Populism has now arrived in China. As opposed to the 1989 protests driven by students as well as an intra-government political struggle, the current unrest, while including students, has been driven much more clearly by a broader mass of people who have grown frustrated with the bureaucratic overreach of the zero COVID policy. With the largest and most comprehensive system of bureaucratically organized surveillance, management, and domination of the populace in the world, China has certainly been ripe for such populist revolt. While the original theory of the new class was developed by Milovan Djilas in order to explain state socialism in the Soviet Union, the populist reaction to the new class has up to now been associated mainly with liberal democracies whose state bureaucracies are still relatively undeveloped when compared to the Chinese version. The Chinese state receded somewhat during the reform and opening up period, but the rule of Xi Jinping, the growth of the surveillance state, and especially the zero COVID policy have led to new extremes in the level of new class management of the population. Moreover, the lockdowns and their economic effects have highlighted the divide between the new class and the broader populace. As one protester shouted to the police, the police are state functionaries with stable incomes while most of the people are dependent on the flourishing of a market economy that has been throttled by the COVID lockdowns.
If the recent past is any guide, the Chinese Communist Party is likely to react to the current protests in the same violent manner as with the 1989 democracy movement. As Shaomin Li has demonstrated, the Party has committed itself to pervasive and all-encompassing surveillance and control of all aspects of Chinese society in order to maintain its rule in the face of the possibility of alternative centers of power. Yet the Party faces a different situation than in 1989. In the first place, the relative economic freedom and growth of the intervening years has set a new baseline for social freedom and economic development in China that has become the new norm from which to view the current restrictions as well as the declining economy. Especially the young are less willing to face a return to the repressions of pre-1978 China in a way that is similar to the situation of young people in Burma. Second, the Party’s commitment to its zero COVID policy risks increasing both the impetus for the protests and the formation of a populist form of class solidarity against the government class. The development of populist class solidarity was clearly the impetus for the current protests, in which many people across China could identify with those Xinjiang residents trapped by COVID lockdowns inside a burning building. Such a group consciousness will only grow with continuing lockdowns. Yet the alternative of easing COVID restrictions also risks damaging the legitimacy of the Party once COVID cases mount, indicating that the past three years of restrictions have only delayed an inevitable society-wide spread of the virus. Such loosening also risks emboldening protesters to demand even more civil rights in a continuation of the “blank paper” protests over state censorship.
But whichever path the Party chooses, there is almost certain to be continuing turmoil, as the only way to maintain control will be with increasing repression. There is little doubt that the Party would prefer a return to a totalitarian closed society than see a loss of its power. While North Korea demonstrates the stability of such repression, it is not clear that the kind of violence necessary to return China to such a state would be successful, and it would certainly bring with it a precipitous economic decline. China desperately needs populist alternatives to new class rule. But the intellectual and political path to such alternatives is as yet extremely uncertain.
