But if you only got your news from Reddit, you’d think the people are preparing to overthrow the government and establish a new liberal country.
There were protests where people were singing the national anthem too, but it seems like western libs are the only people who can protest the government without wanting to topple it
https://www.dw.com/en/protests-spread-across-china-amid-zero-covid-anger/a-63906795?maca=en-rss-en-top-1022-rdf
There are all sorts of protests going on right now. Some of them shouting anti-CCP and anti-Xi slogans. I don't remember the 1989 protests but they were a fraction of the size of this and spread out mostly around college campuses with Tiananmen square being the largest of about a dozen protests across the country. I've seen a lot more than a dozen protests in the past week alone in China.
What culminates in the next few days/weeks between protesters and police may change the course of China for awhile. Most Chinese under 30 don't care about communism or capitalism they care about raising a family, buying a home, etc. As living standards go down for younger generations this will continue to exacerbate protests. Especially as they can see the rest of the world has moved onto something beyond Zero Covid.
Will Xi and the CCP relent and listen to protester's demands or choose to crackdown? There have been regional but not national crackdowns on protest in mainland China since 1989; however, back in 1989 that was mostly college-aged kids and this current batch of protests you can see a much wider demographic of protesters. These protests are not something that will be easily quelled. So unless the CCP relents and loosens restrictions this could get ugly.
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China and Xi realize they don't have the hospital beds to let er rip like the United States or Germany did without killing one million or more of their senior citizens. The amount of fully vaxxed over 80's in China is only ~40%, and unlike in Western countries more than half of those over 80 in China still live in multi-generational homes. There will be no escape from Covid in China once Zero Covid is gone.
It is shameful that the West refused to share MRNA tech with the Chinese when they asked, which would have made the vaxxing process much easier; but, that being said, nothing short of vaxxing the elderly to 80-90%+ is going to allow China to curb Covid controls w/o mass deaths. If the CCP do remove Covid controls and Chinese parents/grandparents start dying en masse it will likely inflame even more aggressive and long lasting protests.
This is the 1st major challenge of Xi's new consolidated CCP leadership, and the world waits with bated breath on what happens next. When China trade stops that is ~1/3rd of all global manufacturing gone overnight. We are likely going to see cooler heads prevail and the most onerous restrictions lifted, as a mass crackdown seems too bullheaded for Xi's governing style.
I'm pretty sure there are other ways to implement zero covid so I'm sure they are going to pivot to something else
What ? There were ~1 million + people all over China that participated in various protests and hundreds of thousands in Beijing alone . Hundreds of thousands of PLA troops were mobilized all through out. Not to downplay whats happening rn as "just another day nothing spacial at all" but nothing i have seen seem like even a fraction of the 1989 protests in size and intensity or even potential by even the most exaggerated "china watchers" reports
Rows of apartment blocks and condos that are locked down are chanting and singing all night. Even besides the social media aspect - some protest videos have been shared over 100 million times, these are not just street-level protests.
300 million Chinese have experienced being in a fully-locked down city at some point in the past 3 years some multiple times. Zero Covid saved many lives, and not just in China, but it is also three years in and if every few months 10's of millions of Chinese citizens are being thrown into lockdown -- for what would be just another day of covid infections in the rest of the world -- the anger and resentment is just going to keep growing.
The intensity of this protest may not be as directly challenging to the CCP as the student-led protests in 1989, but these still pose a major challenge for Xi. The anger and frustration against the Zero Covid policies are far more widely spread and sympathized with than the abstract demands of the students in 1989. The challenge for the CCP will be quickly addressing the concerns of the protesters, because these protests are becoming a forum for general grievance against the government.
You understand that , despite these protests indeed being serious and stuff needing to be addressed from the CPC, it's hard to take your comments seriously when I point out how your initial specific comparisons and outlook for the protests is obviously wrong and over exaggerated by a huge margin and you try to double down with "actually no a lot of Chinese people have lived through lockdowns in the last year and many didn't like and viral videos" . Yeah duh ok, still doesnt make your initial comment any less inaccurate and sensationalist as fuck
1989 was not mostly college aged kids, it was mostly an ideologically and politically uneducated urban proletariat lashing out at a perceived reduction in material conditions brought about by the introduction of market-oriented economic reforms, with the kids taking the spotlight because they were the only ones who looked like they had ideas (newsflash: they didn't) and also because kids are more photogenic than unemployed middle aged civil servants.
one thing this current batch does have in common with 89 is the recurrent theme of liberals wanting to shoot themselves in the foot and then turning around and blaming the government and communism when it turns out that things have consequences. tbh joker me really wants the government to just rip the fucking bandaid off just to see the inevitable 'who could have done this?' cope blasted all over social media, because the one thing these people are all operating under is the assumption of ITS JUST A FLU BRO and that 'of course there will be only MINIMAL blowback' in the form of elderly family members kicking it but that's ok because they have an overpriced mortgage to pay, the privilege for which they leveraged like 90% of their assets 3x over to get.
chinese urban gentry deserve all the consequences of the capitalism they so desperately want.
public/private partnership bureaucrats get the wall too, it's those fuckers who are too deep in the fucking hole to release some of that real estate blood money for even the slightest bit of direct pandemic relief for the most marginal.