The China protests part 2: The anatomy of modern Chinese outrage
How do Chinese people express their discontent in contemporary protests, how do they evade censorship, and how, ultimately, does the CCP win every time?
In the last newsletter, we discussed the history of protests in China, and the methods Chinese people use to voice their grievances and outrage while living under authoritarian regimes. In this newsletter, let’s take a look at a few more modern examples of protests in China, and see how they’ve changed in the 21st century.
As China has now entered its technological age, social media usage has exploded across the country, with around 80% of the population frequently using at least one social media platform to chat with friends and family, play games, read the news, order taxis, pay for shopping, order food and more. Super apps like Wechat not only allow the quick dissemination of information, but also provide the opportunity for people to organise en masse, voice their opinions and even gather for offline protests. However, this growth in technology has been mirrored by an increase in surveillance and censorship of online communications by the state.
The problem for those protesting then becomes their ability to spread news of their issue faster than the state is able to censor them, which is further complicated by mechanisms such as self-censorship, tech company deference to government whims, and the huge amount of content generated every day, especially by those who work directly for the state or who just generally are in favour of them.
So how is social media used to voice dissent in China? And how successful are protesters when facing the might of the CCP surveillance state?
The power of social media
Social media is used in every country around the world to spread information, voice political opinions, call for change, and set up in-person, real-time protests. Each country has its limitations when it comes to social media, but China’s are quite unique. Apart from very active censorship by platforms on behalf of the government, Chinese social media also lacks cross-integration (the ability to post the same content on different platforms, like sharing a Tik Tok to Twitter etc), with apps often painfully fragmented. This means that apps can’t really be used to organise a protest, especially as the government will censor any news of times, dates, or places associated with a cause.
But this does not mean that they can’t be used at all:
“Thus fragmented, digital platforms in China cannot be integrated into a coherent protest space, and the information curation and integration vital to communicative organization cannot be achieved. Therefore… the organizational effect of social media in street protests in China may be limited to internal logistic coordination and meaning construction.”
This author argues that while social media can’t be used to organise (unless there is already some sort of movement or political divide already in place), they can be used to ‘pick up’ protests. “Pickup logic refers to protesters’, bystanders’, and citizen journalists’ use of social media to pick up the protest event and communicate it in the networked public sphere that often induces an event-specific virtual crowd.” Social media is used to garner wider support, and possibly more importantly, register that there was indeed unrest in the first place, before the state can pretend that nothing ever happened.
Protests in China that get picked up on social media are “more likely to be “motivated by simple causes and set off by trigger events.” This is what we saw with the case of Wukan (discussed in the last newsletter), the current protests in China, and a host of others in between. Worth noting that Chinese citizens are very aware of the censorship measures being deployed against them, and throughout any movement will constantly devise new and ingenious ways of getting around bans and censors. One example that comes to mind is of the #MeToo movement in China. In an attempt to dodge censors, the main hashtag for the movement was first adapted to the homophone #mitu (米兔, lit. ‘rice bunny’), and then to the emojis for rice and bunny.
Social media can also be a powerful tool for raising awareness of an issue and getting it resolved without ever needing a public gathering at all. These purely online protests usually pick up on a single event, usually captured on film and disseminated quickly before censors can pick up on them, and then are used to highlight a larger issue. The perfect example of this is the case of the video of a mentally ill woman left chained in a doorless shack in Xuzhou which went viral on Weibo. The woman has 8 children, but was left in appalling conditions, leading online commenters to ask whether or not she was just used for breeding. In the end, a full scale investigation into her case showed that she was a victim of human trafficking, still a serious problem in China. 17 officials were punished for dereliction of duty.
But while this incident shows that the government is aware of local issues and will deal with them on a case by case, it also highlights how the state, on a grand scale, is essentially able to get away with doing nothing at all. While they can make a show of conceding defeat and bowing heads in one or two cases, the truth is that the CCP already has an arsenal of weapons to hand to make sure they can win every fight - at least the ones that matter.
Deflection, Denial, Demotion
When I say that the CCP or government wins every time, this is not to say that the protesters get nothing in return for their efforts. Not every protest ends in violent shutdowns, arrests, or disappearances. As we’ve seen in many cases, those protesting have legitimate concerns, which the government can decide to meet or resolve to varying degrees. The difference is the extent to which demands are met, and how far one can say the original problem was truly ‘solved’.
One of the most common tactics employed by the state is the punishment of those they deem appropriately responsible, usually some local officials or business owners, who are labelled as being the direct cause of the misery of their constituents or customers. One study puts it plainly: “Despite the significant economic cost of terminating p-Xylene3 projects, local governments across China have repeatedly made concessions in a spate of anti-p-Xylene protests in Xiamen in 2007, Dalian in 2011, Ningbo in 2012, Kuming in 2013, and Maomin in 2014. Furthermore, in 2009 several local governments also made concessions to victims of cadmium pollution in Liuyang and lead pollution in Fengxiang at considerable political cost, dismissing and prosecuting multiple party officials.”
There are some fights the party can’t afford to let drag out, and would rather pay off either with real money or with a gesture of arbitrary punishment to quell anger. At the same time, there are certain grievances they can't afford to acknowledge. As the same study puts it, “a secessionist protest in China can hardly succeed no matter how well the protesters exploit constraints facing local governments or how much attention protesters get from higher-level officials. For a secessionist movement, the attention of higher-level officials… would probably mean a devastating crackdown rather than leverage to get concessions from local functionaries.” This means that while successful protesters might feel like their case has been heard - and in some cases their property might even be returned - the victory is shallow as it does not incentivise the CCP regime to change at a fundamental level. The party-state can continue to use the same tactics to assuage and distract demonstrators, without having to resort to violence at all.
This is not to say that the government won’t stoop to using repressive tactics first, even in cases when protester demands are eventually met. The Henan bank scandal that we spoke about a few months ago is a good example. While the government is now punishing the criminals who swindled savers, at the time of the protests, authorities turned out in droves to disperse crowds, and even allegedly turned protesters’ health codes from green to red to stop them from being able to travel.
In some cases, while we may hear of the protest, we never hear whether demands were met in the end. The case of a viral video of a wedding in a poverty stricken town in Sichuan was meant to shed light on the failure of the CCP's claims they had fully eradicated absolute poverty in the country. The video spread far and wide, but instead of firing officials, the video maker was summoned to be seen by local party officials. His fate is still unknown.
Man who filmed this wedding banquet in Daliang Mountain in #Sichuan province in #CCPChina was summoned by police. Why? Because this video shows that the #CCP & #XiJinping's claim of having lifted Chinese people out of #poverty is a sheer lie. See more in the thread.
Fundamental rights
What happens when the Chinese government is dealing with something deeper than a local environmental issue or unfortunate local swindling? Deeper, even, than a growing feminist movement or the truth about the origins and spread of a deadly disease? What about the issue of whether or not a group of people feel they should be governed by China’s laws in the first place?
Chinese regimes have had to deal with rebellion and cessation since the empire was first formed over 2000 years ago. Today, these calls for cessation, often classified as ‘ethnic riots’, are primarily seen in Tibet and Xinjiang, but also to a lesser extent in Hong Kong (Hong Kongers, for the most part, at least regard themselves as ethnically Chinese).
In 2009, a clash between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang, frequently labelled internally as China's "9/11" left 200 dead. This was following increasing tension and isolated incidents of violence carried out by small cells. In Tibet in 2008 riots broke out in Lhasa and other Tibetan-populated areas. 18 people were killed and hundreds of shops and stores run by Han Chinese were burned down. The riots continued during the start of the Beijing Olympics, tarnishing China's World image and angering the government.
How does the government deal with these large scale targeted issues that threaten the foundation of their legitimacy? Usually, the party employs a dual approach: stomp out rebellion while also improving conditions. In Tibet, this looks like the closing down of Buddhist monasteries while relocating large parts of the population away from their ancestral homes into modern dwellings and providing them with 'modern' jobs. In Xinjiang, closure of mosques and forced incarceration of large swathes of the Uyghur population is paired with guaranteed job programmes for law-abiding, Mandarin-speaking citizens.
More recently in Hong Kong, we’ve seen similar promises made about reviving the economy and stamping out corruption, only after the government has gone to great strides to crush protests, silence dissent, arrest and imprison problematic figures, and implement pro-Mainland social and educational policies across the city state.
In some ways this is not too different from the way the state normally deals with demonstrations. The difference is that for these groups, surveillance and control is even more intense than what the normal population has to endure. And they are more likely to get the short end of the stick when it comes to compromise from the CCP. They certainly won't achieve anything like the fundamental rights of which they dream.
Happy endings
In the above examples, it seems as if both parties are able to get what they want to some extent. The CCP can get peace and seeming stability, while protesters get some concessions: removal of corrupt governments, better jobs, a more stable economy. But what about the more fundamental things that protests may aim for? What about economic reforms, fewer restrictions on movement, or even regime change? What about freedom?
Perhaps a lack of support from national media as well as active censorship of all other communications means that minor concessions are all protestors can really hope for. In Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, social media was instrumental in bringing the issues people face to an international audience. But in the end, what has really changed for them? The people there still all live under the same regime, and are now subject to even greater surveillance and suppression than before.
Maybe freedom is an irrelevant question here. After all, Chinese citizens live in reality, and are under no illusion as to what kind of system they are governed by. Then are the reports that the zero-covid protests may lead to regime change really overblown? Is that the real aim of the protesters, or are they after just a little taste of freedom? And more importantly, can they even achieve that?