With old tactics, China moves to snuff out protests
Steps up COVID vaccinations for its older adults
Reacting to China’s boldest and most widespread protests in decades, the security apparatus built by Communist Party leader Xi Jinping is mobilizing on multiple fronts to quash dissent, drawing on its decadesold tool kit of repression and surveillance.
In a meeting of the party’s top security leaders, reported in state media Tuesday, officials were ordered to “resolutely crack down on illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order.” And by evening, the demonstrations already appeared to be smaller and more scattered, with new videos emerging on social media — the main channel for news of the protests to reach a wider audience — showing only groups of residents in several different locked-down developments demanding to be freed.
At the same time, the government announced that it would step up vaccinations of older adults. That move is deemed crucial to easing China’s tight COVID-19 controls that have fueled public anger, signaling that as Beijing suppresses dissent, it is also moving to address the problem underlying the protests.
Public security personnel and vehicles have blanketed potential protest sites. Police officers are searching some residents’ phones for prohibited apps. Officials are going to the homes of would-be protesters to warn them against illegal activities and are taking some away for questioning. Censors are scrubbing protest symbols and slogans from social media.
The campaign is being carried out by a security apparatus Xi has upgraded in pursuit of unshakable dominance. He has expanded the police forces, promoted loyal security leaders into key positions, and declared that “political security” — for him and for the party — must be the bedrock of national security.
Yet even as Xi rolls out the police, he is projecting an unruffled appearance of business as usual. He has stayed silent about the rare open challenge to his rule that erupted in the protests, including calls for him to step down. He appears to be wagering that by outwardly ignoring the demonstrations; he can sap their momentum while the security services move in and the party’s army of online loyalists try to discredit protesters as tools of US-led subversion.
“They’re saying as little as possible for as long as possible,” said William Hurst, a professor at the University of Cambridge who studies politics and protest in China. “If they speak, it could inflame the situation, so it’s better to sit back and pretend nothing is happening.”
On Tuesday, the People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, featured Xi’s talks with the visiting Mongolian president and a front-page celebration of Xi’s decade in power, but not a word about the protests, China’s most widespread since the Tiananmen Square prodemocracy movement of 1989.
Still, there seems no doubt that inside the guarded seclusion of the party’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing, Xi and his advisers have been monitoring the unrest and plotting a response. Since the protests of 1989, Chinese leaders have fixated on the dangers of antigovernment social movements, determined to nip them in the bud and avoid the trauma of another bloody crackdown.
Even so, the protests that broke out in parts of Shanghai, Beijing, and other Chinese cities over the weekend appeared to catch leaders off guard.
The collective public anger first welled up in Urumqi, a city in western China where at least 10 people died in an apartment fire last week. Many people have said, despite official denials, that the deaths were caused by pandemic restrictions that prevented residents from leaving their apartment block. Protests over the tragedy escalated into wider denunciations of China’s pandemic policies, as well as calls from some for democracy, a free press, and other ideals anathema to the country’s authoritarian rulers.
This week, China’s security forces have regrouped, making new demonstrations much more difficult and risky.