PROTESTS WERE ONCE UNTHINKABLE

The protests sweeping China seem to have taken everyone by surprise, not least the experts who are supposed to have more of a clue than the rest of us about what makes that country tick.

Wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago that we were reading endless articles about how Xi Jinping had cemented his control over the Chinese Communist Party, giving himself an unprecedented third term as president and becoming China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong?

And didn’t the same articles lay out in exhaustive detail how the Communist Party had put in place the most thorough surveillance state on the planet, controlling every channel of information and making co-ordinated dissent almost impossible?

Yet here we are, seeing hundreds of protests erupt in major cities across China in the biggest overt challenge to CCP rule since Tiananmen Square three decades ago. It just goes to show — sometimes it’s exactly the moment the experts agree on something when that consensus is shown to be an illusion.

The proximate cause for the protests is anger at China’s draconian “zero COVID” policies, which have kept the number of cases there very low but at enormous cost to freedom and even life. The spark that seems to have lit this particular prairie fire (a metaphor favoured by Mao himself ) seems to have been the death of10 people in a fire in the city of Urumqi. They had reportedly been locked in their apartments because of inflexible COVID rules and were trapped when fire engulfed the building.

This is where we need to pause and make the point that “zero COVID” in China is orders of magnitude different from pandemic restrictions in Canada and similar countries. Venture onto Twitter and other such venues and you’ll find plenty of people mocking those who they claim are praising the Chinese protesters while having condemned the likes of Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” for also opposing pandemic rules.

This is a particularly brain-dead point for two painfully obvious reasons. COVID restrictions in Canada were nothing like China’s “zero COVID” policies.

Being required to wear a mask in public and told you can’t eat in a restaurant without getting your shots isn’t actually the same as being locked in your home to starve or burn to death, as tragically happened in China.

And second, the consequences of protesting restrictions in a democracy like Canada aren’t remotely the same as those in China. Anyone can shout “down with Justin Trudeau” until the cows come home, and no, what happened to a handful of hardcore convoy leaders after weeks of being warned to disperse doesn’t compare with the fate of Chinese dissidents. As I said, painfully obvious.

The focus of the Chinese protesters is clearly excessive COVID restrictions, but it’s in the nature of an autocracy like China that demonstrations against key government policies necessarily take on a broader political character.

The downside for Xi Jinping of centralizing all power in the Communist Party and himself is that policies like zero COVID are inextricably linked to him. So opposing those policies quickly turns into opposition to the regime itself. Hence the chants of “Xi Jingping, step down! Communist Party, step down!” heard at some of the protests.

Beijing did relax some COVID rules after the recent 20th CCP congress, but that clearly didn’t go far enough for many Chinese. And the government’s dilemma now is that reversing zero COVID would be seen as a sign of weakness and might well unleash a major surge in cases because China hasn’t done a good job of mass vaccination, especially among vulnerable older people.

The new expert consensus is that Xi will stick with zero COVID (in fact, Beijing reaffirmed that on Monday), likely tweak some more rules, and crack down if the protests continue. That’s what happened after demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2017, and of course after Tiananmen in 1989.

That’s this week’s conventional wisdom. But remember that last week’s conventional wisdom was that protests like the ones we’re seeing now were almost unthinkable.