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Just five weeks after being elected to a historic third term, President Xi Jinping suddenly faces cracks in the facade of unchallenged authority that he so successfully presented to the world at the 20th national congress of the Chinese Communist party.
For groups of protesters, apparently without central coordination, to take to the streets across China and to social media, and for some then explicitly to call for Xi and the Communist party to stand aside, is a seismic shock.
The echoes with Iran are superficially present, even if the two political cultures and the proximate causes of the unrest are entirely different. Equally the rush to compare these protests with those of 1989 is tempting, but wrong, as it has been previously during numerous bouts of dissent over the last two decades.
But many observers detect two unique factors about the current protests. In 1989 the protests were largely confined to Beijing, but these demonstrations are much more geographically diffuse, and with an apparent knowledge of what other cities are doing. Second, there is a sense that the proximate cause – Xi’s unending hallmark zero-Covid policy – is enough to bring people on to the streets, but also resonant enough to pose wider questions about how the Chinese state operates.
So Covid provides a frame for workers in Zhengzhou, for students across dozens of campuses and for the people of Urumqi, the capital of the remote region of Xinjiang where the deaths of 10 people in a high-rise apartment block fire have been blamed on Covid restrictions delaying firefighters.
