China is not in the middle of a new revolution. But its ruling Communist Party is being taught that after a decade of pushing its people around relentlessly, it is reaching the limits of their endurance.
Few of the young people protesting on the streets in many cities and on 80 university campuses this week know anything about what happened to the previous generation of protesters, in June 1989. All information about that violent military suppression remains banned.
But they are better educated and more pessimistic about the prospects for change than those predecessors. Youth unemployment is hitting 20 per cent. A degree is no longer a path to a job. Home ownership is largely unthinkable. The Chinese economic miracle is no longer delivering for them.
And the zero-Covid strategy imposed relentlessly for almost three years, has sucked out much of social life, and hope, especially among the young.
Many in this soccer-loving country watched, startled, the maskless crowds in the World Cup stadiums in Qatar, as a fresh wave of lockdowns hit cities under the new “dynamic” – meaning, more locally tailored, and swiftly-imposed – zero-Covid approach.
Despite the massive official control of online content, citizens’ posts continue to reach audiences who have long learned swiftly to download and share them. Some dodge the Great Firewall by using virtual private networks to access banned foreign platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or – preferred by Chinese protesters – Telegram.
President Xi Jinping had been presented as the people’s leader winning the people’s war against Covid. But comparatively modest levels of vaccination among the elderly, refusing to import foreign vaccines despite their greater efficacy, and overall health system limitations, mean the country remains more vulnerable to the pandemic than places such as Australia that have steadily reopened.
Local officials are penalised over reported cases. Thus, residents of buildings where cases are suspected are sometimes forced on to buses and transported outside their areas of responsibility. In one such case 27 people were killed when a bus transferring them out of Guiyang city overturned.
Then the news shot around the internet before it could be fully suppressed, of 10 people killed when their apartment building caught fire in Urumqi, and the authorities would not release its zero-Covid locks.
These grim stories catalysed long-festering grievances about zero-Covid and about increasingly pervasive party-state controls more broadly. China commonly experiences “mass incidents” challenging local officials, but this week’s wave is different – the protests have happened simultaneously around the country, and the demonstrators have joined the dots, holding up sheets of paper whose whiteness culturally denotes death, and blankness their being silenced.
And it has happened just as the jumpy party elite was starting to relax following its successful five-yearly congress that extended Xi’s leadership and formalised his new team of long-term loyalists.
Some protesters have referred to the banners slung across the Sitong Bridge in Beijing by a lone figure last month, including: “We don’t want a supreme leader, we want a vote,” and “We don’t want to be slaves, we want to be citizens.”
At their heart, this week’s protests proclaim a desire to become citizens – a distinction denied in the People’s Republic, where people are precluded even from legal appeals to the national constitution.
Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at London University’s SOAS, told The Australian that “suppression is Xi’s default response”.
“I don’t see how he will allow himself and the party to appear weak,” Tsang said. “Hence, strong measures will be taken to ‘restore’ order, and only after that will he consider adjusting the zero-Covid policy to remove some of the causes for the protests.”
Xi succeeded in suppressing Hong Kong’s protests through a harsh new national security law, and could introduce similarly innovative new regulations for all China, where facial recognition technology supplies full details of every protester even when masked.
But a fiercer crackdown would lose even more “hearts and minds”, and stimulate questioning about who is now on the “right side of history”, a line Xi formerly loved to use when enlisting leaders such as Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
Rowan Callick is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute
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