China’s Zero-COVID Protests Are Not Tiananmen

After unrest erupted in parts of China this past weekend, many friends asked, “Will this end in bloodshed, just as the 1989 Tiananmen protests did?” The recent outburst of public dissent attacking the Chinese government’s zero-COVID policy was the most intense and widespread that many Chinese had ever seen. Wednesday then brought another eerie parallel with 1989: The death of former President Jiang Zemin echoed the April 15, 1989, demise of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) head Hu Yaobang, whose popularity drew an estimated 100,000 demonstrators to Tiananmen Square just before his funeral. Would Jiang’s death inflame the protesters of today?

Mourners have already begun leaving wreaths and flowers at Jiang’s former residence in Jiangsu province. Still, 2022 isn’t 1989. Having covered the Tiananmen bloodshed in 1989, I don’t believe history will repeat itself. China’s recent protests are important in their own right, but their long-term significance may not be as clear-cut as some would think. To be sure, it is extremely rare to hear demonstrators openly call for President Xi Jinping to step down, declaring they don’t want an “emperor for life.”

But let’s be clear: The majority of demonstrators seemed to be calling for an end to draconian zero-COVID restrictions. And paradoxically, authorities were already scrambling to liberalize bits of its anti-pandemic playbook when protesters began clashing with police. In fits and starts over recent weeks, local apparatchiks tried to roll out incremental tweaks to the strict pandemic protocols that have been seen as Xi’s personal obsession. At the same time, increasingly angry tenants’ committees were writing up homeowners’ manifestos. One of them read, “If I’m infected, I would quarantine at home and not accept being taken to other places for centralized isolation against my will.” This document, drawn up by residents in the Runfeng Shuishang complex of Beijing, also declared: “I retain my legal rights [and] will make audio and video recordings of all individuals or organizations suspected of violating the law.”

The Power of China’s Blank Sheets of Paper

 

Will China Prove the Doomsayers Wrong?

The new leadership team selected by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China failed to impress financial markets at home and abroad. In the week following the announcement of Xi’s new team, Hong Kong’s stock market declined by 8.3%, and the Shanghai Composite Index, China’s largest stock exchange, dropped 4%, despite the Chinese government’s intervention to prop up prices. US-listed Chinese stocks plunged by 15%.

Investors have good reason to worry. Though financial markets had already priced in Xi’s third term, investors had hoped that he would appoint a team of more moderate, experienced officials capable of putting pragmatism above politics. Instead, Xi packed the Politburo and its Standing Committee with loyal allies and protégés.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/xi-new-leadership-team-economic-challenges-by-minxin-pei-2022-11

 

Xi Jinping Exposed

The recently concluded Chinese Communist Party congress seems like a clean sweep for Chinese leader Xi Jinping: he achieved a precedented third term as head of the party—and thus as ruler of China—and he forced out potential rivals by elevating people presumed to be his allies. All of this is being hailed as Xi running the tables, with many analysts calling him China’s strongest leader since Mao Zedong, who ran China from 1949 to 1976.

All of this is accurate on one level. Xi is powerful and he seems to have achieved most of what he wanted at the congress. But the past week’s events also reflect what may turn out to be a flawed strategy of Xi putting himself at the center of everything—making him seem strong while actually vulnerable.His power was on full display Sunday, with the unveiling of the Politburo Standing Committee—the inner sanctum of seven people who make the most important policy decisions. The congress itself had ended Saturday but this moment is the apogee of high drama in China’s political system. As supreme leader, Xi strode on stage first. Then came the others, in an order indicating their power: most notable was Li Qiang, the party secretary of Shanghai, who was ushered onto stage after Xi, indicating that he is likely to be named the new premier at a meeting next spring. The 63-year-old obtained the post despite his presiding over a long Covid lockdown in Shanghai, but this might have worked in his favor, showing him to be a loyal follower of Xi’s approach.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/xi-jinping-exposed

 

Why Young Chinese Are Learning to Live in the Now

Last month, a popular Chinese blogger shared the story behind his recent weight gain. After years as a disciplined diner, avoiding oily, salty foods in favor of more nutritious fare, he had started eating what he wanted, when he wanted it.

In his post, he described his earlier eating habits as a product of the values that were instilled in him and millions of other Chinese from childhood. It wasn’t just about thrift, but also about keeping in good shape and being ready for whatever the future had in store. More recently, however, he had come to view this outlook as untenable. After a series of unexpected incidents had occurred in his life and in the lives of his friends — everything from injuries to bankruptcy and unemployment — he began to wonder what the point of preparing for the future was when even the present could be so unpredictable.

He’s far from the only person to feel this way. Youth unemployment is nearing 20%. The tech giants that drove so much of China’s private sector growth over the last decade are considering layoffs. And real estate, once a reliable asset, is teetering on the edge. Trapped between COVID-19 lockdowns and a slowing economy, many Chinese are questioning the purpose of preparing for a future that — for potentially the first time in their lives — feels less bright than the present.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1011030/why-young-chinese-are-learning-to-live-in-the-now?source=recommend

 

An investigation into what has shaped Xi Jinping’s thinking

Just over ten years ago, Xi Jinping disappeared. He was then China’s leader-in-waiting, about to acquire a slew of titles that would make him arguably the most powerful man on Earth. Without explanation, his aides cancelled meetings with foreign dignitaries, including America’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Western analysts were baffled.

Outside observers are acutely sensitive to such absences. Over the past few days a prolonged stretch with no public sightings of Mr Xi again triggered wild rumours about his political welfare: on September 27th he put paid to them by visiting an exhibition highlighting the Communist Party’s achievements under his rule. But in 2012 those withdrawals from diplomatic appointments felt different. It was two weeks before Mr Xi resurfaced. To this day analysts wonder about what happened then and what it meant.

Speculation about why Mr Xi went dark has ranged from a health problem to an assassination attempt. Chris Johnson had recently left the cia, where he had worked as a China analyst. He thinks it was probably Mr Xi’s riposte to Communist Party elders who—while backing his rise to the top—had bristled at his eagerness for power unfettered by their opinions. “Find someone else to take the job, then,” Mr Johnson imagines Mr Xi as having told them. “It was a good opportunity for him to show, ‘I’m not going to be dictated to by any retired person’,” reckons the ex-spook. Mr Xi wanted to be “not just the first among equals, but just plain first.”

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/09/28/an-investigation-into-what-has-shaped-xi-jinpings-thinking

 

How we ended up with such a stupid generation of leaders, from Johnson and Biden to Putin

The role of stupidity in determining the course of history is often underestimated by historians. They neglect it as too crude and shallow a factor to be the cause of crucial events, preferring to unearth more sophisticated and intellectually respectable explanations. Calling a leader “a fool” may be pervasive as abuse, but is seldom accepted as the underlying reason for a calamitous decision.

This is surely a mistake. “Never lose your sense of the superficial,” said the newspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe and his advice applies as much to historic trends as it does to daily news. Yet pundits like to feel that they are digging deeper than a personal failing, and seldom focus on plain and simple stupidity as the reason why leaders make unforced errors.

This kind of individual inadequacy is not equally present in all periods and it may be that in some eras the scope for chronic blunderers to do damage is higher than in others. It was certainly high in 1914, for instance, when dim-witted leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm 11 in Germany, Tsar Nicholas 11 in Russia and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy were making the decisive moves leading to a European war that more intelligent leaders might have avoided as being much against their interests and putting at risk the future of their regimes.

We may now have entered a similar period when powerful political leaders are more foolish and incapable of coping with crises than their predecessors. Looking at just the events of the last 12 months, I have drawn up a league table of actions by four national leaders which suggests that they are a bigger fool than anybody had imagined.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/stupid-generation-world-leaders-johnson-biden-putin-xi-jinping-1692885

 

TikTok May Be More Dangerous Than It Looks

At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life. Call them town squares. Call them infrastructure. They exist in some nether region between public utility and private concern. They are too important to entrust to billionaires and businesses, but that makes them too dangerous to hand over to governments. We have not yet found a satisfying answer to the problem of their ownership and governance. But some arrangements are more worrying than others. There are fates worse than Musk.

TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years old. But its growth is like nothing we’ve seen before. In 2021, it had more active users than Twitter, more U.S. watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more site visits than Google. The app is best known for viral dance trends, but there was a time when Twitter was 140-character updates about lunch orders and Facebook was restricted to elite universities. Things change. Perhaps they have already changed. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok.

 

What China gets wrong

IT IS OFTEN said that China’s government plans decades ahead, carefully playing the long game as democracies flip-flop and dither. But in Shanghai right now there is not much sign of strategic genius. Even as the rest of the world has reopened, 25m people are in a citywide lockdown, trapped in their apartments and facing food and medical shortages that not even China’s censors can cover up. The zero-covid policy has become a dead end from which the Communist Party has no quick exit.It is one of a trio of problems faced by China this year, alongside a misfiring economy and the war in Ukraine. You may think they are unconnected, but China’s response to each has a common root: swagger and hubris in public, an obsession with control in private, and dubious results. Rather than being the product of statecraft with the Yellow Emperor’s time horizon, China’s actions reflect an authoritarian system under Xi Jinping that struggles to calibrate policy or admit when it is wrong.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/04/16/what-china-gets-wrong

 

As Hong Kong’s Covid crisis continues, Beijing makes its presence felt stronger than ever

Recently, the traffic has been busier than usual in Lok Ma Chau, a village on Hong Kong’s northern border. Heavy-duty trucks shuttle mainland Chinese workers to and from the mostly wetland district, where they are building a makeshift hospital to treat Covid-19 patients.

Logistically, the hubbub would have been unimaginable a year or even a month, ago. Hong Kong is separated from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen by a winding river. But in early March, a makeshift bridge linking the two cities was erected. Satellite images show the foundations of the structure being laid days before the Hong Kong government announced the project.With mainland Chinese medics and caregivers now staffing Hong Kong’s coronavirus facilities, the two-lane crossing in the city’s northernmost district has emerged as a physical manifestation of the shrinking space between Beijing and the semi-autonomous territory.

As Hong Kong’s Covid crisis continues, Beijing makes its presence felt stronger than ever

 

Putin and Xi Exposed the Great Illusion of Capitalism

A book published in 1919 on “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” isn’t the obvious starting place for understanding the economic consequences of the current war in Ukraine. But it’s worth taking a little time to read John Maynard Keynes’s famous description of the leisurely life of an upper-middle-class Londoner in 1913 — just before the Great War changed everything:

The inhabitant of London [in 1913] could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.

Keynes then describes how this Londoner could speculate on the markets and travel wherever he wanted without a passport or the bother of changing currency (the gold standard meant that his money was good everywhere). And then the famous economist delivers his coup de grace by going inside the privileged Londoner’s head: 

[The Londoner] regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

Keynes’s cosmopolitan Briton, completely unaware that the first great age of globalization was about to be shot to pieces at the Somme, is the urban equivalent of the cavorting toffs in “Gosford Park,” Robert Altman’s movie about a weekend in a grand country house just before the outbreak of war. One of us possesses a photograph of the Bullingdon, Oxford’s poshest dining club, in 1913: The future rulers of the world stare out at us with frozen arrogance. Within a year most of them were in the trenches. 

Foppish aristocrats weren’t the only ones who were complacent. Intellectuals agreed. Norman Angell’s “The Great Illusion,” the Edwardian bestseller published in 1909, argued that war was impossible given the interconnectedness of the world. The great businesses of Europe and the U.S. operated on the same assumption. The first great age of globalization, which started in the 1860s and was underpinned by British power and coordinated by British statecraft, had left the commercial classes free to make money — businesspeople then faced far fewer barriers than their modern equivalents when it came to moving money, goods or people around the world.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-24/ukraine-war-has-russia-s-putin-xi-jinping-exposing-capitalism-s-great-illusion?srnd=premium