What just happened
- Saudi Arabia announced plans for a six-runway airport in Riyadh.
- Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi filed for bankruptcy.
- A Frenchman won a legal right to not be “fun” at work.
There’s a case to be made that the protests being suppressed all over China threaten the very foundations of Communist Party power.
Exhibit 1: a notice issued last night by M&G Stationery, based in Shanghai, saying it was banning the sale of A4 white paper to “maintain national security and stability”.
The notice went viral. M&G’s stock fell four times faster than the Shanghai Stock Exchange average this morning. “Nobody knows if it’s real or not, which becomes part of the joke,” says Isabel Hilton of China Dialogue.
So what? Students, professors and their supporters are holding up blank sheets of white paper all over the country. Hence #whitepaperrevolution. Whether it unseats Xi Jinping or (much more likely) not, it signals that…
- Censorship hasn’t worked. The surveillance state Xi has worked so hard to create hasn’t prevented the widespread use of virtual private networks and the Telegram app, both illegal in China, that police are now searching for on people’s phones.
- There’s a whole set of grievances shared among millions – to do with lockdowns but also the party and Xi himself – that don’t even need to be written down.
- These grievances are national and include Tiananmen-style cries for freedom for three nights in a row, for the first time in 30 years. Local protests by students and workers, fuelled mainly by anger over corruption, pollution and working conditions, are routine and routinely suppressed – there have been tens of thousands of them since 1989. But the lockdown experience has been a) a national trauma, b) blamed on Xi personally, c) puncturing the myth of his infallibility.
There are important implications for 2023.
Double bind. Xi’s shown no sign so far of easing lockdown rules in response to the protests. That would be an admission his zero Covid strategy was flawed and it could endanger the lives of tens of millions of inadequately vaccinated elderly Chinese. But the alternative of more lockdowns risks provoking more protests and a…
Hit to growth. Chinese GDP growth is already forecast to end the year at least 2 per cent below the party’s 5.5 per cent target. Global growth will suffer as a result. Multinationals are downgrading forecasts for the Chinese market (VW sales are 14 per cent below expectations), and more protests and suppression would only exaggerate the effect of lockdowns on the manufacturing sector, which produced 30 per cent of the world’s goods last year.
Frayed knot. Western governments are assuming they will have to go on dealing with Xi. Last night Rishi Sunak promised “robust pragmatism” (translation: I still dare not offend Beijing). Biden officials are saying privately they don’t think the protests can be sustained. They could be wrong. Censors are purging the Chinese web of all mention of white paper, A4 and Shanghai’s Wulumuqi Zhong Road, which was filled with protesters on Saturday. But Xi’s power base has been exposed as fragile. The social contract he offered – prosperity in return for obedience – has broken down. There is talk of emboldened factionalism in top party echelons behind the scenes, and the protesters know it.
Watch out for
- next weekend, when crowds could return to the streets of Beijing and Shanghai and the relatively restrained police response so far could turn ugly; and
- Tibet’s southern border, where Indian sources have accused China of territorial incursions and a troop build-up they fear may be a prelude to deployments designed to distract attention from domestic Chinese unrest.
Number of the week: 29,256 – Covid cases in China (seven-day rolling average)
Number of the day: 7 – factor by which US per capita intensive care bed numbers exceed China’s.
Zero Covid has come to define Xi, and it is doomed.