Something important is happening in China, and it should worry the country’s political leadership. Younger Chinese are increasingly exhibiting an attitude of passive resignation, captured by the new buzzword bai lan (擺爛, “let it rot”). Born of economic disillusion and widespread frustration with stifling cultural norms, bai lan rejects the rat race and urges one to do only the bare minimum at work. Personal well-being takes precedence over career advancement.
The same tendency is reflected in another recent buzzword: tang ping (躺平, “lying flat”), a slang neologism denoting a sense of resignation in the face of relentless social and professional competition. Both terms signal a rejection of societal pressures to overachieve, and of social engagement as a fool’s game with diminishing returns.
In July last year, CNN reported that many Chinese workers were swapping high-pressure office jobs for flexible blue-collar work. As a 27-year-old from Wuhan, China, explained: “I like cleaning up. As living standards improve [across the country], the demand for housekeeping services is also surging... The change it brings is that my head no longer feels dizzy. I feel less mental pressure. And I am full of energy every day.”
Such attitudes are presented as apolitical, rejecting violent resistance to power and any dialogue with those in power, but are these the only options for the alienated?
The mass protests underway in Serbia suggest other possibilities. The protesters not only recognize that there is something rotten in the state of Serbia; they also insist on not letting the rot continue.
The protests began in November last year in Novi Sad, Serbia, following a roof collapse that left 15 people dead and two severely injured at a recently renovated railway station. Demonstrations have since spread to 200 Serbian cities and towns, attracting hundreds of thousands of people and making this the biggest student-led movement in Europe since 1968.
Obviously, the roof collapse was merely the spark that lit the fuse of pent-up dissatisfaction. The protesters’ concerns span many issues, from rampant corruption and ecological destruction (the government plans to go all in on lithium mining) to the general contempt that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has shown toward the population. What the government presents as a plan to tap into global markets, young Serbs see as a ruse to cover up corruption, sell off national resources to foreign investors under shady conditions and gradually eliminate opposition media.
What makes these demonstrations unique? The refrain from the protesters is: “We have no political demands and are keeping our distance from opposition parties. We simply ask that Serbian institutions work in the interest of citizens.”
To that end, they are insisting, narrowly, on transparency about the Novi Sad train station’s renovation; access to all documents on the accident; a dismissal of charges against those arrested during the first anti-government protest in November; and criminal prosecution of those who attacked student protesters in Belgrade.
Thus, the protesters want to short-circuit the process that has allowed the ruling party to hold the state hostage by controlling all institutions. For its part, Vucic’s government has reacted violently, but also with a technique known in boxing as “clinching”: when a fighter wraps his arms around an opponent to prevent him from punching freely.
The more panicky Vucic becomes, the more desperate he is to try to strike some deal with the protesters. However, the protesters are refusing any dialogue: They have specified their demands and are insisting on them unconditionally.
Traditionally, mass protests rely at least implicitly on the threat of violence, combined with an openness to negotiate. Yet here we have the opposite: Serbia’s protesters are not threatening violence, but they have also rejected dialogue. Such simplicity causes confusion, as does the apparent absence of any obvious leaders. In this narrow sense, the protests do have some similarities to bai lan.
At some point, of course, organized politics would have to enter the game. For now, the protesters’ “apolitical” stance creates the conditions for a new politics, rather than for another version of the same old game. To achieve law and order, the tables must be cleared.
This is reason enough for the rest of the world to support the protests unconditionally. They prove that a simple, straightforward call for law and order could be more subversive than anarchic violence. Serbians want the rule of law without all the unwritten rules that leave the door open for corruption and authoritarianism.
The protesters are a far cry from the old anarchic left that dominated the 1968 demonstrations in Paris and across the West. After blocking a bridge over the Danube in Novi Sad for 24 hours, the young protesters decided to extend their rally for three additional hours so that they could clean up the area. Could one imagine the stone-throwing Parisians of 1968 ever doing the same?
While some might see the Serbian protesters’ politically motivated apoliticism as hypocritical, it is better understood as a sign of their radicalism. They are refusing to play politics by the existing (mostly unwritten) rules. They are pursuing fundamental changes to how basic institutions work.
The biggest hypocrite in this story is the EU, which is refraining from putting any pressure on Vucic for fear that he would gravitate toward Russia. While European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has expressed support for the Georgian people “fighting for democracy,” she has remained remarkably quiet about the uprising in Serbia — a country that has officially been a candidate for EU membership since 2012. The EU is letting Vucic have his way because he promised stability and exports of lithium, a key input for electric vehicles.
The lack of criticism from the EU, even in the face of allegations of electoral fraud, has repeatedly left Serbian civil society out in the cold. Should we be surprised that there are so few EU flags being waved by the protesters? The idea of a “color revolution” of the type pioneered in Ukraine 20 years ago to “join the democratic West” no longer has any purchase. The EU has reached yet another political low.
Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author, most recently, of Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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