An apartment fire on Nov. 24 in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang lit the fuse for the largest nationwide protests the country has seen since 1989. Many saw the tragedy as preventable and attributed the blame to China’s COVID-19 policy, claiming that the ongoing lockdown in the city hampered rescue efforts and prevented people from escaping the burning building.
“Zero-Covid,” as the policy framework has come to be known, has been China’s strategy for dealing with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. The idea is to lockdown a city at the first sign of a positive case and to keep it locked down until infections return to zero. To do this, China’s anti-Covid measures have been strictly enforced with local officials keeping tabs on every resident and sending them to mandatory government quarantine centers if they test positive.
Zero-Covid has become synonymous with Xi and his immense grip on power over the CCP. Early in the pandemic, it was touted as one of the biggest successes of his rule, as infection rates in China remained well below the rest of the world.
Fast forward to 2022, and China’s Covid strategy seems to have backfired. Due to new, highly infectious variants, as well as low vaccination rates, China is now the only major economy in the world that is still experiencing lockdowns.
Though mass protests have only recently broken out, discontent has been brewing for a long time. Despite being one of the richest economies in the world, the extended lockdowns have put China under extreme hardship.
Youth unemployment has sharply risen to almost 20%, and its economic growth has slowed to a standstill. Meanwhile, the CCP has largely ignored the massive economic costs, instead opting to pour even more government funds into “Zero-Covid,” with the cost of testing alone amounting to a whopping 7.2% of public revenue. However, macroeconomic indicators aside, first-hand accounts and videos of the experience somehow paint an even bleaker image.
Citizens in prolonged lockdown have frequently reported a lack of adequate food and medical supplies being delivered to them. In Shanghai, entire apartment complexes resorted to screaming out their windows to let officials know that they don’t have enough to eat. The government responded to them by sending drones to their windows, ordering citizens to “control your soul’s desire for freedom.”
If this sounds a little dystopian sci-fi novel-y, it should. China, in the past decade, has partnered its rapid economic growth with an equally rapid growing government surveillance apparatus.
However, after the apartment fire, the frustration of Chinese citizens has become too large for simple censorship and intimidation.
The protests in China are unique because they are rarely this coordinated, widespread or incorporate this wide demographic. Everything about these protests suggest that its sentiment is nationwide.
It’s little surprise that anger against Zero-Covid is what’s unifying Chinese citizens across all demographic divisions. After all, the one experience that every Chinese citizen has more or less shared, is living under the austerity and uncertainty of what seems like an endless cycle of lockdowns, with no exit strategy.
However, what truly makes this protest significant is the rhetoric that’s being used by protesters. What initially began as a protest against the government’s strict anti-covid measures, quickly evolved into a protest against the government itself.
Rallies soon started to chant pro-democratic slogans, such as “We want freedom, not PCR tests” and even became explicitly anti-government, with chants of “Xi Jingping, step down” and “Communist party, step down.”
Such open criticism is practically unheard of in China, and comes with dire consequences. But that doesn’t seem to matter to protesting citizens, when the situation they are subjected to is just as dire itself.
Despite the extreme nature of these protests, the crackdown has already begun and protests have quieted down. This wave of protest may not be what ultimately leads to regime change, but the West should be paying attention nonetheless.
That’s because what these protests are showing us runs counter to what the Western world broadly assumes of Chinese society. China rarely ever enters Western media coverage outside the context of its geopolitical rivalry with the U.S. Because of this, the role of Chinese citizens themselves is often ignored, as many assume (implicitly or not) that the Chinese surveillance state has essentially propagandized its citizens into accepting authoritarian rule.
Yet, this recent wave of unrest shows that even the most powerful authoritarian state in the world, with the largest surveillance network in human history, cannot stamp out the basic and universal human desire for a life of freedom and dignity.
