In the aftermath of an outbreak of demonstrations between November 26 and 28, especially concentrated on Sunday 27, when a dozen Chinese cities had experienced political opposition rallies, the regime brought out heavy artillery to kill in the egg a beginning of popular rebellion.
Was this outbreak in November only a short episode without a future?
A deep and substantial protest
The grievances heard in the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Urumqi, express a serious, deep and substantial challenge to the policy of systematic confinements applied by the government since the start of the pandemic. In this, this movement calls into question the legitimacy of the regime.
However, the Chinese state has considerable means of surveillance and repression, among the most sophisticated in the world.
These demonstrations are audacious, unprecedented and directly political. It was not just protests for bread and butter
or focused solely on the issue of confinements.
We shouted there Freedom
, Democracy
… and even Xi Jinping, resign!
And this, in several cities at the same time. Which is amazing in the Chinese context: the embryo of a movement, with slogans that identify the one-party dictatorship and the absence of freedoms as sources of evil.
But these demonstrations have remained numerically modest: a few hundred protesters per demonstration, and perhaps a few thousand at times – in a country of nearly one and a half billion inhabitants.
Public frustration with politics zero covid
is real and much more widespread in China than this small number of protesters suggests. A significant fraction of the population can no longer take this frenzied policy of strict and prolonged confinements, which are disproportionate to what we have experienced here.
A man is arrested in Shanghai during a rally.
Photo : Getty Images / HECTOR RETAMAL
In China since 2020, building entrances have been padlocked, blocks fenced off and workers locked up in their factories.
On the one hand: a very widespread frustration, which has begun to express itself. On the other: the hesitation between a relaxation of controls in the face of popular grievances, or ruthless repression as the Chinese state knows how to do.
An ideological stubbornness
Where does the government’s stubbornness to maintain this policy come from?
We have to look back over the last three years. Politics zero covid
was, at the start of the pandemic, associated with real success. By confining cities like Wuhan at the start of 2020, by isolating Chinese regions from each other, and by hermetically closing China to entry and exit from the country, we have managed to avoid most of a pandemic – however born in Wuhan! – which has ravaged much of the world.
For months — the entire first year and beyond — that policy worked. The cases were almost non-existent: two patients in a building? Boom! we confined to death
; PCR tests were generalized throughout the neighborhood or even the city; contact persons were tracked… but also – new Chinese concept – the contacts de contacts
: that is to say, in the end, almost everyone… and this, all the time (every 48 hours, or even every 24 hours).
Illustration of this obsession with testing and control: in May 2022, the Nomura Group (Japanese financial holding company) estimated nearly 2% of the GDP Chinese government spending on testing PCR since the start of the pandemic! Just the tests… not the overall effects of the lockdowns which also cost Chinese growth several percentage points.
This policy was very harsh. In some places, an exasperation filtered through… But this malaise, in 2020 and 2021, was overwhelmed by triumphant ultranationalist propaganda, that of a China proving its superiority. A China beating the virus, while Europe and North America were crumbling with infections.
In China, the deployment of law enforcement in major cities has deterred protesters from gathering. The government maintains its zero COVID policy, but it is focusing on vaccination and relaxing its health measures. The story of Lise Villeneuve.
Photo : Getty Images / HECTOR RETAMAL
This method worked for about a year and a half, two years, as the new waves became less virulent in the West and the vaccines began to visibly increase the level of herd immunity. But nothing helped: Beijing was staying the course, despite an obvious change – outside of China – in the nature of the pandemic and the responses to it.
Behind this stubbornness in maintaining the zero covid
, there is also an ideological phenomenon. The desire to prove that our system is the best
. With also, in the case of Xi Jinping, an additional element: the fear of losing face.
We have seen this, for example, in the stubborn refusal to import messenger RNA vaccines, which have nevertheless won the game
against Chinese vaccines. Another element: the absence of systematic vaccination campaigns (which first seems surprising in a country as authoritarian and supposedly disciplined as China).
Epidemiological vulnerability
On the epidemiological level, there is also talk of a weak protection of the population against the virus, of the fact that – more than any other country – China has experienced the pandemic under glass
minimizing contact with the virus.
Factor to which we can add a (relative) low rate of vaccination compared to the West, particularly among the elderly – and in any case, with a vaccine clearly inferior to Pfizer and Moderna. Hence the insufficient immunity of individuals, less exposed and less vaccinated, against the virus and its variants. With a possible backlash
epidemiological.
Other countries – these democratic ones: Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia and a few others – have also practiced zero covid
. But towards the middle of 2021, they recognized that this policy had become inapplicable, less and less effective in the face of new variants, in addition to being economically harmful.
But in these countries, there are several things that China doesn’t have: elected governments, independent media, public opinion that can and regularly protests, scientists who speak freely.
As the pandemic progressed, we gradually saw the accumulated costs – economic, social, health – of the closures, the more popular discontent, the (relative) benefits of vaccination campaigns in Europe and North America, change the situation.
Without forgetting the incessant mutations of a virus that has become – obviously, and until proven otherwise – both less virulent and more contagious… All these accumulated factors have pushed these countries to abandon their policy zero covid
to start vaccinating more, to relax controls, etc.
Chinese people get tested for COVID-19 near a residential complex in Shanghai on May 10, 2022, as part of a massive testing campaign to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Photo : Associated Press / Andy Wong
But not China. China which, on the contrary, in 2022 during the outbreak of a few cases in Shanghai, redoubled the controls, imposing on the great Chinese metropolis, in April and May (but also on Beijing, in June) extremely severe confinements .
Also in the spring, the economic figures (albeit a little disguised) began to show that things were hurting badly on that side as well. We do not even know if China will reach 3% growth in 2022, which has been sailing at 8-10% for decades.
All this added up to give what we can call today, without risk of being mistaken: the debacle of politics zero covid
in China.
Congress stays the course
It was expected that, in the face of such overwhelming results, the Communist Party congress in October would announce a change of course. Instead, Xi Jinping, before the congressmen who gave him his famous third term (of quasi-dictator for life), reiterated the adhesion unwavering
of the infallible Communist Party to this health strategy.
A strategy that always claims strangle the dragon to kill it
– thus eradicating COVID – in addition to demonstrating Chinese superiority.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping delivers his opening speech at the Chinese Communist Party Congress.
Photo : Getty Images / NOEL CELIS
Can these November demonstrations shake the regime? It seems first unlikely. Xi Jinping’s regime, especially since 2017 (during his second term), has perfected his tools of surveillance and repression, bringing them to an almost unimaginable level.
George Orwell himself could never have predicted what the Chinese regime can do with its high-tech 21e century – facial recognition, centralized logs, spyware in every cell phone, etc. The actions and gestures of each citizen are scrutinized and recorded in several ways simultaneously.
We see it today, as the authorities spotted almost all the protesters on November 26, 27 and 28, and began to telephone or visit them – while sealing off the sites of the weekend demonstrations.
Le dilemme de Xi Jinping
Wouldn’t there be a way for Xi Jinping to order a quiet, gradual withdrawal from politics zero covid
… without humiliating themselves?
This question is undoubtedly at the heart of his reflection on the way forward, after these demonstrations against a dictator and a regime that believed they had created, once and for all, for eternity… perfect social control.
Is there pressure right now – in high places – to concessions
? Are there counterweights – to the seven-member Standing Committee (which before Xi Jinping was a true collective leadership)? Or maybe, in some important cities, people who can resist Beijing’s dictates?
This is not what recent political developments suggest, with this 20e Congress in October, which has been described as totalitarian turn
.
Beyond omnipotence totalitarian
, there are objective difficulties which can cause the most perfect dictatorships to stumble. An economy that is doing badly (and even more so with the zero covid
). Immense ecological difficulties, in a country which remains the largest consumer of coal in the world, and the largest producer of CO2on a par with the United States…
And now this policy zero covid
– symbol and emblem of the regime – which seems to be headed for shipwreck… A policy which, if we began to loosen it, could release protesting forces far greater than those we have just seen.
This is Xi Jinping’s dilemma.