China's protests follow simmering discontent, plus: the novelty of dissent in today's China, Xi's challenge, undeterred in Iran, and anticipating price-cap fallout ...
Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. December 1, 2022 |
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"(I)t is wrong to see this crisis as solely the result of a spark from Urumqi," former New York Times China bureau chief Howard W. French writes for Foreign Policy. "This challenge to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the state has been building for some time."
As anti-lockdown and anti-government protests unfold across China, touched off by a deadly apartment fire in the far-western city of Urumqi, French and others have suggested the remarkable authority amassed by national leader Xi Jinping and the CCP have helped produce the discontent now on display. At China Heritage, Geremie R. Barmé writes that this "crisis … is the kind of 'black swan event' of which Xi Jinping and his comrades have been fearful for years. They have been far less willing to consider the danger they pose to themselves, something summed in the Qing-era expression 官逼民反 guān bī mín fǎn, 'the repressive behaviour of officials incites popular rebellion'."
Others see economic pressures, worsened by Covid-19 and the government's stringent lockdowns, as playing a major role. In the course of describing the police response to protests, an unnamed Foreign Policy special correspondent points to long-simmering malaise among a younger Chinese generation "stressfully coping with the country's highly competitive job market and education competition. Since 2020, slogans such as 'lying flat,' meaning seeking peace by giving up on ambition; 'let it rot,' an expression that giving up would be more beneficial than trying; and 'run-ism,' the art of leaving the country, have become popular terms among young Chinese." |
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Chinese police have begun to seek out demonstrators, Reuters reports, but given the rarity of open protest in China, the significance of this movement is hard to ignore.
"What's happened in the past 24 hours is novel in that protesters have appeared on the streets in multiple cities with apparent knowledge of what is happening in other parts of the country," University of Cambridge Chinese-development professor William Hurst tweeted Saturday, in a lengthy thread.
"The outburst of emotions on display is a cognitive cue signifying to Chinese people that their grievance is widely shared," tweets professor Yan Long of the University of California, Berkeley, in another thread. "Such cognitive liberation implies the possibility of civil disobedience and change." (Hat tip to China Heritage's Barmé for calling attention to the above Twitter commentary.) |
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As for where things are heading, China expert Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) tells host H. Andrew Schwartz, on the CSIS podcast "The Truth of the Matter," that this protest movement is still "far short of anything that threatens (Xi's) hold on power or the (Chinese) Communist Party's hold on power. … The protesters have couched this, to some extent, around norms about freedom, but really what they want is just their normal lives back" via a lifting of Covid-19 restrictions.
The problem for Xi, Kennedy and others say, is that China's population is particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. The country is thought to have low rates of immunity, as infections have been scant and as Beijing decided to shun foreign-made mRNA-based vaccines.
Xi could end his so-called "zero-Covid" policy "fast, or he could end it safely, but he can't do both," Kennedy says, predicting a kind of race between the government's ability to lift restrictions and protesters' growing demands. |
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Anticipating Price-Cap Fallout |
The West is struggling to finalize an imposed cap on Russian oil prices before Dec. 5, when the European Union will enact an import ban on Russian oil shipped by sea. If such sanctions take effect, Derek Brower and David Sheppard predict in a Financial Times essay, we could see the "unraveling of the old order in the global oil market." The Economist writes that these measures are "no magic weapon" against Russian President Vladimir Putin. They've been crafted to avoid economic blowback, but that "assumes no logistical hiccups will prevent decade-old trading patterns from undergoing a smooth but rapid transition," The Economist adds elsewhere. "Three bottlenecks stand out: a crunch in tankers, an insurance gap and a global shortage in risk appetite." |
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