Thirty-three years after the repression of Place Tiananmen, we are again witnessing demonstrations in the streets of Beijing and other major cities. In reality, popular protests have never been completely absent in China in recent decades, especially against bad wages, the illegitimate confiscation of personal and land, unjust legal judgments … and they have enamelled these “glorious” to the Chinese. They mainly belong sociologically to the category of social, apolitical protests, often local, punctual and limited size. Politics are absent from public space, except during rare acts of courage of isolated dissidents, quickly stifled by the authorities.
This tendency to depoliticization is the consequence of the bloody repression led by the authorities in 1989. But it could only be realized with the improvement of the living conditions of the Chinese, at least for a part of ‘Between them, arising from lightning economic growth. Power has replaced the economy for politics, and pushes the citizen to be only a consumer. He buys peace from society by promising him a certain prosperity and a framed freedom, an implicit contract well established.
This contract, however, remains weakened by a lack of legitimacy at the political level, which is a guarantee of justice and harmonious social life. Power knows it and society too, so the tension continues. The method of “the carrot and [of the] stick” – renmin wenti renminbi jiejue (the problem of the people is resolved by money, the renminbi being the Chinese currency “of the people”) and FEIRENMIN WENTI ZHUANZHENG JIEJUE (“The problem for Those who do not belong to the people is resolved by the dictatorship “) – is practiced skillfully and cynically by the authorities, without moods.
This empire made up in nation
Meanwhile, power sinks with characteristic arrogance in general corruption which, as often in world history, leads to society towards moral corrosion. This results in the loss of common sense, justice, the Philia, Aristotelian term designating affection and enthusiasm for others.
But here suddenly resurfaces demonstrations in this immense country, this empire made up in nation. The phenomenon affects dozens of cities, and a hundred universities. So, in this country where the regime continues to viturate the yanse geming (color revolutions) and the “conspiracies” of Westerners in this regard, it is by holding in hand a blank virgin but sense of meaning, symbol of anger And despair meaning “we are reduced to nothing, without rights, without freedom, nor dignity”, that the demonstrators pass in the streets and the campuses.
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