Covid protests: Xi Jinping will tide over the current crisis, but Chinese people have put Communist Party on notice

If a few blank sheets of A4 paper can cause the most powerful leader in China since Mao Zedong to quake sufficiently in his boots to order a stinging crackdown on protestors, Xi Jinping perhaps should be called a paper tiger.

Quite telling for ‘Lingxiu’, who has spent the better part of his decade in power building a personality cult rivalling that of Chairman Mao, and just last month completed a sweeping takedown at party congress — booting out rivals, installing staunch loyalists in top leadership positions of the Chinese Communist Party and securing a precedent-smashing third term in power. Maybe more. Who knows.

Xi has moved diligently, meticulously, and deftly to corner absolute power. Events in China over the last few days shows how inherently fragile that authoritarian power grab is. At his most powerful since he became the party general secretary and president in 2012, Xi is now paradoxically also at his most vulnerable.

Faced with a civil disobedience of a nature, scale, magnitude, intensity, territorial and demographic spread unprecedented since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 — triggered by his draconian “zero-COVID” policy that has no exit strategy — Xi is discovering that centralization of power comes at a great cost.

Unlike the early stages of the pandemic when the virus was ravaging Wuhan and Covid whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang’s death had sparked a torrent of outrage, Xi is now in no position to deflect responsibility.

He had vanished from plain sight when an angry Wuhan, seeking answers, was counting bodies in early 2020. Premier Li Keqiang was sent to firefight and placate residents. Three years on, the minnows can no longer take the blame for the ruthless, whimsical and perpetual cycle of disruptive pandemic control measures. ‘Zero-Covid’ is Xi’s baby. The CCP has been drilling the message into citizens day in and out.

That also accords unique weightage to the current crisis. Xi had sought to make political capital out of a severe global pandemic. A faltering world learnt to live with the virus. Citizens were inoculated with vaccines, natural immunity took over. India, soon to be the world’s most populous nation, achieved near total vaccination. Normalcy crept in. Life, business returned.

Meanwhile, an endless loop of mass testing, strict lockdown and quarantine routine trapped China into a giant bubble. Propaganda points were ripe for the picking when the world was struggling, and China seemed secure in its bubble. Xi announced victory of China’s authoritarian system over the chaos of ineffectual democracies that can’t protect economy or lives. The CCP propaganda machinery doubled down on ‘Zero-Covid’.

Xi had written in his world report to the 20th party congress that “in responding to the sudden outbreak of Covid-19, we put the people and their lives above all else, worked to prevent both imported cases and domestic resurgences, and tenaciously pursued a dynamic zero-Covid policy. In launching an all-out people’s war to stop the spread of the virus, we have protected the people’s health and safety to the greatest extent possible and made tremendously encouraging achievements in both epidemic response and economic and social development.”

In his premature triumphalism, Xi had laid the foundation for today’s crisis.

Focusing only on containment strategy, the party failed miserably in other aspects of the battle against the pandemic. It was a grave policy error driven by hubris and arrogance. It fully illustrates the limits and vulnerabilities of authoritarian systems that, in absence of space for policy debates, critical checks and honest feedback are led into an asymmetric information paradigm where the sellers of propaganda are also its biggest buyers, increasing the possibility of bad decisions being made on a very large scale.

Foreign vaccines were not allowed to enter Chinese shores, even collaborations weren’t done — a decision based on a misplaced sense of nationalism instead of science. Chinese healthcare system is still geared more towards controlling a notoriously infectious bug from spreading than mitigation, cure and wellness.

Vaccination coverage remained poor, especially among the seniors. For a demographically old nation of 1.4 billion, that is a lot of people. Just around 66% of seniors aged above 80 and above have been fully inoculated while the booster dose percentage is even lower at 40 per cent.

A combination of less effective domestic vaccines, wrong immunization strategy, lacunae in healthcare infrastructure, a vast population never exposed to the virus, and pigheaded policymaking focused more on scoring ideological points and upholding the ‘Chinese model’ meant that Xi has no viable exit strategy from ‘’Zero-Covid”. All options are bad.

Faced with vociferous resistance and defiance from a weary public if Xi now tries to move on from the ‘dynamic Zero-Covid’ strategy in sync with the world, that may devastate the Chinese healthcare system, spike deaths and illnesses.

According to an estimation by?Bloomberg Intelligence, “a full reopening” in China “may lead to 5.8 million ICU admissions, overwhelming a health system that currently has less than four ICU beds per 100,000 people.” An uncontrolled wave may trigger “32,000 daily ICU admissions, more than twice the 14,500 high-care beds China is estimated to currently have.”

It would be a shattering blow to Xi’s image. His credibility would lie permanently damaged. For a party and a leader obsessed with regime stability, that is not a good option. If Xi is seen to be making concessions due to popular unrest, it would indicate that demonstrations can impact CCP’s decision-making. That may encourage people to hit the streets and protest more vigorously. It would also be a tacit admission that ‘dynamic Zero-Covid’ was a grave blunder.

Xi can also clamp down hard on protests and let law enforcement loose on demonstrating public by harnessing the capabilities of a full spectrum surveillance state to identify and punish the individuals. It certainly possesses that capability. The irony of an authoritarian system is that the tighter it seeks to control the levers of power, the more it betrays the insecurities woven within.

The CCP, more so under Xi, is ruthless when it perceives any threat to its grip on power. It is possible that the party answers the surge in popular outrage by tightening the internal security apparatus and increasing its chokehold over Chinese society to snuff out any semblance of political grievance.

This strategy is, however, unlikely because it carries the risk of further igniting passions and giving shape to a movement that until now has been shaped more by frustration, anger and weariness than the grammar of organized political resistance.

If Xi pushes the public too hard, it may backfire and lead to coordination and coalescing of forces behind the movement. The protests may gain in strength, scope and unity of purpose. Leadership and capabilities will form along the way. Already we have seen that despite an army of censors scrubbing the tightly regulated Chinese internet clean of any traces of dissent, demonstrator have turned to?subtle methods of creative protests?using cryptic coordinates, blank sheets of paper, VPNs or even dating apps to?get their message across.

As former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale writes in?Times of India, “…in 1989, the movement began as spontaneous and random outbursts of mourning for the late beloved leader Hu Yaobang and, along the way, it acquired leadership, purpose and capabilities. That happened when the party-state, unmindful of public dissatisfaction, declared on April 26, 1989 on the front pages of the People’s Daily, that the protesters, mostly university students, were fanning a ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’. It was the insensitivity and hubris of the party-state that led to the Tiananmen incident of 1989.”

For a country with a history of student movements, Xi would have noted with some concern that students from China’s premier universities, including Tsinghua, his alma mater, have jumped into protests and in some cases have called for the ouster of the party and the supreme leader. Cries for freedom and democracy have reverberated throughout the length and breadth of a paranoid regime.

Protests in China are nothing new. It may seem an anathema but localized disgruntlements are par for the course in China. The CCP allows a degree of latitude for people to vent their frustration over issues that are primarily local, specific, disaggregated and as varied as grain payment or real estate mortgage.

Freedom House’s new database research tool, The?China Dissent Monitor, finds that “668 instances of dissent” took place in China “from June to September 2022, as people spoke out against stalled housing projects, labor rights violations, fraud, COVID-19 policies, and state violence, among other grievances.”

It wouldn’t have escaped Xi’s notice that for the first time since 1989, protests in China have transcended the barriers of ‘local’ and have united citizens across a broad spectrum of social groups including iPhone factory workers, minorities in Xinjiang, upwardly mobile urban middle class and even students, and their anger has coalesced over a common cause — grievance around the oppressive and relentless ‘Zero-Covid’ regimen.

And even more worryingly for the CCP regime, the outburst of rage quickly moved from demands to rescind harsh pandemic measures to gneralised political dissent — yearning for personal and political liberties and freedom from dictatorship.

Two more attributes of the protests are worth noting. One, the involvement of the urbanites and students from prestigious universities indicates that the party’s unwritten social contract with the ethnic Han majority — accepting the CCP’s autocracy and bartering political freedom in exchange for prosperity and political stability — is fraying. China’s stalled economic progress and disproportionate rise in indices of living standards is gnawing away at CCP’s legitimacy. The protests could therefore be at the cusp of a pivotal turning point.

Second, the anger has galvanized as much around weariness over endless Covid restrictions as over a sense of betrayal. While the world is celebrating one of the most keenly followed sporting events where maskless fans from all across the globe are thronging football stadiums in Qatar by the thousands, the Chinese are caught in an endless loop of mass testing, quarantine and lockdowns. Businesses are struggling and youths are unemployed due to an economic downturn caused by the disruptive pandemic measures.

The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back is the widespread belief that 10 residents of a high rise in Urumqi were burnt alive and many more were injured because lockdown measures came in the way of firefighting and rescue. It didn’t help that the local administration reflexively blamed the victims.

The CCP has consistently mocked the rest of the world for choosing to live with the virus and has touted Xi’s ‘dynamic zero’ model as the difference between deaths abroad and “people’s war to stop the virus” within China. Almost four years since the Wuhan outbreak, as the world has moved on, exhausted Chinese citizens have finally ditched the blue pill for red and questioning the very basis of ‘Zero-Covid’ policy, and their indignation has shaken the CCP to the core.

Xi knows that the simmering discontent may boil over, so he is likely prioritise political stability. The CCP may provide some quiet concessions on pandemic control. Such a move is already afoot. Softer tones are emerging in state media and party rhetoric on Covid control, quarantine protocols are being noticeably loosened and on Tuesday, reports?Bloomberg, “a media outlet supervised by the CCP’s Propaganda Department published interviews with people who were infected with Covid and recovered, a rare topic. It is a potential sign that propaganda officials are trying to normalize infection.”

Alongside, however, the party will crush dissent with a heavy hand. Heavy police deployment has ensured that protests have ground to a halt since Monday. Harnessing the full power of surveillance state, cops are seeking out?Covid protestors?and demanding information on their whereabouts. Shopping malls closing early, people are being subjected to random identity checks and police, according to multiple reports, are verifying people’s smartphones for apps banned in China like Twitter, Telegram, Instagram and others.

Bolder voices are getting arrested. One protestor in Shanghai, who raised slogans against the party and Xi, has been arrested and there is no trace of him even after three days, reports?The Economist.

In a veiled but chilling warning to protestors, the state-run Xinhua news carried the first official response to demonstrations where China’s domestic security chief Chen Wenqing?vowed at a meeting Tuesday to “effectively maintain overall social stability” and urged law enforcement officials to “resolutely strike hard against infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces, as well as illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order.”

The party has hardened itself over decades to deal with exactly such contingencies. Regime changes rarely occur without a section of the political elite buying into the calls for change. Xi has neutered the factionalism within the CCP to an extent that such a possibility seems remote.

Yet, even if the protests fizzle out without achieving any radical policy shifts, it would have revealed how brittle the party-state really is, and how little people trust it. That will have major implications for policy decisions going ahead. For all the power in the world, Xi Jinping is not in a good place.