China protests test the limits of Xi Jinping’s authority

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘China protests test the limits of Xi Jinping’s authority’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s edition is about the nationwide protests in China against the country’s zero-Covid policies. My guest is my colleague Yuan Yang, who returned to Britain this summer after six years as an FT correspondent in Beijing. So how much of a threat are these nationwide demonstrations to the Chinese Communist party and to President Xi Jinping?

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Gideon Rachman
The Chinese government has often boasted of its success in keeping the pandemic at bay through its zero-Covid policies. But as the rest of the world has opened up after the pandemic, China has been stuck with increasingly severe lockdowns, and in recent days, something seems to have snapped. (Audio of protests in China) Protests have broken out all over the country against the government’s Covid-19 policies and many of the demonstrations in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, the slogans quickly became much more political, with calls heard for freedom of the press and for President Xi to step down. To discuss the significance of all this. I was joined by Yuan Yang. Public protests are not uncommon in China, so I started by asking her what was new and significant about these particular demonstrations.

Yuan Yang
As you said, Gideon, there are protests every day in China. There are small-scale protests about single issues from labour disputes over wages to, you know, housing groups who don’t want the local governments to demolish historic housing. But these issues historically, at least in the last 30 years, have been confined to specific regions and single issues. And what we’ve seen in the protests of last week is something completely different. It’s nationwide protests over not just a policy — the zero-Covid policy — which residents are now saying should be finished, but over the leadership that’s enacted the policy. So these protests are political to the core. They’re not confined to one single issue, and they’re uniting a broad coalition of people from different backgrounds who all oppose the policy.

Gideon Rachman
And it must be chilling for the party to suddenly see across the country people chanting things like, “We want freedom of speech and Xi should step down.”

Yuan Yang
Absolutely. And the contrast of that is even more shocking compared with just over a month ago, we had the 20th party congress, at which President Xi not only removed all potential opposition to his policies in the Politburo Standing Committee but also got himself an unprecedented third term as leader of the party. And so that was a moment of great pageantry. And of course, I’m sure there was a lot of focus from the propaganda bureau to create the right image in the lead-up to this kind of crowning of President Xi. And potentially, I think what they missed in that focus on the pageantry of the party congress was the great discontent at the popular level with their policies.

Gideon Rachman
Mmm. And you came back over the summer after six years in Beijing. So you lived through this pandemic. What was it like living with these constant lockdowns? Could you sense discontent?

Yuan Yang
For the first couple of years — so from January 2020 to the end of 2021 — I’d say that broadly, Beijing and most large cities in China had a pretty good time of the pandemic. There were the minority of towns and cities that were locked down, particularly in the countryside, particularly Wuhan, of course, the epicentre of the pandemic, which suffered several months of lockdown in early 2020. But aside from those localised lockdowns for those two years, Beijingers were pretty much free to go out and about. We could continue seeing friends. There was no enforced lockdown in Beijing or in Shanghai or in other major cities for those first two years. And that, of course, all changed in the third year of the pandemic this year, with the spread of the Omicron variant, which is much more contagious and also much less deadly. And so the rolling lockdowns that we’ve had since the start of this year in many cities, including the long lockdown in Shanghai, I think have tipped that balance away from a positive vision of most people feeling, “OK, we can enjoy our freedom at the expense of this minority lockdown cities” to now the majority of people having experienced lockdowns of some form or other where they live and thinking, “Well, we’re doing this, but what is the point and what is the cost?”

Gideon Rachman
Mmm. Well, we’ll get back to the dilemmas of how they handle this pandemic in a second. But just on the demonstrations, was very dramatic. But the following day, quite quickly, the government seemed to have moved in and clamped down. Do you think these things will fizzle out even if they leave a lasting memory and a shock that the government is pretty good at restoring control? Or is it impossible to predict?

Yuan Yang
I wouldn’t want to predict, but I think the lasting images from the protests already will go down in history. The images of, for example, the street officials taking away the signpost of the Urumqi middle street in Shanghai where the protests coalesced around, how that has been marked as a way of the government, you know, mishandling the protests, the many videos of police beating up protesters, including beating up the BBC journalist. These images that show a clash between the official kind of coercive side of the government and the huge amount of public anger on the other side, I think, will last for quite a long time. And even their mere existence, I think, is quite an affront to the party’s legitimacy.

Gideon Rachman
Mmm. I mean, I can imagine what the defenders of the party would be saying, and they in fact already are out there saying on Twitter. You know, they’re saying, “Well, you know, China’s a big country. There’s 1.4bn people and these are a few thousand people — they’re not necessarily that representative. The party remains very popular”. Do you think they’ll be able to stick to that line and do you think they believe it?

Yuan Yang
I think that what’s been really clear in terms of the reaction to the protests is that the leadership have misjudged how much anger there was and how much resentment there was, how much economic suffering there was at the mass level and underlying its zero-Covid policies. I think that misjudgment has also been a result of the huge amount of top-down control over the policy and the identification of the zero-Covid policy with President Xi himself. I mean, he himself has come out to say repeatedly that this is the policy that China is going to stick by, and this is his landmark policy. Now there’d be a lot more flexibility in Chinese policymaking at the regional level to experiment or at the agency level, for example, for the Ministry of Health to come up with its own recommendations, if there were not such centralised control over the policy. And there have been moments where academics, even officials of last few years have said in public or suggested in public that there might be a way out of this. And then those voices have been censored because of the tight control. I think that this has been really a mistake of centralisation of power around Xi and identifying him with the policy.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And in the past, I mean, certainly in economic policy, China’s took a certain pride on its ability to experiment . . . 

Yuan Yang
Yeah...

Gideon Rachman
 . . . at the local level. So it doesn’t have to be this way of having this one-size-fits-all policy imposed from the top.

Yuan Yang
Yes, that’s true. And I think in a pandemic setting, of course, the experimentation within regions would have to be tightly controlled in terms of boundaries of travel between those regions. But that already exists right now because of the health code system in China. The system of high-risk, low-risk areas effectively already brings about a number of internal barriers to movement so that the country as a whole is not one large country but a series of blocs that can erect borders and dismantle them at a moment’s notice, just according to your health code app. So I think there is room for experimentation on this. There have been local governments seemingly in response to protests, lifting their lockdown restrictions in stages. So over the weekend, Urumqi — which was the epicentre of the first wave of protests — announced that they had hit the zero-Covid target. And, well, hey, we can now lift these lockdowns in stages, which is obviously very convenient as a response. And so I think we’ll see some of this local level responding to pressure. But on the national level, I think the government is under a huge amount of optical pressure, if you like, to keep the image as it is and say we’re not going to bow to these demands, we’re still sticking by this policy.

Gideon Rachman
Mmm. And I gather that tech stocks rallied in China because they believed that the government would relax the policy. Obviously, people are waiting for the government to shift.

Yuan Yang
That’s right, yeah. And I think the reaction of the government and the lack of flexibility of the government is partly overconfidence that carried over from the first couple of years of the pandemic. And I really have to emphasise, especially for friends in the UK who ask me how my first few years of the pandemic were. For the first two years of the pandemic in Beijing, it was extremely open and extremely safe.

Gideon Rachman
Right. So the rest of the world was locked out and China . . . 

Yuan Yan
Exactly.

Gideon Rachman
 . . . felt free.

Yuan Yang
Exactly. And that was the point when there’s a huge amount of confidence in state media, when Chinese leaders and state media figureheads were saying, “You look at how successful our system is, the western systems don’t work. Look at these democracies and how they’ve really crumbled, especially look at the US and the huge wave of deaths that the US suffered”.

Gideon Rachman
Which was a fair point. I mean, America had a million deaths.

Yuan Yang
Exactly. This narrative of the western liberal systems that have marked our form of governance for so long have been crippled by this pandemic. And look at us, we’re all safe. We have very, very few cases, let alone deaths in China. And so look at the success of our system. And I think that narrative worked until the Omicron variant came along and until China failed to carry on vaccinating.

Gideon Rachman
And what you hear now is that it’s not so simple to reverse policy. Chinese officials have said to me that, you know, we can have over a million deaths because they haven’t vaccinated extraordinarily enough. And also this decision not to bring in foreign vaccines, which does seem like a big mistake.

Yuan Yang
Yeah, yeah. I think the foreign vaccine decision, if we were to look back at this in a few years’ time, I think probably would emerge as one of the biggest strategic mistakes early on in the pandemic for China because of two things. One is the mRNA vaccines that have been developed outside of China are something more effective than the traditional vaccines. And so there’s going to be an efficacy gap even if they carry on with our domestic vaccines.

But secondly, I think the amount of public trust in Chinese vaccines is also a big issue. And vaccine hesitancy in China is not the same as vaccine hesitancy in the west, when it’s often about people who are questioning the use of vaccines in general as a whole class of intervention. I think vaccine hesitancy in China is often from people saying there is not that much public data about these drugs. We don’t really trust the government to give us the full amount of data. And, you know, fair enough. I think those are reasonable criticisms in China. And you have many friends of mine who I think are very intelligent and very sceptical people, are vaccine-hesitant in China because of their lack of trust in the public disclosure system and government’s transparency. I think under those situations, letting in foreign vaccines could have been a way of improving vaccine take-up, particularly amongst the elderly.

The UK government vaccinated the over-80s first and then worked its way down to the younger and less vulnerable parts of the population. And that was partly made possible because of the testing of the vaccine on elderly populations before mass rollout. Now in China, it’s the opposite. The Chinese government was very careful to say, ‘We’re gonna vaccinate the under-60s. We think that this vaccine is safe for under-60s and then we’re going to do more trials later. And I think that structuring of rollout has also led elderly people to wonder, “Well, is this vaccine really safe? Is it really safe for us?”

Gideon Rachman
So, we talked about the mistakes that Xi has made. But if you were to get everything right now, what would they actually do? Because even if they were to turn around now and say, OK, we’re gonna bring in, you know, zillions of doses of mRNA vaccines. It would take a long time to get all the shots into arms and meanwhile, Covid is spreading, I gather, and popular discontent is spreading. They’ve got a real problem haven’t they?

Yuan Yang
Yes. I don’t think there’s any easy way of doing this. And particularly what the government needs, not just needs a way of doing this, but an easy way of doing this that also looks good and doesn’t look uncoordinated and messy and so on. So I think those are the two difficult things to wrestle with. I can see a situation in which China managed to secure a huge vaccine supply for Pfizer or Moderna. I don’t know what the capacity that they have, especially because they’re also going through the winter rollout in the rest of the world with booster jabs. I don’t know where the capacity would be to secure that supply to the Chinese market, but certainly it would also be a huge win for those pharmaceutical companies. I’m sure they would love to have that market back. And then the Chinese government could say, we’re going to give everybody free doses of this vaccine. We’re gonna have a nationwide push, try to create some kind of patriotic campaign around getting vaccinated. And then at the end of the vaccination push, say, “That’s it, we’ve given you the gift of the vaccine. Now we can lift these restrictions. But even trying to make that a success story is completely contradictory to the messaging of the last three years where the government has been saying the opposite. It’s been saying you can have vaccines, but it’s not safe enough to lift the lockdowns.

Gideon Rachman
So what do you think they’ll do?

Yuan Yang
I think the only smart thing to do is rapidly accelerate the vaccination schemes and that might be even offering many more incentives for vaccinations. I can imagine the kind of public health campaign on the scale of also in the kind of coercive scale, as well as the public health campaigns that have been rolled out in previous decades, like the population control one-child policy campaigns. The government is capable of making people do things that they really don’t want to for what it sees as public health objectives. So I think there is that capacity there. But the system is already really strained, I would say, in terms of the ability to enforce another massive public health campaign at the same time, as all the nurses and doctors in the public health system are taken up with these daily RNA tests that the government’s also supplying. So I think the capacity for this, even in a very large and top-down system, is already under quite a lot of strain.

Gideon Rachman
And from what we know of Xi’s personality, I mean, he seems to be a pretty stubborn person. Do you think he’s capable of the flexibility or need to do this kind of sudden change in policy, or is he gonna stick with lockdowns because that’s the policy he’s identified with and believes in?

Yuan Yang
I think — and really interesting dynamic that’s gonna emerge is not just Xi’s own response but those leaders that he has recently appointed around him in the politburo, including the head of Shanghai, which is also a city which enacted a huge lockdown earlier this year. Whether they’ll start to change their minds about the zero-Covid policy and see that it’s in their interests because their constituents are out on the streets protesting because they can no longer juggle their local economy while keeping the zero-Covid policy in place. Whether they’ll start to show signs of discontent with this central policy and how they judge the space for being effectively disloyal to the core of the party, which is now identified as President Xi. He is the party. He is the core of the party. And were they enough of those kinds of political elites who will see it in their own interests and perhaps in their own self-preservation, to try to change the policy and try to change President Xi’s mind, or at least try to pressure him on this. And I think we can also see in the response of local governments and this kind of small regional governments, for example, particular quarters of Beijing or Shanghai, whether they start to release lockdowns ahead of schedule, a sign as to whether the governors of those cities are themselves feeling under pressure.

Gideon Rachman
Mmm. And you mentioned the economic pressure. How much of an economic impact have all these lockdowns had? I mean, you read that youth unemployment is now 20 per cent.

Yuan Yang
Yeah. And I said the unemployment figures in China have been massaged over such a large timescale that for any economic bad news to come out, you have to imagine that the reality must be really quite bad for there to be this mission. If the delay of the GDP figures this quarter, which were also much, much worse than we predicted, are another sign of the kind of difficulty that the economy is going through right now. I think this is something that’s not a recent phenomenon. Even in the first year of the pandemic, the 300mn migrant workers who need to cross regional boundaries in order to go to their factories and places of work were without work. And that led to the mass of working people in China who are on around minimum wage in China eating into their savings for the whole period of the initial pandemic for the first half year. And so I think there’s a lot of people who are already incredibly precarious in year one of the pandemic, and now it’s year three. So this has been a long build-up to the economic problems we see today.

Gideon Rachman
So you have, as you said, the economically precarious. But just to end, I think one of the things that certainly resonated, you know, as an outsider, was seeing these demonstrations on Chinese campuses among the elite. And Chinese students have always played a kind of big role in history in student demonstrations. So can you explain that and what might be going through the minds both of the students and of the leaders knowing their Chinese history?

Yuan Yang
Yeah, this is a wonderful point. And in comparison, of course, to the last moments like this in Chinese history, which was the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which also emerged in part due to economic pressures, due to the rampant inflation of the late ‘80s. And, of course, those economic pressures and workers’ discontent and city dwellers’ discontent combined with idealistic students who wanted democracy and freedom of speech and all those demands kind of came together in one pool. So I think that’s one thing to emphasise is that this is not, you know, a single-issue protest. But people have tied zero-Covid policy together with domestic political repression, the one-party system, Xi as the core leader who’s unchallenged and freedom of speech and all these issues as one big kind of package.

I think historically, China’s biggest political movements have come out of its student campuses over the last hundred years, including the movement that led to the rise of the Communist party itself. And that comparison is not lost on the party. It’s why it’s most careful to try to stamp out protests on campus because it sees the capability they have for sparking huge movements in China. So the students, at least at Tsinghua, for example, in Beijing, have been told by their teachers that they can go home early. I mean, it’s a full two months before the actual spring festival holidays, which are usually towards the end of January. So it’s kind of like, you know, in October, everyone’s saying, “OK, it’s Christmas holidays now in October, everyone go home. Nothing to see here”. That’s a tactic that the government has used in the past to try to dissipate the energy behind the movements.

I would guess, based on what I know of student campuses and the culture of students particularly at the elite universities in Beijing and Shanghai, that these are students who have a huge amount of access to information around the world. They probably have access to VPNs, a software to bypass the Great Firewall. They can actually access a lot of uncensored internet through their university connections as well. And they’re incredibly international. They read and speak English, many of them very fluently. They can see how the rest of the world is now in a stage of coming back to normality after the west’s bungling of the early pandemic response. I think we’d all agree with that. Now those countries are coming back to normal, and they’re also seeing kind of the opposite, the intensification of lockdowns in their own country.

I think for a young population that’s very switched on to discourse on social media, on Douyin, which is domestic equivalent of TikTok; on WeChat, which is the ubiquitous messaging platform, they can see how quickly the news of, for example, the deaths of people stuck in the high-rise apartment in Ürümqi during a fire which residents blame on the zero-Covid policy. They can see all these messages spreading at the same time as censors swooping in quite heavy handedly to block out everything. And to experience that also will lead them to question, you know, why is this being censored and why are these important, you know, voices of solidarity not allowed? Why can’t we mourn for people who’ve died in this fire? And why can’t we express the discontent we have with these policies?

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Gideon Rachman
That was Yuan Yang of the FT ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for joining me and please listen again next week.

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