Zero Covid could be the end of Xi Jinping’s rule
Only a month after China’s leader consolidated his power, his people may have reached a tipping point
Xi Jinping, China’s newly reappointed supreme leader, relies on his capacity to stifle popular dissent. He has drained billions from state funds to create an Orwellian web of digital national security to detect and suppress criticism of himself and the Communist Party. But it has failed. The challenge of Covid has proved too acute and even the strictest lockdown no longer silences the cries of China’s oppressed citizens.
When the Covid outbreak was first revealed online by Dr Li Wenliang in December 2019, he was accused by the Chinese authorities of subversive fabrication. No lockdown measures were implemented for around three weeks. Shortly before his death from the virus, he told reporters that “a healthy society should not have just one voice”. Before censorship bit down, social media was briefly flooded with expressions of solidarity with Dr Li. Three years later, despite draconian “hard lockdown” measures promoted by Xi himself, Covid continues to spread, while social media increasingly manages to project dissenting voices. Now they are on the streets.
The pressure has been building for months. In October, Beijing was gripped by hardline security measures ahead of the Communist Party Congress. Yet something extraordinary happened. Social-media videos circulated showing banners being unfurled on a Beijing bridge calling for strikes by students and workers, exhorting the Chinese people to be “citizens, not slaves” and demanding the removal of Xi, branding him a “dictator and national traitor”. In April, videos emerged from Shanghai in which residents in gleaming residential towers screamed into the city night their desperation and rage at Xi’s merciless lockdown policies.
Now, Covid infection levels across China have broken previous records, and once again Shanghai is at the eye of the storm. In the past couple of days, protests have grown, mourning a fire in a partly locked-down Xinjiang tower block in which 10 residents are thought to have died. Shanghai protesters took up their plight as a symbol of wider Communist oppression, demanding freedom and the lifting of lockdown not just for Xinjiang but all of China, and the overthrow of the Party and Xi himself.
These events come only a month after the Party Congress at which Xi consolidated his autocratic grip on power. They could well indicate that he may not be able to maintain it as long as he hopes. Lately, he has talked about “people-friendly policies” and the need to promote “common prosperity”. But a tipping point seems to have been reached at which the citizens of China have had enough.
The CCP headquarters in Beijing proclaims Mao’s injunction to “Serve the People”; protesters in Shanghai are demanding that their leaders do exactly that, saying explicitly that they want democracy in place of dictatorship. Social unrest has begun to break out in other major cities, including Wuhan and Beijing, where students have just held large anti-regime demonstrations at Peking and Tsinghua Universities – inevitably evoking memories of their role in 1989’s Tiananmen massacre.
Xi began his decade in supreme power by paying lip service to China’s benign role, where cooperation between nations would bring “winwin” benefits to all. In this rose-tinted mist, his intelligence and influence apparat exploited Western venality and ignorance to achieve widespread penetration of liberal political elites and their key national infrastructure.
Xi’s aggressive handling of Covid-19, however, contrary to the false projection of personal victory over the virus, has alienated not only the Chinese people but democracies and their partners across the world. “Win-win” saccharine has given way to “wolf warrior” aggression backed up by military expansionism. International concerns about Chinese ambitions have multiplied, save among collaborators such as Russia, Syria and North Korea.
Xi wishes only to win an existential Marxian struggle with everything that could threaten the CCP. Hong Kong has been broken on his wheel. His totalitarian “China dream” looks increasingly nightmarish. The citizens of all mainland China – not just Xinjiang and Tibet – are his victims as well. More than ever, as they face an inevitable crackdown, their interests are ours; a fact on which responsible political and corporate China strategies should be founded.