‘Since Tiananmen’

Over the weekend, in Shanghai, a man strode unimpeded down what looked to be a cordoned-off street. Someone (him, I think) shouted “Communist Party!” to a large crowd gathered for the occasion. “Step down!” the crowd responded, in unison. The next prompt: “Xi Jinping!” The crowd’s response: “Step down!”

Arrests were made. The following day, crowds gathered in the streets again, this time to call for the release of those detained the previous evening.

Similar scenes were observed across the country. At Tsinghua University in Beijing (Xi’s alma mater), students screamed “Democracy and rule of law!” They carried pieces of paper, some of which featured an exclamation point enclosed by a red circle, an allusion to online censorship. Blank sheets of paper were used in a candlelight vigil on Wulumuqi Middle Road in Shanghai. The street is named for Urumqi, the site of a deadly fire that killed at least 10 in Xinjiang last week.

Elsewhere, crowds demanded “freedom!” and generally espoused the kind of insubordination that, at best, is punishable by a lengthy prison sentence. At worst, agitating for the overthrow of the Chinese government carries a death sentence. I’m not sure there’s a more polite way to put it.

Ostensibly, the protests were triggered by the Urumqi fire. Some suggested the blaze would’ve been extinguished sooner were it not for road barriers hindering fire fighters. Others mentioned bolted doors associated with virus control efforts in Xinjiang, the site of Xi’s notorious “re-education” campaign for ethnic Uyghurs. The Washington Post, paraphrasing an account of the Shanghai protests as conveyed by a local photographer, wrote that “one person held up pieces of paper with the number ’10’ written in Uyghur.”

A narrow interpretation of the unrest is that citizens are worried that COVID containment protocol can be deadly. The death toll in the Urumqi blaze would’ve been smaller were it not for virus curbs, protesters said. It’s not possible to assess the veracity of such claims, but it doesn’t matter. The narrow interpretation isn’t the best lens. The big picture is obvious: The Chinese people, weary of Xi’s quixotic “COVID zero” strategy, were looking for an excuse to rebel against the lockdowns. The fire in Urumqi was a match on dry kindling. (Urumqi officials conceded that rescuers cleared a few barriers, but said there were too many cars parked around the building.)

“A lot of people are reaching the breaking point,” Yanzhong Huang, a public health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Wall Street Journal. “The highly volatile situation could quickly evolve into the most severe political crisis since Tiananmen.”

That’s a somewhat grim reference, but one that proliferated over the weekend. So far, Chinese authorities haven’t engaged protesters in any systematically violent way. The absence of violence was confounding to some. “Perhaps the police were waiting for instructions from above,” a Shanghai local who spoke to the Journal for the same linked article said.

Yes, “perhaps.” And, as I’ve endeavored to make clear over the past week, Xi is no run-of-the-mill autocrat — no cookie cutter strongman. Xi is, as at least some protesters shouted over the weekend, an out-and-out dictator. He wields absolute power, and made as much clear last month at the Party congress.

On Monday, a guest on a financial television program in Hong Kong said Xi “ran the table” at October’s twice-per-decade leadership shuffle. That’s not accurate. Such language suggests observers (even purported experts) haven’t yet accepted the reality of the situation. Xi didn’t “run the table.” Xi set the table. If you’d suggested to him that a knife he placed should be positioned differently, he’d have chopped your hand off with it. Maybe literally.

That doesn’t mean protesters will be shot imminently, although that’s certainly possible if they continue to gather in large groups and declare their intention to overthrow the government. Xi may not want to irrevocably isolate China from the democratic world over a virus control strategy he knows isn’t sustainable. Beijing is now logging around 4,000 cases per day. On Monday, the national tally of new daily cases was 40,347.

In a decent Op-Ed for Bloomberg (and regular readers know “decent” is a huge compliment coming from me), Clara Ferreira Marques described Xi’s predicament as akin to zugzwang, in chess. He has to do something, but anything he does is guaranteed to make the situation worse. “In the first six months of the omicron outbreak, around one-quarter of people in the US and Europe were infected,” she wrote, before noting that an outbreak on that scale in China would entail more than 350 million infections, roughly equivalent to “the entire population of Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Italy and the Benelux countries.”

China claims (ludicrously) that only 5,232 people have died from COVID over the course of the pandemic. The Party is proficient in ridiculous lies, but an outbreak on the scale of 300 million cases would result in so many deaths as to make a coverup logistically impossible. If readers will pardon the macabre visual, the piles of bodies would simply be too large to hide. It’s conceivable that the international community would characterize any effort to conceal the scope of the deaths as some manner of crime against humanity.

Given that, and also considering that Xi likely plans to commandeer Taiwan at some point over the next, say, 20 years, the Party may be reluctant to employ an Iran-style crackdown on protesters. The associated murders wouldn’t do anything to ameliorate the dilemma that is “COVID zero.” A bloody crackdown would simply ostracize the regime, wake the world up to the true nature of Xi’s rule (as if additional evidence is needed) risking US sanctions and handing Taiwan an opportunity to tell the world, “See, that’s why we need security guarantees.”

On Monday, in an apparent nod to the Urumqi fire, a city official in Beijing said that, “Passages must remain clear for medical transportation, emergency escapes and rescues.” In Guangzhou, officials cited the necessity of conserving scarce resources while easing mass testing mandates.  And yet, the People’s Daily was adamant: “Facts have fully proved that each version of the prevention and control plan has withstood the test of practice.”