The China protests part 1: A history of protest

In this 3-part series on the anti-covid policy protests in China, we discuss the history of modern Chinese protests, the anatomy of modern protest, and what the current discontent may mean for the CCP

In 2013, as part of my final grade for my undergraduate degree in Chinese studies, I wrote a dissertation entitled “What does the Wukan Incident tell us about the Prospects for Democratisation in China?” The 10,000 word piece focuses on a protest that took place in the village of Wukan in Guangdong province in 2011. They were sparked by the local government’s decision to sell off what villagers felt was collectively owned land to a private developer, in which the local government would pocket around 1 billion yuan without properly compensating locals.

The main focus of the thesis is to draw a link between village elections in China and something called the economic development theory, to try and answer the question of whether or not China was headed for democracy. But another topic covered in the essay is the frequency and nature of protests in China.

When contextualising the Wukan Incident, I managed to find this figure: “The term ‘mass incident’ is used by the government to refer to any protests, demonstrations, strikes and riots that take place, with at least 180,000 incidents reported in 2010.” Today, another source I read stated that “collective protest incidents had increased from 8,700 in 1994, to 90,000 in 2006, and to an unconfirmed number of 127,000 in 2008.” These are not insignificant numbers, and put a dent in the all-too-common theory that protest in China is ‘rare’ and the people ‘never challenge authority’ (NB: China is the only country where I’ve seen a sober person shout in a policeman’s face).

Over the past couple of weeks, people have been watching events unfolding in China with rapt attention. Turn on the radio or TV, check Twitter or whatever news app you use, and everyone is talking about the protests in China. So far, coverage is fairly non-committal, though many reporters are stating that the current protests are ‘rare’ or even ‘unprecedented’. As I discovered during my dissertation (and quite to my surprise at the time) protests in China are fairly common, even though our knowledge of them may not be.

In the case of Wukan, the protests were about local government corruption, and the anger of villagers did not reach as far as the central government. There was a clear problem, and a clear solution. At scale, these sorts of protests have occurred only when many people feel that the central government’s policies have overstepped. The difficulty in containing these protests has become something of a fine art for the CCP, although with modern technology, cracks in the system are becoming apparent.

Before we jump into predicting the future, however, it will come as no surprise to you that I think we need to take a look at the past first. So let’s talk about the history of protest in China, and what the significance of these past protests is for what is unfolding today. We’ve got plenty of time in later newsletters to discuss why exactly the current protests are taking place, and what exactly the fall-out might be for the CCP. Who knows, maybe the last newsletter on this topic will be a post-mortem.

Not uncommon

Protests in China are not uncommon. In fact, they are so uncommon that they are deeply rooted in Chinese society as a means of asserting change in or control over a despotic and corrupt regime. In her awesome book Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, Elizabeth Perry points out that almost every historical Chinese dynasty ends in rebellion that topples the establishment. Even as far back as 209 B.C., the Chen She Rebellion helped to topple the Qin empire, the first unified Chinese empire, and establish the Han dynasty. She also points out a critical factor in making any rebellion successful:

bridging the (often state-imposed) categories that set various groups of people against one another… To overcome these hurdles required the intervention of farsighted individuals… drawn from the ranks of students, teachers, militia captains, religious masters, bandit chieftains, or Communist cadres. The state, too, was a critical variable in the equation; a poorly executed repression effort could stimulate, rather than stymie, the spirit of political protest.

What matters most in a successful protest is a mix of the people coming together and the failure of an inept state. Perhaps the root of the CCP’s deep-seated fear of organised protest is this long history of such challenges to authority in China. After all, the CCP champions China’s history, as well as the strength and resilience of its people, and the party is very conscious of the fact that it was popular discontent in the early 20th century that allowed the communist movement to flourish in the first place.

The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 toppled the last dynasty, the Qing, bringing forth new hopes of republicanism and democracy. When those hopes failed to materialise, students supported by the general public led the May 4th Movement and 1931 demonstrations against a weak and corrupt government that continually capitulated to foreign powers and Japanese invasion. These movements all required people to overcome divisions imposed either by the Qing dynasty, Nationalists, or Chinese culture more generally, and realise that they all shared one common goal.

To some extent, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is another example of the Chinese people being able to ‘bridge the gap’. Mao’s call for continuous revolution inspired the youth of China to overthrow the authority figures in their lives in order to uphold what they believed were true communist values. Though organised from above and part of a larger goal of the CCP and (mainly) Mao to remove bureaucratic elements that stifled his personal powers, the protests did run away from the leadership at some point, and were quickly and heavily suppressed as a result. I talk about this at length in my podcast (here) so I won’t go into detail here. But at many times, the goals of workers and students, aggrieved ‘black’ families and deposed ‘red’ families, all converged, and seriously threatened the stability of the regime.

Even though the CCP promoted the equality and unity of the Chinese people, the truth is they continued to keep social divisions alive and well in order to promote the idea of a continuous ‘revolution’ against the ‘bad elements’ corrupted by westernism, capitalism, and bourgeois notions of democracy. And yet, time and time again, the Chinese people have seen through these artificial divisions and been able to spot their true oppressor. There is perhaps no better example of this than one of China’s most famous mass protests, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident.

1989 and the power of shared experience

As expected, today’s protests in China are being compared most frequently to the Tiananmen Square protests and ensuing incident of 1989. This was the last time China saw a truly mass uprising against the central government, and was also largely championed by young people, which saw protests spread nationwide with international news coverage. If national-scale protests are so rare in China, how did this one manage to unite people from over 400 cities across the country?

The simple answer is that the people of China were experiencing exactly the same reality - the same feeling of injustice - at exactly the same moment in time. Prior to this, people may disparately had a sense that something was wrong in their own lives, but not that others around them or their fellow countrymen were going through similar hardships. Just like Yang Jisheng and his fellow villagers, they believed that the CCP as a whole had nothing to do with their lives, let alone their problems.

But when beloved Hu Yaobang passed away in April, a sudden feeling of anger swept over the population. Forced to resign for his tacit support of economic and political liberalisation, many felt that his sudden death was caused by his sudden downfall. What started as public mourning soon exploded into protests about inequality, lack of civil liberties and freedoms, and political corruption. Inspired by the over 100,000 students who had marched on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, protests spread nationwide, and lasted for almost two months until the fateful morning of June 4th 1989.

Like in 1989, today's young people have joined to express their common grievances, their loss of freedom, chances of life and all its experiences. The party has also responded in a familiar way: blaming ‘foreign agents’, as well as bad Chinese who have ‘colluded’ with ‘international forces’ seeking to bring down the CCP. This rhetoric is not just simple deflection. Rather, it is a tool for stoking patriotism, and fear, and bringing people back to the safety of the CCP by strawmanning an unseen enemy,, not unlike how governments employed ‘red scare’ narratives in the US and UK during the Cold War. 

But the Tiananmen incident did not lead to nationwide insurrection against the CCP. The people did not take up arms against their oppressors - a government that callously ordered the death of its own young people - nor did it even condemn them, at least not openly. Media was blacked out; NGOs were silenced; leaders disappeared; evidence was destroyed; survivors fled abroad. Information was suppressed to the extent that, until the past couple of weeks, one would be justified in thinking that most Chinese people didn’t even know they had happened (as it turns out, they do).

There are two major reasons I can think of. The first is fairly simple: despite being made up of the people, the military is a branch of the CCP and is completely loyal to CCP ideology. Secondly, it is not impossible that many people at the time never even knew that anything was happening. There was no internet, and all media (then and now) was controlled by the CCP. They certainly didn’t know they had whole international communities and Chinese diaspora chewing them on. Also, not unlike today, China’s government has often been organised in a way whereby the central government issues edicts or policies that they expect to be enacted - either loosely or to the letter - by local officials. 

The saying “heaven is high and the emperor is far away” has real meaning in China. Locals often had no means of petitioning the central government or emperor for change or justice, and so had to take out their grievances on local government in order to affect change. In many ways, they still don’t. This phenomenon, so unusual to us in the West, helps to answer a broader question about the nature of protest in China.

Frogs in a well

With local protests being so common one might ask: “why do the Chinese people not overthrow the CCP, and simply replace them with a new party or regime that neither causes them so much grief nor represses expressions of that grief?” Unfortunately, the CCP has rather cleverly set up the governance of China in a way that precipitates this issue.

As mentioned, China’s local authorities are given responsibility for enacting local laws and handling local management, encompassing everything from food and water supply, to education and jobs, right down to housing and disaster prevention. Add to this the disparate nature of China’s historical set up - many villages, very poor, very isolated from each other - and the fact is that most people had no knowledge of the role of the central government in their lives. When people did have grievances, they were usually perceived as local ones, and it was rare for these protests to take on a mass form, or for people from different localities to link up and take their anger all the way to the top. 

A good example of this is China’s Great Leap Forward, which ended in a nation-wide famine from 1959-1962. People often ask why the Chinese people didn’t protest or demand the government change during this time. There are many reasons, not least of all the total control of the CCP over the people’s movements. But for me the answer that springs to mind is recorded beautifully in the prologue of the book Tombstone by author Yang Jisheng. In it, he tells the story of his father’s death, how in April of 1959 he travelled home from school upon hearing that his father was starving. Though he tried to nurse his father back to health, he eventually passed away three days later. The story itself is heartbreaking, but the most interesting part of it is probably his memory of how he processed his father’s death, especially in light of local politics:

I grieved deeply over my father’s death, but never thought to blame the government… I had no idea what was going on even farther away. I believed that what was happening in my home village was isolated, and that my father’s death was merely one family’s tragedy.

Although I was very sad about my father’s death, it did not weaken my confidence in the Chinese Communist Party…My heartfelt support for the Great Leap Forward was due not only to the inspiration of Communist ideals, but also to ignorance. I came from a remote village far from any major thoroughfare. We were largely closed off from information, and residents of our village knew virtually nothing about matters beyond the hills. They did not know of the great event that occurred in Beijing on 1 October 1949. The village cadre Huang Yuanzhong knew, and he held a meeting in the village on that day. The next day, his son told me, ‘Chairman Mao has been enthroned’. I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ He replied, ‘He’s the emperor’. He said that was what his father had told him. The vast majority of us never circulated beyond a 50 kilometre radius of our village. 

A familiar pattern thus emerges. A situation occurs, either locally or at scale. The situation is kept muted, either downplayed or not reported on at all in the press, and communication between affected areas is heavily suppressed. The main ‘rabble rousers’ are quelled, first with violence, then, if necessary, with negotiation. In the end, local officials take the heat, and the central government is seen to be the only true arbiter of justice the people can rely on.

During the Wukan incident, too, the CCP was able to push the blame onto corrupt local officials, who certainly were not doing whatever necessary to climb to the top of the political hierarchy by emulating those that came before them. We saw the same thing in the early days of the covid outbreak in China, where top ranking Hubei officials were dismissed and punished for “dereliction of duty”. The people may raise their voices, but in the end scapegoats are found, and nothing changes.

Spill-over

What brings the Tiananmen Square incident closer to the Wukan incident I discussed in my dissertation almost a decade ago is that in both cases the people didn’t riot just because a single injustice occurred. As I note when introducing the Wukan protests “although this was the first incidence of large scale protest in the village, this was not the first incidence of a ‘land grab’ the villagers had witnessed. For the past twenty years, the collectively owned land in the village had been sold “in an endless stream of illegal transfers”, leaving villagers with only a fraction of the land they had possessed under the communal system, culminating in the sale of the “last piece of land in the village”. The villagers were not only frustrated with the fact that their land was being sold bit by bit, but also that they were not receiving the benefits of revenue gained from these land sales.”

The Chinese people are very strong and resilient people. Over the past few hundred years, they've overcome poverty, war, starvation, and made tremendous personal sacrifices to grow their country into one of the most powerful, richest countries in the world. However, any people can only be told to ‘wait their turn’ and ‘eat bitterness’ (吃苦) for so long. Every resilient group has a tether, and it seems the Chinese people have reached the end of theirs.

The major question people have now, of course, is to what extent the current situation has the power to shake up Chinese politics and perhaps even dethrone the CCP. It’s easy to get excited, but we should be cautious, and bear in mind are the words of Tiananmen Square activist Liu Xiaobo:

Most of the resources and methods we made use of to mobilize the masses were ones that the Communist Party itself had used many times before .... As soon as we began our revolution, we became extremely conceited-just as if we had reverted to the time of the Cultural Revolution and felt ourselves to be the most revolutionary. As soon as we joined the 1989 protest movement, we considered ourselves to be the most democratic. After all, had we not fasted for democracy and devoted ourselves to it and made sacrifices for it? ... Our voice became the only truth. We felt as though we possessed absolute power.

His words underline an uncomfortable truth about Chinese social politics: when your livelihood, values, customs, traditions, and beliefs have been dictated by a single entity, at some point it becomes difficult to separate yourself from that entity, and to know how much you truly rely on them for every aspect of your life. How much do today’s protests actually reflect the tools, knowledge, and limited agency the party grants the people, and can take away at any moment?

The answer may lie in an analysis of contemporary Chinese protests, the methods protesters use to organise, evade government intervention, and to what extent they are able to truly succeed in their goals.

Let’s explore more in the next newsletter!