China's COVID rebellion

Taipei, Taiwan and Beijing, China – When Ivan joined a vigil in Shanghai on November 27 to memorialise the 10 victims of an apartment block fire in the far western city of Urumqi, he did not know what to expect.

The gathering – held on a busy commercial street named after the Xinjiang capital – was the young professional’s first “real” protest.

What began as a tiny gathering to remember the dead soon swelled into a crowd, as hundreds of people protested COVID-19 lockdowns amid claims that pandemic restrictions had stymied efforts to rescue the victims.

As the crowd grew in size, some protesters called for political reforms and even the resignation of President Xi Jinping – an act of defiance almost unheard of since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

“The emotion quickly escalated when people were chanting together,” Ivan, an IT professional in his 30s who asked to use a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera.

“I was surprised, thrilled and a little bit scared. It was a complicated and mixed feeling. My eyes misted for a while and I told my friends it has been 33 years since the last protest that was not only about the protesters’ personal interests”.

Ivan is among thousands of Chinese citizens who joined COVID-related protests that erupted across China in late 2022 in the country’s biggest display of public dissent in decades.

China has since begun dismantling the tough “zero-COVID” policy that served as the spark for the protests, which began in Urumqi before spreading to cities including Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu and Nanjing.

But deeper frustrations exposed during the unrest appear set to linger long after the end of harsh pandemic controls, posing a challenge to the social contract that undergirds the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) grip on power.

In interviews with Al Jazeera, six protesters – all of them well-educated urbanites – expressed profound dissatisfaction with the status quo, pointing to a deeper malaise within China’s economy and political system.

Another Chinese citizen, whom Al Jazeera is referring to as Emma, said that while she did not support the protests herself, she has doubts about Beijing’s handling of the economy.

“I don’t think the economy will improve immediately,” Emma, a 38-year-old teacher in Beijing, told Al Jazeera.

“Most people have been affected in the past three years and their incomes have sharply gone down. Everyone has become cautious about consuming or purchasing anything.”

For some, Beijing’s rigid adherence to lockdowns, border closures and mass testing, even as the economy cratered, shook their faith in authorities’ handling of the economy and ability to respond to changing conditions. For others, it simply reinforced pre-existing doubts.

“This is not only about the COVID situation and lockdown,” a theatre worker in his mid-20s, who joined protests in Beijing, told Al Jazeera on condition anonymity.

“Rather, it includes the long-term control of freedom of speech and neglect of workers’ rights, so I think this is overall a structural problem.”

The protester said he and others like him were also angered by the reelection of Xi – who has concentrated power in his own hands and ruthlessly suppressed dissent – to a third term in power at the 20th National Party Congress in October, shattering decades of precedent of Chinese leaders serving just two terms.

“They are making stupid decisions out of their egos,” another protester, a 33-year-old woman who works as a freelance instructor in Beijing, told Al Jazeera.

“But why? To show China is different? I actually don’t understand the logic behind such control. One party, one decision maker – that’s exactly the flaw.”

“As soon as I heard about the protests, I actually ran to join the protesters,” she added.

“I saw thousands of young people silently parading and expressing their anger while, at the same time, showing their hope for this country. I was astonished that it was really happening.”

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.

For decades, the CCP has had an unspoken bargain with its population: In exchange for relinquishing their aspirations for democracy and civil liberties, the people can expect continual improvements in living standards.

But after huge leaps in China’s prosperity since the 1980s, the Chinese dream feels increasingly out of reach for many of the country’s 1.4 billion citizens.

China’s economy, which is less than one-quarter of the size of the United States on a per capita basis, is expected to grow by less than 3 percent in 2022 – among its weakest performances in decades.

Private industry, from tech to education, is reeling from heavy-handed regulation, while real estate prices are plummeting amid a clampdown on excessive borrowing by developers. Youth employment is hovering at approximately 20 percent.

The stock markets of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen are lower today than they were in 2007. A looming demographic crisis, the result of rock-bottom birth rates, threatens to spell the end of China’s high-growth days, casting doubt over Xi’s bid to achieve developed country status by 2049.

The Australia-based Lowy Institute has estimated that China’s economic growth will be capped at 2-3 percent from now until 2050.

Wu’er Kaixi, one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen protests, said “zero-COVID” and the economic downturn had chipped away at the CCP’s post-1989 promises of economic liberalisation – the only concession to the Tiananmen protesters, whose movement was crushed in a bloody crackdown.

“It was a lousy deal but Chinese people bought in with the Western world endorsing it,” Wu’er Kaixi told Al Jazeera from Taiwan, where he lives in exile.

“The deal is: Surrender your political freedom so we will lift some restrictions on the economic side, so you will have some chance, some opportunities, to pursue your own economic growth.”

While protests are not uncommon in China, they are usually small in scale and involve grievances directed towards specific workplaces or local authorities.

Some labour-related protests, like a 2010 Honda factory strike, have even been tacitly supported by Beijing, which has sometimes made concessions to demonstrations focused on “livelihood issues,” according to Mary Gallagher, a professor in democracy, democratisation and human rights at the University of Michigan.

The COVID protests broke new ground by occurring in dozens of cities at once and directly taking aim at policies set by Beijing.

“These are young, urban, middle class – maybe even upper middle-class – people in top tier cities, and those people have been a strata of Chinese society that has benefitted the most from the last 20 years of reform, and they’ve been pretty politically quiescent,” Gallagher told Al Jazeera.

“They really have the political capital and often the social capital to make their voices heard without using protest. I think what was very shocking to them over the course of the last year or so, in particular, was this notion that they really didn’t have much control over their lives, that the government really could take it away.”

At least 277 COVID-related protests, including street demonstrations and displays of protest signs, took place between March 2020 and December 5, 2022, according to an analysis by Al Jazeera based on data from Freedom House, the China Labor Bulletin, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and social media posts. Among those, 137 took place during a 10-day span in late November and early December.

An analysis by Freedom House of 70 protests and protest signs between November 25 and 29 – the height of the protests – showed that 37 percent of demonstrations and three-quarters of signs aired political grievances or called for democracy and the rule of law.

In Shanghai, for example, protesters repeated now famous slogans – “Life, not ‘zero-COVID’ policy; freedom not lockdown; elections not dictatorship!” – that had been hung on banners on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge by a lone protester in mid-October.

“’Zero-COVID’ is more like an obedience test. It’s a test to see how the people can obey and tolerate the pressure and restrictions,” a protester in his late 20s, who joined a demonstration in Shanghai in November, told Al Jazeera.

“Their plan is slavery and revenge.”

It is unclear how pervasive the discontent exposed during the “zero-COVID” protests may be, or if the protests reflected any more than a sliver of public opinion. Despite its increasingly negative image overseas, the CCP is widely believed to have long enjoyed broad support among the Chinese public.

In a study based on face-to-face interviews with more than 31,000 Chinese citizens between 2003 and 2016, researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School found that the public’s satisfaction with the government, at both the local and national levels, increased virtually across the board during the period.

The greatest rises in satisfaction were reported in poorer, rural inland regions, “casting doubt that China is sitting on a looming ‘social volcano'”, the researchers said.

In online surveys carried out by the China Data Lab at the University of California San Diego, Chinese citizens’ average level of trust in the central government – measured on a scale from 1 to 10 – increased from 8.23 in June 2019 to 8.87 in May 2020.

Not only has the CCP overseen huge strides in living standards – with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increasing roughly 40 times since 1990 – its vast and increasingly sophisticated censorship and surveillance apparatus maintains a tight grip on the public narrative, suppressing dissent and making mass organisation difficult and dangerous.

All the protesters that spoke to Al Jazeera acknowledged that their frustrations put them in the minority, although several said they had witnessed even their most pro-government friends and family members express doubts about Beijing’s handling of the pandemic.

“I can’t be too optimistic about the next protest, especially if the protest is about political rights, such as freedom of speech or any other civil rights,” said Ivan, the Shanghai protester.

“Most Chinese people here are disciplined to not care for any political rights even if the rights are guaranteed by the constitution.”

Baogang He, an expert in Chinese politics and democratisation at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, said he does not believe mass opposition to Beijing is likely unless economic conditions deteriorate to the point where people begin to fear for their survival.

“In the next six months post-COVID, China’s economy will get worse, but it is unlikely to reach such an extreme situation where people cannot survive,” He told Al Jazeera.

Any serious challenge to the CCP’s system of control would also need support across a broad swathe of demographic groups.

While Chinese of various backgrounds took part in the protests, city-dwelling younger people, many of them students, played an outsized role in many of the demonstrations, recalling seminal, but ultimately failed, moments of resistance such as Tiananmen Square.

“At least in my education, we have always believed that the government is responsible for the people,” said Emma, the school teacher in Beijing.

“Even though there are problems, most people – I’d say 80 percent – won’t resort to protesting because they feel it is inappropriate. Of course, this represents the view of elderly people. For people born in the 1990s, I don’t know what their views are. My university professor told me that college students nowadays could not tolerate lockdowns any more because they have gotten emotional.”

The protesters that spoke to Al Jazeera stressed that the demonstrations they attended were not organised and had varied demands.

But they pointed to a number of key turning points before the Urumqi fire that had deeply upset people, like the death of COVID-19 whistleblower and doctor Li Wenliang, stories on social media of people denied medical care and the deaths of 27 people whose bus crashed while en route to a quarantine centre.

Yang, a media producer in her early 30s who joined a protest in Shanghai in the early hours of November 27, said protesters’ grievances ranged from frustration with “zero-COVID” to the CCP itself.

“People are not really united because their requests are so varied and they are so different,” Yang, who requested to use a pseudonym due to fears of repercussions, told Al Jazeera.

“It varied from one individual to another. Someone wants to overthrow the government, they want to have new leadership, they want to have a new government. Some of them just want the current government to change the COVID policy.”

Still, many of the protests had economic grievances in common.

Public frustration over the economy had been building long before mass protests erupted in November, with roughly half of the known COVID-related demonstrations taking place during the previous two and a half years, according to an analysis of protest data by Al Jazeera.

Many of these earlier protests were based around flashpoints like Shanghai’s two-month lockdown during March-May, which resulted in serious hardship including food shortages, or labour-related complaints as the Chinese economy ground to a halt in the early months of 2020 and then again in the second half of 2022.

A Chinese citizen living abroad who runs an Instagram account that posts critical content about China said the Shanghai lockdown had been a shock, as people had assumed one of the country’s largest and most international cities would be able to “provide basic security for the middle class”.

“It’s the city we are most proud of but even though it has the highest position in China, Shanghai could still do this,” the person, who runs the account @tears_in_rainbow, told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.

“After the unreasonable and unexplained madness, and the extreme disrespect for human rights, I think this belief has been shaken. It’s impacted the public’s confidence about our country.”

Qinduo Xu, a Beijing-based political analyst and senior fellow at the Pangoal Institution, a Chinese think-tank, said the public’s concerns about the economy extended beyond “zeroCOVID” to tightening state control over large parts of the private sector.

“Over the past couple of years, there’s been a crackdown on the private sector, on the platform economy, a so-called crackdown on the private tutoring industry, and a crackdown on the ‘fan’ economy [around] movie stars. In general, people are wondering what is the clear direction of national development,” Xu told Al Jazeera.

Still, Xu said he was “cautiously optimistic” about China’s future as the country looks towards reopening after lifting some of the most draconian measures, including centralised quarantine and restrictions on domestic travel.

Manoj Kewalramani, a Chinese studies fellow at India’s Takshashila Institution, expressed doubt that the protests represent an existential threat to the CCP in the longterm.

“What the ‘zero-COVID’ protests have done is show that when the policies have a prolonged, concentrated impact on massive communities, pushback is possible. But I don’t think this represents a rupture in the social contract,” he told Al Jazeera.

Among Beijing’s takeaways may be “learning lessons from the mobilisation strategies of the protesters and identifying loopholes that it can plug,” Kewalramani said.

Even as Beijing has appeared to make concessions to some of the protesters’ demands by abandoning “zero-COVID”, it has avoided any discussion of the demonstrations and cast its pivot as a response to the changing nature of the virus.

After smothering the protests with a large display force, police have mobilised to track down at least some of those who took part, making arrests days, and in some cases weeks, after their participation.

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, said Tiananmen had taught Xi the importance of the CCP acting decisively and uniformly at the first sign of protest.

“Hear what they have to say, incorporate enough of what the Party has heard into policy but stick to the policy the Party has set to make the Party policy appear to have taken on board public opinions – and then use the powerful propaganda machinery to ‘educate’ everyone that the Party’s policy reflects what they want and is the best policy for them,” Tsang told Al Jazeera.

“It has so far worked like a charm. It will probably continue to work until the realities on the ground become so obviously bad that no amount of propaganda can mislead people to follow the Party.”

“It always adopts the yin and yang methods,” said He, the Deakin University professor, of the CCP’s response to public discontent.

“One is to accommodate some economic and social legitimate interests and demands. The other is to ruthlessly suppress any political demands.”

For Beijing, the unwinding of “zero-COVID” comes with its own political risks in a country with a patchy vaccination rate among the elderly and little natural exposure to the virus. Some medical experts have estimated the lifting of restrictions could be followed by up to 2 million deaths.

Already, cases are surging nationwide.

Authorities across China are scrambling to add hospital beds and build fever screening clinics as hospitals fill up with patients. Crematoriums in several cities, including Chongqing and Guangzhou, have told foreign media they are struggling to handle the number of bodies coming through their doors, suggesting deaths are rising fast.

Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have changed the criteria for recording COVID deaths to only include those who die of respiratory failure – effectively ensuring the eventual death toll will be vastly underestimated.

Since easing curbs earlier this month, Beijing has reported just seven deaths – a tally that flies in the face of overseas experience and medical experts’ understanding of the virus.

Ellen, who is in her late 20s and joined protests in Beijing in November, said the rapid policy reversal, including downplaying the severity of the virus, has been upsetting as people made huge sacrifices during the pandemic.

“After China began opening, many people found it difficult to accept,” Ellen, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera.

“For those who firmly supported COVID, it is equivalent to the feeling of ‘I believed you for so long before, and you told me how terrible this virus is [and] in order to protect my family, I would rather be unemployed or incur some financial loss,’ but then they suddenly told me today that it is no different from the flu.”

Ellen said the abrupt U-turn could lead to more questioning of the CCP, even among government supporters, as cases climb amid the loosened restrictions.

Emma, the school teacher, said Beijing’s rapid shift away from “zero-COVID” had caught many people off guard.

“Three years is too long, and people wanted to go out sooner,” she said. “It’s just that everyone feels that the government’s decision to ease policies seems very sudden.

While China’s biggest protests in decades have died down, some of those who took part continue to hold out hope that their actions will bring about lasting change.

Yang, the Shanghainese protester, said she believes the COVID protests will have a longterm effect on cities like Beijing, with calls for change not stopping with pandemic policies.

“It’s going to be an extremely longterm goal for anyone who wants to see a fundamental change in this country. It could easily take five to 10 years to have any small reforms,” she said.

“For me personally I’ve been starting to look at history and the democracy process in other countries such as South Korea and also Taiwan. I think if you want to have a longterm goal and you want fundamental change to happen in this country, you need to learn from others and learn from history.”

Fengsuo Zhou, a Tiananmen protest leader who lives in exile in the US, said change always begins with a difficult first step.

“They have liberated themselves from the spiritual slavery that was imposed on them by brainwashing and surveillance,” Zhou told Al Jazeera, referring to the COVID protestors.

“All of sudden they are trying to break free. Just by protesting, they are experiencing the feeling of independence from this regime and that’s really a very profound change.”