The CCP After the Zero-Covid Fail

The CCP After the Zero-Covid Fail - Lynette H. Ong

Introduction

After protests, the CCP abandoned its zero-covid policy in December 2022.
This surprised move left many unvaccinated Chinese citizens, especially the elderly, vulnerable.
Covid spread rapidly, causing a high number of deaths, with estimates ranging from one to two million.
The full costs of the Chinese government’s covid debacle may never be known due to a lack of data transparency.
The consequences for Chinese society and its government are beginning to emerge.

Zero-Covid Policy Implementation

Following the initial outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, the CCP implemented stringent measures to eliminate the virus.
These measures included harsh lockdowns, daily mass testing, and a smartphone application to enforce quarantines.
In 2020, the Chinese people supported these measures, viewing the country’s low infection rates as proof of the superiority of its authoritarian rule.
Unlike other governments, the CCP did not abandon the zero covid-case target, even as the pandemic wore on and measures became unsustainable.

Protests Against Pandemic Restrictions

The CCP’s obstinacy led to protests against pandemic restrictions between June and December 2022.
The “White Paper” protests in November 2022 involved participants holding up blank A4 sheets of paper to protest the CCP regime.
These protests grew into the largest antiregime demonstrations since Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The CCP managed to crack down on the protests, but its actions damaged public confidence in its authoritarian rule.
This weakened the CCP’s trust-based method for governing China.

Two Repressive Systems in China

China has two repressive systems: a coercive system in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet, and a trust-based system elsewhere.
To implement the zero-covid policy, the CCP used the trust-based model, relying on local volunteers to persuade communities to comply.
As the pandemic continued, this system showed signs of failure, and public discontent with pandemic restrictions led to protests.

CCP’s Response to Protests

The CCP responded to the protests with concessions and repression.
Neither approach is able to address China’s deep-rooted social problems or quell dissent.
Coupled with the country’s slowing economy, these protests could indicate a new era of contentious state-society relations in China.

Stability-Maintenance System

The CCP built a stability-maintenance system (weiwen tizhi) to prevent social contention from escalating into street protests.
Stability maintenance involves preemptive and covert measures to minimize the need for overt coercion or punishment.
The CCP views this system as fundamental to its survival, allocating a significant budget to it.
Mobilizing the masses has been a cornerstone of CCP rule since Mao Zedong.
Citizens are enlisted to provide intelligence, surveil each other, and work with local police to ferret out dissent and solve crime.

Volunteer Networks

Older women belonging to the Xicheng Aunties were praised as “‘ace partners’ for stability maintenance.”
The Chaoyang Masses, a volunteer policing group, provided more than 210,000 intelligence tips in 2015.
The grid-management system divides Chinese cities into smaller units for policing purposes, managed by neighborhood volunteers.
These resident-volunteers use local knowledge and social ties to persuade neighbors to obey CCP rules.

Outsourcing Repression

The CCP practices “outsourcing repression,” marshaling willing members of society to repress the people or elicit compliance with state policies.
This form of repression relies on coaxing, persuasion, and social pressure rather than violent coercion.
Outsourced repression is trust-based, drawing on social relations (guanxi) of ordinary Chinese.
The party-state’s manipulation of social networks allows it to extend its reach into the daily lives of citizens, eliciting compliance while minimizing resistance.

Two Systems of Repression

The CCP reserves the overt and violent system of repression for Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet.
These regions have seen a rise in public-security officers per capita, arrests, and jailings for “subversive” behavior.
In Xinjiang, more than a million Uyghurs have been detained in concentration camps.
Blatant repression does not bolster the CCP’s legitimacy and will eventually provoke backlash.
Outsourced repression is more pervasive but less visible.
These two systems, along with propaganda and censorship, prevent Chinese citizens from recognizing each other’s plight and prevent mass uprisings.

Shift from Obedience to Defiance

Residents’ committees marshaled people to implement the zero-covid policy.
Roughly 4.9 million grassroots party organizations mobilized about four million people across 650,000 communities.
Volunteers enforced quarantine rules and delivered supplies.
Known as “Big Whites,” they ensured high compliance with zero-covid measures.

Unsustainability of Zero-Covid Policy

The zero-covid policy became unsustainable due to new, highly transmissible covid variants and erosion of the trust-based system.
Residents’ committees were overwhelmed, and local authorities recruited temporary covid workers.
These hired hands were less effective than volunteers.
Some workers and “security guards” resorted to brute force against residents.

Erosion of Support

Far-reaching pandemic lockdowns eroded support for the zero-covid policy.
Incomes were disrupted, access to emergency care was denied, and citizens feared quarantine facilities.
The situation reached a tipping point in Shanghai between May and June 2022.
Residents self-organized to buy and deliver food.
Families were separated, and elderly persons died due to denial of hospital treatment.

Resistance and Backlash

As covid measures became unreasonable, citizens and volunteers questioned their validity.
Shanghai residents vented their anger online, complaining about food shortages and corrupt residents’ committees.
By November, ordinary Chinese began to revolt against the authorities, questioning their legal ability to compel testing and impose lockdowns.
The change was in people’s trust and attitudes toward the restrictions.

Street Protests

Protests against covid measures began in mid-2022, focusing on livelihood issues.
Migrant workers and Foxconn factory workers staged walkouts due to missing bonus payments and unsanitary conditions.
These protests remained confined to narrow occupational groups.

Characteristics of Typical Protests in China

Despite the authoritarian system, there are many public demonstrations annually.
Protests are usually spurred by specific economic grievances.
Lacking independent civil society organizations, the Chinese people have no infrastructure to mobilize large-scale movements.
The state’s repressive machinery is vigilant against cross-mobilization.
The Chinese regime is resilient despite social contention.

Pandemic-Related Protests (June-December 2022)

There were 183 pandemic-related protest events.
More than 98 percent occurred in urban areas.
Urbanites made up 53 percent of the participants, and another 35 percent were university students.
The demonstrations were almost always small.
More than 82 percent of the demonstrations were nonviolent.

Freedom and Covid-Related Protest Grievances

Protests specifically against the regime were labeled as "Freedom."
In June, July, and August, most demonstrations targeted local pandemic workers or restrictions and were staged by residents.
Beginning in September, students became increasingly active.

Emergence of Cross-Regional Protests

By the end of November, cross-regional protests started to emerge.
The first protest wave was triggered by a fire in Urumqi on November 25, killing at least ten people.
Thousands of people across China took to the streets on November 26 and 27 in the White Paper protests.
Protestors raised blank sheets of A4 paper to communicate discontent and sorrow.
November stands out as the month of antiregime demonstrations, 79 percent of which were organized by university students.

Solidarity Protests

From Beijing to Guangzhou to Wuhan, thousands of urbanites held candlelight vigils for the fire victims.
In Shanghai, protestors chanted, “Liberate Xinjiang!”
Similar solidarity protests were held across university campuses in major western cities.

Characteristics of Protests

The protests do not have a known organizer, coordinator, or mobilizing structure, suggesting they were spontaneous events.
The vast majority of protests had fewer than a hundred demonstrators.
Nevertheless, the protests were among modern China’s largest.

Second Wave of Protests

The second wave focused on lockdown grievances and did not feature antiregime slogans.
It occurred from November 28 until December 8, when the CCP reversed the zero-covid policy.
These demonstrations comprised hundreds of participants.
Even though antiregime slogans were confined to the first wave, the second-wave demonstrates protesting against pandemic restrictions had gained momentum and spread nationwide.

Break from Typical Protests Post-Tiananmen Square

The protests were a firm break from typical protests in three ways:
1. Shared grievances transcended social groups, ethnicities, and regional divides.
2. The 2022 antiregime protests were the first to articulate demands for political change.
3. The 2022 protests inspired unprecedented demonstrations of solidarity both within China and abroad.

Divides Between Protest Groups

Divides between protest groups remained, particularly between the migrant and factory workers and the urbanites and university students.
Workers mainly participated in protests fueled by economic and lockdown grievances, while urban residents and students made up the antiregime protesters.

Demands for Political Change

The 2022 antiregime protests were the first since the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations to articulate demands for political change, shattering a psychological barrier that the regime had worked so hard to construct.

Demonstrations of Solidarity

The 2022 protests inspired unprecedented demonstrations of solidarity both within China and abroad.
The Urumqi fire generated empathy among China’s Han majority for the Uyghur minority, leading to the White Paper protests.
People around the world rallied in support of the White Paper protests.

CCP’s About-Face

The zero-covid policy was suddenly abandoned on December 8.
The protests were likely the trigger, but not the only contributing factor.
Mass daily testing was putting enormous strain on local-government finances, and regional growth took a hit.
New, more transmissible covid variants made it practically impossible to get to zero cases.
Beijing’s zeal for zero overshadowed public-health attention to mass vaccination.
Covid was treated more as a political crisis than a public-health crisis.

Consequences of Policy Reversal

The lifting of covid restrictions without any warning to local authorities, resulted in chaotic on-the-ground-responses.
Hospitals were paralyzed when the end of restrictions caused a massive spike in covid cases.
The unequal distribution of medical supplies meant that rural areas fared much worse than urban ones.
Amid all this, Chinese citizens were basically left to fend for themselves.

Collapse of the Covid Economy

With the end of the zero-covid policy, the covid economy collapsed overnight.
Mass testing accounted for 1.3 percent of total economic output in large cities.
People hired to administer tests, surveil, and control the movement of their fellow citizens, and perform other covid-related jobs were laid off without warning.
As a result, pandemic-control workers protested to local authorities, demanding owed wages.
Factory workers who made covid tests were also laid off.
This labor unrest came on top of a flagging national economy, creating additional headaches for local authorities.

Dissent and Crackdown

Despite the conciliatory tone of Xi’s New Year’s speech, local authorities began a “silent crackdown” of the protests soon after they began.
The police rounded up the protesters, demanding “a theory” to explain how they organized themselves.
Authorities tracked down and arrested those involved in the Urumqi fire vigil and the demonstrations on Shanghai’s Urumqi Middle Road.

Persistent Social Contention

Although the repression and zero-covid policy reversal may have quelled the pandemic protests, other forms of social contention persist.
Young people heralded the new year with prohibited firecrackers.
In Zhoukou, a group of rowdy youths climbed on top of a police vehicle and overturned it.
In Nanjing, a group of young people placed flowers at the base of Sun Yat-sen’s statue on New Year’s Eve as a sign of disdain for the CCP and its leaders.

Means of Expressing Discontent

Social contention is risky behavior in China.
Many members of the middle class have opted to emigrate.
In 2022 alone, an estimated 10,800 wealthy Chinese left the country.
Leaving China is so widely discussed that there is a word for it; runxue means “runology” or “to run away.”
Many of those without the means to seek greener pastures are deciding to abandon China’s relentless professional culture, giving rise to the popular discourse of “lying flat” (tangping).

Social Mobility and Economic Decline

Forty years after Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policy in 1979, migrant workers have seen their livelihoods improve, but social mobility for ordinary citizens has hit a ceiling.
Economic growth is slowing, and unemployment rates are now as high as 30 percent in the cities.
These forms of popular discontent signal the emergence of passive resistance among a younger generation with declining faith in the CCP’s ability to deliver economic prosperity.
Emigration and lying flat are just as powerful acts of defiance against the party-state.

Economic Challenges

As China enters a phase of structural economic decline owing to its aging and shrinking population, discontent will only become more strident and palpable.
China’s society has been under stress, but the critical difference this time around is that the economic “pie” is no longer expanding as rapidly as it was back then.
Now that annual growth is comparatively sluggish (3 percent in 2022), the economy is less resilient.

Implicit Social Contract

The implicit social contract—which stipulates that the CCP can deny political rights in exchange for economic prosperity—has long kept society compliant.
Yet as the economy declines, the rising expectations of the people, especially the younger generations (which have never known hardship), can no longer be met easily.
From this perspective, it is slowing economic growth—which the covid lockdowns only worsened—that will cause the most severe strain on state-society relations.

Challenges Facing Xi Jinping’s Administration

The CCP’s pandemic response has damaged the high levels of citizen buy-in on which its model of trust-based governance and repression relies.
The abrupt policy U-turn leaves the CCP with the challenge of crafting a narrative that will allow it to escape the covid debacle while preserving its legitimacy.
The single greatest challenge facing Xi Jinping is China’s flagging economy.