transmitted COVID-19 infections, the highest on record, with outbreaks in every region. By Sunday, that figure had reached 40,000.
New curbs on daily life and economic activity were imposed in cities, including Beijing, Guangzhou (south China’s manufacturing hub) and Tianjin. Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million people southwest of the capital, tried easing some control measures, but reversed course within days after case numbers rose.
The wave of infections if China ended zero tolerance would simply be too large for the health system to cope. Too few elderly people have been fully vaccinated.
Xi is unlikely to tolerate dissent for long, since he is likely to see the protests as a challenge not to just to his COVID-19 policy, but to collectivist communist ideology and his authority. In 2013, just months after his appointment as party general secretary, Xi gave an address in which he warned about the paramount importance of protecting ideological supremacy, saying “once ideological defenses are breached, other defenses are very difficult to hold.”
No one can yet know how weak the CCP’s defenses are, or if some dam has burst. Either way, expect the ruthless methods deployed in Hong Kong to be put to use on the mainland.
Regardless of what happens next, for Xi,this is a blow to his international prestige only months after returning to the world stage.
With all his recent rhetoric of the great rejuvenation of China, the decline of the West and the CCP’s power to change the course of history, he now risks looking mortal, and dangerously out of touch.
China is the most populous country on the planet, with the second-largest economy and a growing military strength, all of which contribute to the perception that China is a challenger to the US for global leadership. After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban in August 2021, many assumed that China would seek to fill the ensuing power vacuum. However, that has not happened. China’s engagement with Afghanistan has essentially been driven by short-term and narrow considerations, rather than a well thought through plan. If China’s Afghanistan policy is anything to go by, it is clear that it
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the pride of the nation, has recently become a villain to residents of Tainan’s Annan District (安南). In 2017, TSMC announced plans to build the world’s first 3-nanometer fab in Anding District (安定). While the project was once welcomed by residents of Tainan, it has since become a source of controversy. The new fab requires a huge amount of electricity to operate. To meet TSMC’s surging electricity demand, plans are under way to construct a 1.2 gigawatt gas power station near a residential area in Annan District. More than 10,000 Annan residents have signed a petition
I first visited Taiwan in 1985, when I was deputed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to start a dialogue with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). I spent three days talking to officials, the end result being the signing of an agreement where the Republic of China (ROC) recognized the right to self-determination of Tibetans. According to official KMT records in Nanking, Tibet never paid taxes to the ROC government. In 1997, the Dalai Lama made his first ever visit to Taiwan on the invitation of then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). Lee took the bold step of opening Taiwan’s doors to
In a strange way, the best thing that could have happened to Google (now masquerading as Alphabet, its parent company) was Facebook. Why? Because although Google invented surveillance capitalism, arguably the most toxic business model since the opium trade, it was Facebook that got into the most trouble for its abuses of it. The result was that Google enjoyed an easier ride. Naturally, it had the odd bit of unpleasantness with the EU, with annoying fines and long drawn-out legal wrangles. However, it was Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg — not Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their adult supervisor Eric
RSS