Minxin Pei
Myths take years to propagate and only days to puncture. In addition to shocking China’s seemingly unprepared authorities, recent Covid protests in major Chinese cities have claimed two enduring myths about the People’s Republic.
One obviously is the purported superiority of China’s top-down authoritarian system. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stuck to harsh Covid Zero policies mainly to demonstrate that it can do a better job than Western liberal democracies at suppressing the pandemic. With new infection rates rising to record levels and public anger growing, China’s strategy and the political system behind it are clearly failing, not succeeding.
The other debunked myth is that the CCP has successfully co-opted China’s middle-class. Given that young professionals and college students appear to have made up the bulk of the protesters, we need to ask whether the world was too quick to write off middle-class Chinese as a force for political change.
According to theories of democratization, the rise of a middle class is closely associated with expansion of freedom. China is a rare exception. Sustained economic development in the last four decades has vaulted perhaps as many as 400 million Chinese into the middle class (about 28% of the total population). The share is much higher in cities: About 63% of urban households have annual incomes over $34,000. This group has not actively called for expanding human rights or the rule of law.
The usual explanation for their apparent political apathy is that the CCP has delivered sufficient economic benefits to buy their loyalty. Moreover, those Chinese who have done well under one-party rule have the most to lose if they demand political rights, too.
Yet, while this explanation sounds plausible, it has many holes. For one thing, the Chinese middle class has been far more politically active than many realize. Their role in forcing the government to abandon environmentally harmful projects is especially noteworthy.
In 2008, homeowners in Shanghai alarmed about the municipal government’s plan to extend maglev train service through their neighborhoods staged a demonstration that eventually led to the abandonment of the project. That same year, mostly middle-class residents of Xiamen took to the streets to block a chemical complex they believed threatened their health and property values.
These are but two of many examples. What is notable about China’s middle class is that its members pick their battles carefully. Instead of directly challenging CCP rule, they take a stand when their health and property rights are at stake, in part so they can rally enough like-minded potential victims to join in the protests.
What makes middle-class protests more successful than those by less well-off groups (such as migrants and peasants) is that this group possesses sufficient political savvy and resources to gain concessions from the authorities without incurring excessive risks. In the successful 2008 anti-maglev protest, residents used their mobile phones to organize a “window-shopping stroll” — not a “demonstration” — through the city’s busy downtown area.
If defense of property rights fueled middle-class activism in the past, the recent anti-lockdown protests suggest that more explicitly political concerns may now motivate this strategically positioned group.
To be sure, endless lockdowns as part of China’s Covid Zero campaign have exacted a heavy economic toll on the middle class. Many small businesses have shuttered. Employment prospects for young people, including professionals and college graduates, look dim.
But what finally set this group off was not economic hardship. Rather, it was a sense that their government had failed them in the fight against Covid. Despite enduring constant testing and arbitrary lockdowns, urbanites in many Chinese cities simply see no end in sight.
If there was ever a social contract between the party and the middle class, such a deal has collapsed. Instead of a competent government that would occasionally respond to their concerns, many middle-class Chinese find their leaders today clueless and unresponsive.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will be hard-pressed to reverse this trend. With the slowdown of the Chinese economy, his government will generate fewer economic benefits to placate the middle class. Even more importantly, the regime’s tight social controls and intolerance of dissenting public opinion will lead many middle-class Chinese to feel — and resent — their political marginalization even more acutely.
However surprised CCP leaders may have been by the recent demonstrations, they should brace themselves for more clashes with a group whose political awakening may have just begun.
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