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Opinion|Xi Broke the Social Contract That Helped China Prosper
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Opinion
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Guest Essay
XI BROKE THE SOCIAL CONTRACT THAT HELPED CHINA PROSPER
Dec. 1, 2022
Pieces of white paper have become symbols of Chinese protests.Credit...Jerome
Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock
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By Yasheng Huang
Dr. Huang is the author of “Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics.”
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
The protests in China against the government’s draconian Covid controls have
been compared to those in 1989, when students demonstrated for political reforms
and democracy. The 1989 pro-democracy movement occurred in the most liberal,
tolerant and enlightening period in the history of the People’s Republic of
China, and the regime opened fire in Tiananmen Square — after the ouster of the
liberal leader, Zhao Ziyang — because it had run out of every other control tool
in its possession. This is called the Tocqueville paradox: An autocracy is most
vulnerable when it is least autocratic.
But a closer analogy is April 5, 1976. On that day and the days before,
protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, demonstrating against the tyrannical
rule, deteriorating economic conditions and political persecutions by the Gang
of Four and, by implication, its patron, Mao Zedong. That was a movement born
out of grievances, not aspirations.
The Covid protests are occurring at the height of China’s autocratic moment.
While there are calls for free speech and elections, the rallying cry since
Sunday has been against a jarring oppression: the incarceration of hundreds of
millions of people in their homes and in field hospitals. Autocracies — whether
in China or elsewhere — are oppressive, but has another autocratic regime ever
taken away the right of so many people to lead a normal life?
Politically, Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has violated a time-tested
technique his predecessors used to defuse social tensions: divide and conquer.
After 1989, most of the Chinese protests were localized and issue-specific.
Rural residents lost their land, but urbanites were showered with benefits.
State workers lost their jobs, but private entrepreneurs were wooed to open
businesses.
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The benefits and losses evened out in the end. Different people harbored
different grievances, and their grievances were not synchronized. Not only did
the Communist Party survive those scattered protests; it grew and prospered.
Today the party has some 96 million members. If it were a country, it would be
the world’s 16th largest.
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guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to
your inbox.
Now consider China’s zero-Covid policy. Its lockdowns put nearly everybody in
exactly the same situation, and according to one estimate, almost 400 million
people were put under some sort of lockdown in 2022. The affluent Shanghainese
have very little in common with people in Urumqi in Xinjiang. Yet when 10 people
died in a fire in a high rise in Urumqi, with building doors allegedly locked
because of Covid restrictions, empathy, a crucial ingredient in collective
actions, arose among Shanghainese who inhabit similar high rises. Never, not
even in 1989, had a Chinese regime confronted protests in many cities at the
same time.
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 4, 2022, Section SR, Page 7
of the New York edition with the headline: Xi Broke China’s Social Contract.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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