On the 20th of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) was an opportunity, in October, to celebrate the infallibility of President Xi Jinping, gratified of a third term, first step towards a possible presidency for life. This dogma has partly experienced. After weeks of deaf anger in metropolises slammed by zero covid policy, a few days of unpublished protests and first calls for the president’s resignation were enough for power to decrease and abandon his strategy. After many other countries before it, China has resigned itself to pragmatism.
The authorities have renounced the most radical and most attacking measures for freedoms as well as compulsory quarantine in specific centers, or the confinement of neighborhoods, or even entire cities, upon the appearance of the disease. In both cases, individual treatment will be privileged. The PCC’s political office, which has ratified this sudden turn, warned against “formalism, bureaucratism and the arbitrary use of power” which could slow down, by conservatism, the application of new directives. A fairly fair description of what he had previously imposed, for months.
This turnaround is not without potential risks. Because China suffers from the absence, by excess of nationalism, of mesing vaccines developed abroad, and the limits of Chinese vaccines, ineffective against the variant omicron. These faults could allow a flambé to contamination. A real risk for the most fragile people, starting with the elderly, whose vaccination rate still leaves something to be desired.
XI Jinping also gave up in front of the increasingly unbearable cost for the economy of its strategy to combat the pandemic, the functioning of production chains being constantly disturbed. The drop in growth, which should amount to 3 % in 2022 instead of 8 % the previous year, the drop in exports and the increase in the unemployment rate among young people could only eat anger that Explained throughout the country, or almost.
If the blindness of Chinese power has therefore not gone to complete blindness, it is much to fear that it will not draw the double teaching of recent weeks: the need to be Listening to a people and the usefulness of leaving them the ability to express themselves. In the case of zero covid, the latter has indeed filled the void created around power by the repression of any form of internal dispute.
These people have managed to speak despite drastic limitations in place for more than a decade and the silence imposed on civil society. Their determination and ingenuity allowed the demonstrators to bypass censorship and to emphasize its ubiquitous character. Brandir a simple white leaf has been enough to signify anger.
The disappearance of the courageous protester who, on a bridge in Beijing, in October, had dared to deploy harsh banners against power, his management of the COVVI-19 and in favor of greater freedom shows certainly that this power remains Unable to tolerate the slightest form of dissent. The movement of anger has nevertheless demonstrated that China is not limited to soulless images conveyed by the single party. And that no unfinished confinement can overcome a people.