The situation is repeated in the big cities. It doesn’t matter if whoever decides to download on their smartphone a app dating is married or living with a partner. He does not intend an affair. He wants to organize to continue the protests once morest the draconian measures anti-Covid that imposes the regime of Xi Jinping. It is the way that hundreds of thousands of Chinese have to get organized and circumvent the repressive siege of Beijing. It is that the local police make random arrests to check telephones, find out if they are part of the marches and thus be able to point them out as “foreign agents”.
This weekend’s eruption in the largest cities of China made it clear -in addition to the population’s weariness due to the prolonged and absurd confinements- that several things are failing in the country -supposedly- hyper-controlled by Xi. One is particularly striking: the tight monitoring and control that the central power makes of citizen life did not foresee that the patience of the population was at its most sensitive point. A fire in a building blocked by the authorities in Urumqicapital of Xinjiangtriggered anger in other parts of the territory. That city was locked up since August. and the people said it just is.
The protests are the loudest and largest in the last three decades, except for those that took place in recent years in Hong Kongthe financial city that until recently enjoyed a full democracy that was brutally crushed by Beijing. However, believing that these demonstrations might jeopardize the power of Xi Jinping it would be rash. It is more of an overwhelming popular referendum on the policies covid zero and a warning light to a management that until now had not been openly challenged by Chinese citizens.
It is at this point where the most ostensibly weak link in the strategy of Xi to internally combat the epidemic of coronavirus which then spread to the entire planet causing millions of deaths. The pressure cooker that implied intermittently locking up hundreds of millions of people in productive cities of the country over and over once more for almost three years was not correctly evaluated by the national or local authorities, more concerned with completing forms with efficient percentages of non-response infected than to find rational solutions to what would be an inevitable wave of spread of the virus.
Now, when almost the entire planet has practically left the pandemic behind, China faces dilemmas that have already been overcome in the West and other nations of Asia. Beijing wanted to instruct the rest of the planet by showing that its policies of covid-zero they were the most efficient in fighting the virus. The ultimate goal of this sanitary claim was to prove that autocracies were more efficient than traditional democracies in overcoming crises of a dramatic nature. Many stories accompanied that dream during these almost three years.
The tenor of the protests not only showed that Xi it does not have the thermometer of the Chinese people, but also now it must yield or harden. Will he be up to admitting that his strategy was wrong and failed? Your current crossroads lies in allowing the Covid from spreading uncontrollably in cities and the entire country -with the risk of seeing the health system collapse- or redoubling its commitment by closing in on its stubbornness and tightening the restrictions. There is, however, a third alternative that Beijing would not be able to contain: that society as a whole, fed up, raise in fact lockdown ordinances. The rebellion would take national dimensions. So yes the consequences would be difficult to predict.
This total factual opening or another more moderate one ordered by the central power would be unprecedented. And even chaotic. The deficient communication of the measures that descends from the highest authorities to the cities, the fear of local referents to assume mistakes and the general boredom will result in an explosive cocktail. A projection published in the magazine Nature last March already warned that the total opening of China might cause the death of 1.5 million people. This is due to three factors: the low efficiency of local vaccines once morest the variant Omicronthe refusal of Xi Jinping to allow the importation of western doses with better technology and the low rate of inoculation. The regime is obsessed.
To add to the dramatic scenario, the economy has suffered these same strategies for three years. According to The Economist, the recovery will not be seen until 2024, if the necessary measures are adopted to reverse the current scenario. According to an index prepared by Nomura, a Japanese investment bank, the lockdowns have occurred in cities that account for a quarter of Chinese GDP, surpassing the previous high of a fifth in mid-April when Shanghai was locked down. China’s youth unemployment rate reached a record in July, with 19.9%,” said the English outlet today, adding that “the The outlook for the economy is bleak..
Also this Tuesday The Washington Post he addressed the issue in his editorial: “After so many months of insisting that the Communist Party and Xi know best that zero Covid is the only right approach, changing course would mean they have been wrong. China’s economy and the health of its people depend on whether this authoritarian system can respond to voices of protest, abandon its own propaganda and show flexibility.”
Even taiwanfrom the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), criticized the anti-Covid measures, the repression of the protests and expressed solidarity with the protesters. “The basic rights of people to life, speech, expression and freedom of movement must be respected and protected and protests must be handled rationally and peacefully.”, indicates the statement that will have made more than one hyperventilate in Beijing.
The story was left bare: apparently, autocracies are not efficient or work better than democracies whatever the context, even in those dramatic ones like the one proposed by the covid pandemic. Nor when the one who holds all the power was recently crowned in a ceremony that marked the end of an era with the humiliation to Hu Jintao. That wound may remain open for a long time among veteran PCC members..
