From Asia Times, December 5:
State’s response not as harsh, repressive or coordinated as external commentary suggests and Beijing has adroitly shifted blame to the local level
China was wracked with unprecedented “anti-zero-Covid” protests in late November 2022. They started with a fire in Urumqi city, Xinjiang. At least 10 people perished after not being allowed to leave the building due to Covid-19 restrictions. Local street demonstrations followed this tragedy.
The next day, local authorities declared that the city had been rid of Covid-19 at the community level and issued a number of tone-deaf statements about the need for individual protection.
The demonstration in Xinjiang was followed on Saturday, November 26 by a protest on Urumqi Road in Shanghai, where residents also railed against China’s current zero-Covid policy. Unusually, protestors called for regime change. Since then, there have been reports of nearly 100 protests in different parts of China, mainly in universities.
It is easy to elevate the significance of these protests. But protests are both more common and more easily dealt with in China than commonly understood. There have been major political protests in China in the past few decades and the playbook for dealing with them is well established.
Leaders blame problems on local government implementation and crack down hard on generalized statements such as “this was the Party’s fault.” They also hit the leaders of protests hard, but usually leave the protesters themselves alone.
What is new in these Covid-19 protests is that many different issues are being refracted through the lens of the virus. Workers protesting about labor rights use the pandemic as a frame for grievances, but that is a different matter from those seeking greater freedoms of speech or political rights, or wanting to criticize China’s leaders.
Notably, the state response was not nearly as harsh, repressive or even coordinated as external commentary suggests. Instead, protests were dissipated through control of social media platforms and through relocating protesters. Following this, there have been fewer reports of activities.
The protests are unlikely to change the regime, but they may have triggered changes in China’s Covid-19 policy. Why? Because they allowed Beijing to change its policy....
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