transparency matters
what is the scale of dissent in China?
Those of you who don’t know me well are beginning to realise I adore photographing pretty scenes such as this one today looking at our shrouded Maryland Capital building. The clouds were spectacular and the shoppers were out in force! The return of Black Friday crowds was here.
Reports are proliferating about growing frustration with the COVID lockdown policies in China much as they did here two years ago. We know Xi Jinping and the Communist Party have said repeatedly they intend to eradicate the virus from this vast country. Yet, COVID is not agreeing. According to the BBC this evening, the number of daily cases yesterday rose to 33,000 from 31,000 the day before. China isn’t being transparent on the topic.
Many stories on this topic are likely wishful thinking by folks who seek to highlight any powerful protests against a dictatorship that spends are more annually on domestic security than it does in external military modernisation. Others want to stress instability to beat up on the Chinese Communist Party and perhaps China in general but we don’t have empirical information on the scope of these uprisings.
Protests are not unknown in China, even in the COVID era. News clips in the spring of 2020 indicated protestors locked in their homes banging pots with windows open to show their fury as the authorities tried to prevent both accountability for the Wuhan outbreak and the spread of the disease in its earlieest months. Some wondered at the time whether this could threat the Party’s rule but the protests seemed to wither as many do in China as the state mobilised against dissent.
As massive Shanghai went through week after week of lockdown in the spring of 2022, the government appeared able to balance the frustration resulting from deprivation with the overall argument of enhanced health safety. That balance might have been on a razor’s edge but the Party would not brook dissent in the lead up to the Party Congress this past October. Perhaps after that event and Xi’s consolidation of a third term as General Secretary, one argument went, the Party would gradually reduce these draconians restrictions to prevent creating powder kegs of major cities. Indeed, it appeared in as the Party Congress closed four weeks ago that stepping away from the harsh limitations could begin soon.
A month after the Party Congress closed, COVID cases are increasing along with public fury.'Covid anger grows in China', NYT.com, 25 November 2022 Clips of civic unrest continue proliferating online. Protests by workers at a FoxConn factory earlier this week highlighted the international relevance because those protesters work on Apple products. Bernard Orr, 'China Widens COVID curbs, IPhone factory unrest adds to economy worries', Reuters.com, 23 November 2022 How pervasive are they? It’s hard to know with any certainty.
The economy continues showingthe effects of these shutdowns, with the growth of yesteryear over. China’s economic data is always highly suspect due to the lack of transparency but exports slowed substantially over the past two and a half years and supply chain problems due to China’s lockdowns are common Without rule of law and accountability beyond the Party, we have no idea what the growth rate really is. The Party would not even publish growth rates in October as they would have occurred simultaneous with public messaging on the Party’s great successes under Xi. We also do not know how many jobs are unfilled as people cannot work.
We have no way to measure how common these protests are nor how close people are to joining in. The Party’s vigilantly censors certain terms on the internet, such as ‘protest’ or ‘assembly’, to prevent exactly this mass behavior. The inability to document, then share, the data means that we may vastly overcount the numbers or we may be woefully underappreciating the chasm between the government and the governed. I am, sadly, quite certain the internal security forces will brtually address protests when they threaten the luan (chaos) that Chinese culture has feared for millenia because China contains a huge population in an enormous area which has always been extremely hard to govern, no matter who is in leadership.
Transparency, the ability to trust data, is fundamental to governing effectively—and living in a state where accountability, hope, and responsibility permeate a society. Alternate sources of information without accountability to offer and document honest facts means a great deal of distrust in any political system. China’s alternate truths are at the heart of their communist system. The effect is no one trusts that system except those hoping to perpetuate it.
We in the United States and the west are lucky we still have a more transparent system than many other states around the globe. That is eroding with some going so far as to cite ‘alternate facts’ or to dismiss real events. We must recognise this requirement for a healthy democracy, then reinforce it for the better in our country.
Meanwhile, we will see how things unfold in the Middle Kingdom. I suspect these protests could meet severe responses sooner rather than later but we shall see. In any case, we must filter and analyse carefully rather than superficially as we don’t have transparency or high degrees of confidence they are sharing truth with us. This problem continues in so much of the world but China’s contribution is especially high on this score. FIN