The Xi dilemma: China's instability and a zero-COVID trap

In Beijing, they took to the streets on a frosty November evening. Young people yelled the loudest, but there were older Chinese as well, sharing a rare moment of protest in a country where acquiescence is not only expected but enforced.

"We want freedom, not unlimited government power," yelled one man, as mobile phones recorded his rant and posted it online. "We want the rule of law, we don't want the next generation to live in this era of horror."

His "horror" is China's strict zero-COVID policy, an edict from the very top of the country's political leadership that has forced lockdowns, quarantines, tests and travel bans on 1.4 billion people for almost three years.

It has become China's signature mode of countering the pandemic, but Lynette Ong says it is misguided, producing "opposite results."

"More coercive violence means more defiance," said Ong, the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China and a China expert at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

"And already the resistance recently is really unseen since Tiananmen."

Tiananmen Square is just a couple of kilometres from the current Beijing protests, the site and symbol of the last significant anti-government demonstrations in China, ones that shook the political leadership to the core. So sensitive still, the 1989 student protests and subsequent massacre are only mentioned in whispers and never in the media or taught in schools.

Now though, with daily infection rates hitting records day after day last week and no end in sight to zero-COVID restrictions, private horror has turned to public anger. 

And that fury is tearing down barriers and fuelling protests across China.

They have hit the industrial south, in cities like Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhengzhou, in factories where they make the world's iPhones. There were protests in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first identified and the first lockdowns happened, and in the western region of Xinjiang, which has been under lockdown for the past three months and where 10 deaths in a fire last week were blamed on blocked escape doors. And there have been demonstrations at dozens of universities, including one of China's most prestigious campuses, Tsinghua University and Peking University.

But the disobedience wasn't just about COVID. Many demanded much bigger changes in China's society and its political leadership.

In the southwest city of Chengdu, protestors chanted for "freedom of press, freedom of speech." In Shanghai, a woman identifying herself as Kate told European network ETN, "We are protesting against the Communist Party dictatorship … Xi Jinping." Shanghai spent months under lockdown this spring, with residents angrily complaining of food shortages.

Around Kate and at many of the protests, people held up blank pieces of paper, a symbolic act of defiance that signalled opposition to government policies while trying to avoid arrest for speaking against the regime. 

But police still arrested many.