Beijing government found one woman tested positive with COVID, she then went on shopping and her trip made 7 others positive and 2700 became close contacts. While the authority publicly blamed her for the quarantine for thousands of people and threatened to charge her criminally, Chinese social media fought back: while one woman caused 2700 people in Beijing to be temporarily under control in Beijing, one man caused 1.4 billion in China to be permanently under control.
Screenshots of this social media comments were spreading, and soon people who sent the screen shots lost their Wechat account.
This one man, after he got supreme power at the 20 big, took his new leadership team with him to Yan’an, the “birth place of CCP’s revolution”.
There Xi praised the Yan’an Rectification Movement (1942-1945). Modern scholars have increasingly viewed the movement as being initiated by Mao in order to ensure his status as paramount leader of the CCP. Xi also praised the Great production movement(1940), when the CCP mobilized the population for agriculture production. This trip is considered a signal that Xi wants to mimic Mao and close off China again. (See our newsletter 88 on this topic.)
Worse yet, state-run public canteens are back in communities. Supply and Marketing Cooperatives also come back on a large scale. Even though the government issued reports and directed propaganda to show that the modern version of public canteen and cooperative is very different from those that dominated Chinese society in the 1950-1970s, most people still panicked. These were the things happened during the great leap forward, which resulted in three years of great famine in which millions of people died of starvation. Many people think, slowly but surely, government controlled planned economy will squeeze out the market economy, and it means poverty and lack of resources for ordinary people, with total control on everyone’s livelihood by the government.
Worse yet, someone on Weibo wrote about a conversation he had at a conference all with the management of the cooperatives:
Q: In the past years, we have a market economy, (eg., supermarket, Taobao, PDD, etc.), which have solved all the commercial problems, why do we need to expand the cooperatives?
A: Taobao, PDD, who own them? Capital. Capital only cares about returns. When we are in a war, can we depend on capital? Our cooperative is public owned, our employees are government employees, this is a flag of our party in the mass. We only need to make small profit, all the resources can be distributed via administrative means, so we can achieve common prosperity.
So, China is preparing a war? What war?
Of course the war to “unify” Taiwan. A war that no one benefits from, but millions of lives will be lost.
BTW, with the midterm election results, which fended off the Maga gangs in the US congress, Biden is able to face off with Xi on Taiwan issue at the G20.
Many Chinese who don’t want to see things heading this way are searching for answers. Many people became fatalistic — it must be that we Chinese are doomed. But of course this is not a serious answer.
So, let’s go back to 1989, China has just gone out of the cultural revolution for 12 years. 1980s was the most free decade in Chinese history under CCP rule. Ideas from outside China were flooding in, people were united in their lack of wealth and power. Deng Xiaoping was interested in political reform. The separation of the state and party was a big topic. We were even learning about it in our political education in school. Democracy was a shinny new word that appeared in my daily life: I was demanding from my parents democracy at home!
Then came 1989. Most of Chinese people (including me) did not know what democracy looks like, but most university students (also including me) all over the country marched for it. The crackdown was not only brutal but also successful. There was no rebel from the society at large, people accepted the continuation of CCP. In retrospect, this is expected, because we knew so little. People were not ready to fight for a different way of governing yet. But to China, it seems that that was the closest we were from democracy in the past 73 years.
After 1989, Deng decided that no political reform was needed. He continued economic reform. As people got richer and richer, they also got more and more divided along the line between the haves and the have nots. Jiang Zemin ruled China from 1989 to 2002, he made sure to include the haves into the CCP. He also made sure that people loyal to him take strong roots in all levels of government. He handed the posts of party secretary general and president to Hu Jintao in 2002, but he kept the post of Chairman of the Central Military Commission to himself until 2005. By that time, Hu has become a very weak leader, because Jiang’s people occupied important positions. Corruption was rampant, and the central government could not made the local government follow its orders.
In 2007, when Hu’s successor had to be decided, Hu had to compromise with Jiang, and agree with him to let Xi be the next party leader. During Hu’s ruling, China was very corrupted, so much so that party leaders told themselves that the only enemy that can destroy the CCP is CCP itself, through corruption. That seems to mean that someone needs to come in and clean the house. Xi seemed to be the perfect candidate. So, when Hu stepped down, perhaps because of his own experience, he gave up all of the power, including the post of Chairman of the Central Military Commission, the real power in China.
Why Xi seemed to be the perfect candidate to fight corruption? Because in 1999, Xi was the vice governor of Fujian province when a major corruption scandal broke out that shook the country. The scandal involved illegal smuggling of products across borders, of values up to 53 billion RMB. The then prime minister Zhu Rongji was personally in charge of the case, about 300 were criminally charged and sentenced, many of them worked in the police, military and custom systems. A deputy minister of the public security was sentenced to death penalty with suspension. A few princelings were sentenced to life. Xi, who was just appointed to be the vice governor and then governor of the province was summoned to brief Jiang Zemin on the case.
We don’t know the details of the case and what role Xi played in it, but 7 years later, Xi gained total trust of Jiang. Instead of choosing his own people to succeed Hu, Jiang backed Xi. And perhaps just because Xi is not from Jiang’s gang, Hu accepted it.
In 2012, when Xi took over power, he took it upon himself to fight corruption. It was a very popular mission. But he also disliked the news media and social media in China, which in Hu’s era, played very important roles on exposing corruptions at different levels of the government. Xi always liked Mao’s idea that art and literature (which extends to everything consumed by the mass) should serve the party. So, he started to cleanse the internet. Step by step, he killed all the independent voices in China. Many veteran journalists fled the country. Now, the only corruption cases you hear about come from the announcements of the government. This top-down strictly controlled anti-corruption campaign also made it convenient for Mr. Xi to amass power and get rid of any political opponents. So, not surprisingly, in 2017, when Xi wanted to change the term limit in the Constitution, he met almost no resistance.
If you ask me, is China less corrupted now than before Xi took over? I would not know.
On October 13th, just a few days before the 20 Big, Caixin, a newsmagazine, reported that a whistleblower died in September, in an apparent suicide. However, the whistleblower warned people on Weibo that he would never commit suicide. In addition, just a few hours before his “suicide”, some Caixin reporter finally talked with him, and he mentioned no plan to kill himself. This news sparked some interest on Twitter and that is all. The whistleblower claimed that he had explosive disclosure about local public security officials. But no one knows what it is. What we do know is that China is a much less free country now than before Xi took over, for sure.
So, the power struggle that got us here showed that the collective leadership system Deng tried to build to avoid democracy easily slips back into Mao’s one man show that Deng desperately wanted to avoid because his family suffered dearly in that system.
You might ask, if I am not a fatalist, how optimistic I am for a total political reform in China?
My answer is a podcast, hehehe: “Why social change is so excruciatingly difficult”. It is about 1 hour 20 minutes long. I learned from the podcast that throughout human history, most of the time, people accept the ruling system no matter how awful it had been. Revolution was the rare exception. But revolutions did happen. whisper generated transcript
Westerners probably don’t think that China’s system is that bad, since China has had decades of fast growth. But for millions of Chinese living in the system, it is a totally different story. Democracy is designed that people do have some political power and those in power are forced to listen to them. In an authoritarian (or totalitarian) system, people are considered dispensable tools. Those in power have no reason to listen to them. This is very clearly shown in COVID time: Chinese government has not released a penny to families struggling with loss of income due to strict restrictions on their movements.
So, that is China. When will people be fed up with the system and rise up to topple it? No one knows, but I hope when that happen, people understand how democracy works and strive to make it happen in China.
New media with focus on business are very eager to find signs that the current COVID-Zero policy to be stopped. The sudden lockdown of millions of people disrupted economic activities. Recently, two reports, one from WSJ and one from Bloomberg speculated about change of policy. Even as the newly “elected” standing committee just had a meeting and the official report reaffirmed the iron hand of COVID-Zero policy, a reporter working for a state media of China tweeted that Bloomberg reporter still wanted to interpreted the report with some nuance.
But what is Xi thinking? Xi is probably thinking his idol’s famous slogan that led the country into three years of famine: Man triumphs over nature (人定胜天).
Here, the man is the same man in Beijing that caused 1.4 billion people to be permanently under control.