'teaching a lesson'
predictable CCP actions
The protests spilling across China in November almost three months ago were surprising in both their scope and success in overturning the ‘Zero-COVID’ policy of Xi Jinping since 2020. It was not as if people’s frustration with the regime’s handling of the virus was new; people in building blocks banged pots and pans outside their windows while in lockdown in 2020, and this frustration was recorded and circulated via the internet before the world went into hiatus.1 The next two and a three quarters years saw massive shutdowns throughout the country which seriously undermined the Chinese economy, put citizens at various times under ‘health’ house arrest to prevent spread. This also further strengthened the regime’s mechanisms to monitor and constrain public behaviour including protests. Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), personally seemed at the heart of the policy. This all proceeded his coronation for a third term as party leader in October last year.
The late 2022 protests were more visible, more angry, more frustrated, and more widespread as indications that renewed lockdowns would reappear at the drop of the hat. Shanghai went through nine weeks’ shutdown in the spring of 2022 yet the virus persisted.
A breaking point resulted from a fire in Xinjiang province where an unverified number of people died when they could not escape their apartment. This inferno attracted attention at home and abroad, largely because of the presence of so many Uighurs in Xinjiang who already faced harsh conditions at Xi’s hands over the past six years.
I, among others, expected a harsh crackdown by the regime in the face of protests which occasionally mentioned Xi by name and often circulated globally by foreign press. In a society where each and every single street corner has multiple cameras to monitor any sort of disturbance, these incensed citizens showed courage beyond belief with these actions over an intense couple of weeks.
The regime fears protests leading to luan, or chaos. The government—any government in the Middle Kingdom historically—fears the vast number of people who make up the nation. Monitoring their actions is nothing new, repeat not new for generations or millenia. It’s seductive to assume it’s only the CCP with its Leninist, party, proclivities but China has always valued order because of its size, geographic complexity, and other factors.
Much monitoring is via the internet where anyone using that service probably self-polices rather than face a visit by the public security bubbas. Anyone speaking on any topic must know their words can be reported which is why code words become so important as happened in November. ‘Wulumqui Rd (M)’, for example, referred to the flat in the Xinjiang capital, Urumqi (sometimes spelled phonetically Wulumqui) where the fire occurred. Eventually security forces lock on to these terms, censoring them online and pushing back on individuals using them in public. If dissention goes on, the cycle of code words begin anew. Remember, this the country where one cannot show Winnie the Pooh because of the likeness to rotund Xi Jinping.
The November protests seemed to many as indicative that the Party was unable or perhaps too surprised to react in its traditionally harsh manner to curb this activity. Xi Jinping, glorified at the Party Congress mere weeks earlier, seemed forced to ease his policies and allow folks to express their opinions since the vitriol against the Zero- Covid was clearly so strong in so many parts of the country. Or so it seemed to some.
In December, the central government abandoned many of the Zero-COVID prohibitions and China confronted the new health plague that the rest of the world has suffered for almost three years. Stories began spreading of overflowing hospitals and morgues, insufficient medicine, weary physicians, and a society reeling from the new status that resulted from the protesters’ demands.
The weakness of the Party was on display for all to see. Xi backed down from his stern policy but the nation had many new challenges to address as the flood of COVID spread (and still does with this Lunar New Year travel period which lasts another several days). Things looked and still appear unsettling in many ways.
Today’s news is that the authorities, as usual, did not forget those who opposed them but is bullying them into silence for next time by arresting those who chastised the regime for its own policies. And the CCP, like many Chinese governments before it, is blaming the evil influence of foreigners for these misguided people attacking Xi, Zero-COVID, and the People’s Republic of China.2
China’s government cannot tolerate anyone attacking Xi Jinping or the Party because its vulnerability could lead to attempts to hold the CCP as an institution and the individual leaders of that Party accountable. And that accountability, over its more than 74 years’ rule, could extend to pretty awful things it has overseen. Xi sees himself as the embodiment of the Party and cannot abide by criticisms or accountability because, if genuine, it could lead to questions on everything he and the Party do.
In China’s cultural tradition, the ‘mandate of heaven’, or responsibility/right to rule, means that the Celestial Heavens empower someone to rule on behalf of the Chinese people. China sees itself as the Middle Kingdom with a unique role in history and the world, an unparalleled civilisation. As a unique place, its position is to be unchallenged and superior. The CCP has played on that for decades to build a narrative for why it alone can lead China into the future. Xi has made that into his personal mission and right to extend things further.
Because the ‘mandate of heaven’ has both a right to rule and a responsibility to the people, then it must be the foreigners who are undermining this pattern. Xi has used this argument several times over the past decade as Party General Secretary to explain why the nation’s moves closer to the United States and foreigners is dangerous to China. He has accused western education, for example, of subversion against the Middle Kingdom and the ‘new China’ that he and the CCP began cultivating decades ago. Then there is Washington’s moves on foreign policy which clearly aim to humiliate the Chinese people.
This all happens simultaneously with what Xi and the Party believe are new interventions by the United States on Taiwan, such as calls in the U.S. Congress to ‘normalise’ relations with the island. This is again something that could humiliate the CCP and Xi if Taiwan were ‘lost’ from the Motherland. Additionally, U.S. avowed aspirations to strengthen allies and partners to ‘stop Chinese aggression’ is read in Beijing as rolling back the ‘advances for the Chinese people’ that the Party has wrought over its tenure.
The Party’s behaviour is not new on arresting its oppenents but does show a learning curve that we should not ignore. In 1989, when protestors held Tiananmen Square for weeks, making demands for some accountability, the CCP leadership used tanis to mow down the children of the regime. China’s leaders always always always are mindful of ‘teaching lessons’ whether it is to the students on evacuating Tiananmen or to the United States on moving north of the Yalu River in 1950 which provoked People’s Liberation Army forces into North Korea. 'Teaching a lesson’ matters more than we would ever consider because the belief that deterrent will work is invaluable to the Party’s self-myth it represents the people.
This time, however, the Party chose not to send in the tanks. The protests in November 2022 gradually petered out when the Zero-COVID rules began ending. Some of the protests had mentioned Xi by name and called for the Party’s overthrow but people became entangled in the fight to stay healthy and survive the onslaught of COVID.
The ‘teaching the lesson’ part is occurring now, looking familiar indeed. What is unclear is which lesson the people on the receiving end will take. With no public accountability or transparency, it is hard to know precisely why Xi lifted the Zero-COVID policies. It could have been because the policies were ineffective long term. It could have been because the protests were scaring the Party. It could have been to spread COVID, though that would be pretty cynical even for this bunch. We simply do not know nor are we or the Chinese people likely to ever know. What we do know is that ‘teaching a lesson’ will ensue as the Party does not believe it can leave that lesson untaught.
The ‘teaching the lesson’ part was guaranteed. We simply were not sure when that lesson would appear. Nor are we sure what lesson will endure with the citizenry.FIN
Keir Simmons, Jennifer Jett, Amy Perrette, and Elizabeth Kuhr, ‘A Reporter risked her life to showthe world Covid in Wuhan. Now she may not survive jail’, nbcnews.com, 21 December 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/reporter-zhang-zhan-risked-life-show-world-covid-wuhan-now-may-not-sur-rcna9212
Vivian Wang and Zixu Wang, ‘In China’s Crackdown on Protesters, a Familiar Effort to Blame Foreigners’, nytimes.com, 26 January 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/world/asia/china-protests-arrests.html