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Last Thursday evening in Urumqi, the capital city of China’s western region of Xinjiang, a faulty power strip ignited a fire in a high-rise apartment building that killed at least 10 people. The tragedy provided fuel for the surge of protests now sweeping China’s cities, the largest since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989.
Speculation abounds that rescue efforts in Urumqi were impeded by the region’s Covid lockdown, which has confined many residents to their homes for more than three months. Thousands of miles away in Shanghai, some protesters even called for the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, to resign.
The protests are the greatest public challenge to China’s government in years. After nearly three years of pandemic restrictions, how and why did they take off now? And will they succeed in pressuring the government to change course, or will they peter out as a fleeting exception that proves the resilience of Xi’s rule? Here’s what people are saying.
Behind the unrest
In contrast to the approach of much of the rest of the world, China remains committed to eradicating the coronavirus among its 1.4 billion-plus people through border controls, quarantines, mass testing and snap lockdowns of apartment buildings and even whole cities and regions. The country’s “zero Covid” strategy has been credited with saving countless lives, and many Chinese people have expressed support for it. Xi has framed China’s relatively low Covid death rate as a source of national pride and proof of China’s superiority over liberal democracies, transforming what began as a public health campaign into an ideological one as well.
But that campaign has become increasingly difficult to sustain since the emergence of highly transmissible variants, upending daily life and travel for hundreds of millions of people. “People schedule lunch breaks around completing mandatory tests,” my colleague Vivian Wang, a China correspondent for The Times based in Beijing, wrote last month. “They restructure commutes to minimize the number of health checkpoints along the way. A sense of possible disaster always lurks, driven by the experiences of Shanghai and other cities, where sudden lockdowns have left residents without food or medicine.”
The zero-Covid strategy has also taken a toll on the Chinese economy as businesses shutter, growth slows and youth unemployment soars. Some guessed that Xi would relax his approach after securing a third term in October, but while the government did ease some restrictions earlier this month, it quickly backpedaled as daily Covid cases increased to record levels.
While zero Covid may be the protests’ most proximate cause, some argue that their roots run deeper. Evan Osnos, who covers China for The New Yorker, also traces them to the curtailment of private freedoms that Xi has presided over since taking power in 2012, in particular the censorship of even mild online criticism and the dismantling of civil society, along with China’s withdrawal from the more open global community.
“The perfect storm is happening right now with the World Cup,” Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of China at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied protest movements, told Osnos. Under mass lockdowns, he said, “one of the things they can’t do easily now is watch the World Cup games in public settings.” Last week, two days before the Urumqi fire, an open letter to China’s National Health Commission asking if China was “on the same planet” as Qatar reportedly went viral on Chinese social media before it was censored.
Unusual, but how unusual?
Street protests are more common in China than many outside the country might assume, William Hurst, a professor of Chinese development at the University of Cambridge, points out in The Washington Post. Thousands have occurred in recent decades, typically belonging to one of five distinct strands: labor protest; rural protest; student protest; urban governance protest; and more systemic political dissent.
But Hurst argues that these protests are different because the strands have fused: “People seemed to have mobilized first around urban governance issues — particularly in reaction to a tragic fire and failed government response in Urumqi. But by taking up slogans and themes of generalized dissent, as well as signaling solidarity with protesting workers and students, these crowds crossed an important boundary.”
These protests are also far more generalized across the country than is typical. As my colleagues report, frustration with China’s Covid restrictions has fostered a sense of solidarity that transcends geography and even class. “Covid Zero produced an unintended consequence, which is putting a huge number of people in the same situation,” Yasheng Huang, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management who leads its China Lab, told The Times. “This is a game changer.”
Others take a more restrained view of the unrest. “While these protests are certainly serious challenges to authority, they should be kept in perspective,” writes David Goodman, the director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney. In particular, he believes there is no real comparison to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, which involved far more people and ended in a massacre carried out by the military. While today’s protests appear to have been emboldened by one another, “there’s no evidence at this stage that this is an organized national movement,” Goodman says.
What’s next?
China analysts have for some time now observed that Xi faces a dilemma of his own making. Staying the zero-Covid course in the age of Omicron, to the extent that it’s possible, would require an even more aggressive level of social control, which could breed more unrest.
Yet loosening restrictions as protesters demand could set off a public health disaster: While China’s vaccination rates are high overall, more than a third of people over 80 are not fully vaccinated. The homegrown vaccines the country has used are also less effective than their mRNA counterparts, and most Chinese people have no infection-induced immunity. A study published in Nature this year estimated that an Omicron wave in China could cause the country’s critical care capacity to be exceeded more than 15 times over, resulting in 1.55 million deaths.
So far, the government has responded both by promising to vaccinate more older adults, a possible sign that it is considering easing restrictions, and by stepping up its suppression of dissent through surveillance and police intimidation.
But where the protests go from here is anybody’s guess. A true political crisis for Xi could emerge at the elite level, signaled by the formation of factions within the Communist Party or by the public emergence of former leaders, writes John Culver of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Before that happens, John Pomfret, a former bureau chief of The Washington Post in China, believes that Xi will order the police to crack down more forcefully on the protests.
But given the government’s remarkable capacity for managing dissent, many predict the protests will fizzle out and the status quo will more or less persist. Xi has “eradicated opposition in any spheres where they might have policy influence, and he has surrounded himself with a very loyal leadership,” said Tony Saich, a China scholar and a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Given that structure, it’s hard to see where any organized opposition could really come from, unless things really deteriorate terribly.”
When it comes to predictions, Zeynep Tufekci, a Times columnist and Columbia sociologist who has written widely on protest movements, believes that some humility is in order. “Because this is China, most of our analyses of how social movements work do not directly apply since many people have no way of hearing about the fact that these protests are happening, and it’s quite likely that some of these brave protesters will pay a severe price — which could include punishing their families,” she told me. “But the fact that they’re out there protesting anyway is remarkable and shows how deep the discontent runs to risk so much, with such long, unknown odds, just to express themselves.”
Even if the protests dissipate and fail to produce immediate political change, it won’t necessarily mean they were meaningless. “It doesn’t matter if a few days later, people begin to worship the Chinese Communist Party again or if the government starts to cut off the internet like they do in Xinjiang,” one protester, a university student in the southern city of Zhuhai, told Vice. “This collective action is a breakthrough that will stay in people’s memories.”
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at [email protected]. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
READ MORE
“What China’s Protesters Are Calling For” [The New York Times]
“Just Bread and Noodles: China’s Covid Lockdown Distress Hits Xinjiang” [The New York Times]
“‘Breach of the Big Silence’: Protests Stretch China’s Censorship to Its Limits” [The New York Times]
“What It’s Like Inside One of China’s Protests” [The New York Times]
“Xi Jinping has a tough decision to make on China’s Covid protests” [Nikkei]
The post Are the Chinese Protests a Moment or a Movement? appeared first on New York Times.
