Even Chinese patience has a limit
The Chinese people's ability to endure the most unimaginable hardships is proverbial. And no less astonishing is their discipline, which is embodied in scenes such as the sudden acceptance of the confinement and lockdown of entire neighbourhoods and cities with several million human beings locked inside. Since the all-powerful President Xi Jinping decreed the Zero COVID policy, such scenes have followed one after another, punctuated from time to time by isolated attempts by some desperate transgressor to break through the wall of impeccably uniformed policemen in the white of their anti-virus clothing, reduced and unceremoniously detained.
But, even in a people so well versed in the cultivation of patience and accustomed to obeying and not questioning orders, there seems to be a limit. More than two years of massive confinement, of prolonged closures with no certainty of opening, of uncertainty regarding one's own way of life, based on the small business or enterprise that the regime allowed to be undertaken, have led to the protest demonstrations that have spread to several cities across the length and breadth of the country.
Two events have been the trigger for this unprecedented explosion of rebellion: the overturning last September in Guizhou of a "quarantine bus", in which several dozen citizens suffering from COVID were taken to a prison building for compulsory and indefinite confinement, and the fire in November of a building in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region. Closed so that its confined inhabitants could not leave, the incident resulted in ten deaths, among them several Uighurs, the Muslim minority that Beijing is "re-educating" with a ferocity that has been denounced in numerous international bodies.
The feeling of helplessness of the families trapped by the fire, to whose rescue the authorities did not immediately come to the rescue, although they are showing extreme diligence in repression, is the last straw that has broken the patience of many Chinese, at least those who have openly defied the authorities and have taken to the streets of many cities, mainly in Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, Xian, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Young university students, joined by elderly people who were forced to leave their small shops unattended, chanted unprecedented anti-regime slogans, even calling for Xi Jinping's dismissal, and profusely displayed white sheets of paper, the symbol of censorship.
Although in Xi Jinping's thinking everything is clear: first the Communist Party, then the state, then the armed forces, then the people, the latter seem to have realised that this hierarchy does not guarantee their lives.
Barely a month after the celebration of the 20th Communist Party Congress, which enthroned Xi Jinping and his absolute power, the protests seem to have taken the regime by surprise, which at least in the first few moments has preferred to act with restraint and dissuade attempted protests with a massive police presence in the streets. It must be taken for granted that in the only country in the world that has its 1.4 billion inhabitants fully registered and tracked, there will never be a successful rebellion against the regime. The regime has almost 100 million members of the CCP, who not only constitute the elite, but are also charged with the unalterable task of ensuring that this is always the case and crushing any attempt to subvert such an order.
Yet the long-suffering Chinese people were confident that the pact by which they accepted their submission was in return for their own prosperity and consequent better lives. Brutal confinement results in too much time to think and reflect, and many have begun to question whether two long years of imprisonment, even if it is called confinement, under the pretext of COVID, without being able to attend to their business or plan their own future, is in fact nothing more than a breach of that pact. Hence, the first protests focused on criticising the strict sanitary measures have led to proclamations against the regime and its leaders.
It would be illusory to conclude that this incipient protest movement could even lead to a softening of the regime. Xi Jinping will most likely relax his Zero COVID policy somewhat, but only as a tactic. His strategic line is perfectly drawn, and if the protest movement manages to amplify, the response will be one of brutal repression. The Chinese president is convinced that he is in the driver's seat of the nation's historic destiny and will not allow a few wayward citizens to derail him from his path to making China the world's leading power.