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When it comes to ensuring the security of their regime, China’s Communist Party rulers don’t skimp.
The extent of that lavish spending was put on display when the boldest street protests in decades broke out in Beijing and other cities, driven by anger over rigid and seemingly unending restrictions to combat COVID-19.
The government has been preparing for such challenges for decades, installing the machinery needed to quash large-scale upheavals.
After an initially muted response, with security personnel using pepper spray and tear gas, police and paramilitary troops flooded city streets with jeeps, vans and armored cars in a massive show of force.
The officers fanned out, checking IDs and searching cellphones for photos, messages or banned apps that might show involvement in or even just sympathy for the protests.
An unknown number of people were detained and it’s unclear if any will face charges. Most protesters focused their anger on the “zero-COVID” policy that seeks to eradicate the virus through sweeping lockdowns, travel restrictions and relentless testing. But some called for the party and its leader Xi Jinping to step down, speech the party considers subversive and punishable by years in prison.
While much smaller in scale, the protests were the most significant since the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that the regime still views as its greatest existential crisis. With leaders and protesters at an impasse, the People’s Liberation Army crushed the demonstrations with tanks and troops, killing hundreds, possibly thousands.
After the Tiananmen crackdown, the party invested in the means to deal with unrest without resorting immediately to using deadly force.
During a wave of dissent by unemployed workers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the authorities tested that approach, focusing on preventing organizers in different cities from linking up and arresting the leaders while letting rank-and-file protesters go largely untouched.
