THE PEOPLE VERSUS XI — Protests spread across China over the weekend, as citizens from Beijing to Shanghai to Chengdu voiced their opposition to draconian lockdowns resulting from the government's zero-Covid policy. Large-scale demonstrations in China are rare. This round of mass mobilization is the country's largest anti-regime action since 1989 in Tiananmen Square, when the Chinese Communist Party violently stopped protests by killing demonstrators. Many of the Chinese citizens on the streets today are nevertheless openly calling for Premier Xi Jinping's departure. And for now, police have mostly just urged protesters to go home, while the government has slightly loosened some regulations. Still, global stocks fell today amid concerns of unrest from protests and worries about continued lockdowns in China as Covid cases continue to find their way into the country, leading to worries about supply chain interruptions. Nightly spoke with Phelim Kine , POLITICO's China correspondent, about the precarious situation. This interview has been edited. Let's start with an overview: how and where did protests in China begin? How widespread have they gotten? What are protesters frustrated with, and what do they want? The wave of protests we're seeing unfold in major urban centers in China were sparked by news that China's dynamic zero-Covid protocols — its draconian approach to containing Covid contagion hinged to relentless testing and lockdowns of areas with active cases — blocked firefighters in the city of Urumqi [the capital of the Xinjiang region in northwest China, home to a large Uyghur population], from reaching a fire in a locked-down housing compound. That apparently resulted in the deaths of 10 people. That incident prompted protesters to hit the streets in multiple Chinese cities, but notably the capital Beijing and its commercial center of Shanghai. Those protesters demanded an end to the zero-Covid strategy and more startlingly, those protests included loud calls for Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping to step down and for an end to the ruling Chinese Communist Party's 70-year plus monopoly on power. So these protests reflect how the Chinese authorities' approach to containing Covid has fueled a deep reservoir of resentment and frustration that is boiling up and onto the streets. Protests have erupted in at least eight major Chinese cities and have involved thousands of protesters who are mostly turning a deaf ear to police demands that they disperse and go home. Their basic demand is that the zero-Covid policy — which subjects them to daily testing, lockdowns, and a tech surveillance app that bars them from public areas if they are linked to a known Covid case — be lifted and some return to pre-Covid normalcy be permitted. Just how rare is it in China to have these sorts of widespread protests that are directly calling out the regime? And how much has anger at zero-Covid morphed into anger at a larger set of regime controls? Public protests — or what the Chinese government calls "mass incidents" are relatively common. But they are generally very localized — residents of a certain town or city taking to the streets to complain about a distinctly local issue, most commonly related to environmental pollution issues. What's different about these current protests is that we have multiple mass protests in major cities across China focussed on the same issue — the government's Covid containment policy — and that protesters in these demonstrations are openly demanding that the CCP and Chinese President Xi Jinping step down because of that policy. And that reflects that the spark of the Urumqi fire tragedy has been the catalyst for expressions of wider discontent about CCP rule — particularly widespread censorship and tight restrictions on freedom of expression and association. The last time this happened was in the summer of 1989 during the pro-democracy protests centered around Beijing's Tiananmen Square that climaxed with the slaughter of thousands of unarmed civilians on June 4, 1989. Have we seen any concessions from the Xi regime? Any crackdowns? The government response to the protests so far has been two-fold: They have flooded the protest zones with thousands of police that for the most part have restricted their response to calls for the protesters to disperse and go home. That more subdued response will likely change if the protests persist — we've already seen that in Shanghai the police have erected riot fencing on select streets and, as of yesterday, began randomly detaining individual protesters. Meanwhile, the authorities have announced slight and localized tweaks to the zero-Covid policy designed to ease public anger. For instance, in Beijing, authorities announced that they will no longer seal shut the access gates to housing compounds under lockdown, an obvious nod to public concern that a fire or some other emergency in their compounds might go unanswered by first responders if the access gates are locked. But if the protests continue and expand, we can expect to see a far sterner government response designed to smother these demonstrations through targeted arrest/detention of perceived organizers and greater use of force — think riot control tools such as water cannon and truncheon charges — designed to break the back of any possible organized resistance to the CCP regime. What do you think the situation in major Chinese cities might look like in a week or a month? Will protests make Xi feel pressure to crack down? There are two possibilities: One is that the protests we've seen in major Chinese cities the past few days have been a temporary spasm of anger and frustration that will now recede in the face of mass deployment of police on city streets and hopes among protesters that they've made their point and that authorities may well rethink zero-Covid. The second possibility is that a larger slice of the Chinese public will be emboldened by these protests and the relative lack of police response and take to the streets in even greater numbers over the coming days with a growing list of demands targeted at the CCP's totalitarian chokehold over Chinese society. That second possibility will likely prompt a much sterner reaction by a government that views its slaughter of thousands of unarmed civilians in Beijing in June 1989 as a prudent defense of the CCP's grip on power. So we're heading into potentially dangerous territory of a kind that we haven't witnessed in China in more than three decades. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight's author at cmchugh@politico.com or on Twitter at @calder_mchugh .
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