Everyone can be taken. And any honest person should admit that when the moment happens.
Like a lot of people, I believed that the Communist Party’s grip on China was solid. I thought that not only based on the big picture, but anecdotal accounts and personal conversations. Chinese Christians would tell me that Communist atrocities had happened to their grandparents, but they still supported the regime for nationalistic reasons. The lack of any meaningful opposition beyond a handful of eccentric dissidents seemed to confirm that. Between its social credit system, secret police and growing prosperity, the Communist Party had defeated the threat posed by Tiananmen Square and ruled securely.
The protests taking place in China show that the myth of Communist hegemony, the one that the regime itself had likely come to believe, was not true. Or if it was true, it fell apart with Zero COVID.
It can be hard to say how a protest movement takes off. But it’s undeniable that one exists.
The scenes from China show that there is a spectrum of opposition from anger over financial fraud and Zero COVID to traditional calls for democracy and an end to Communist rule. I don’t believe that they will succeed, but the regime has been rattled badly. Zero COVID was to show that people would jump through any hoop and instead it showed that there is a sizable undercurrent of public anger and despite a generation of indoctrination and total media and social media censorship, outrage lurks below the surface.
And given the right trigger and momentum, people will gather in the streets and call for the fall of the regime.
So much about Communist China, from its economy to its technology, is a myth. These lies are meant to fool both the Chinese and the rest of the world. The Communist regime built a carefully constructed myth that claimed that the future belonged to it.
That myth, like most forms of Marxist determinism, just ran into reality.
Communist China, solidifying its grip on Hong Kong and plotting against Taiwan, building a worldwide trade network, doesn’t look nearly as solid as it did a week ago.
I guess not even the ultra nationalist Chinese like a credit caste system, 100 day lockdowns and burning alive in apartment buildings because the government welded its doors shut. Give people a taste of prosperity and they don’t want to return to the bad old days.
They played audio on the news of those people screaming as they burned alive. It’s horrific and I don’t want to hear it again.
I can only imagine how pissed the common Chinese are. They’re finally realizing that their government doesn’t give a shit about them any more than Mao’s did. You know, Mao, the guy who thought it would be just spiffy if 75% of the people starved, or whatever huge proportion it was.
What is the trigger for at least a powerful rebellion if not a revolution? Monica Showalter wrote a very interesting article on that possible trigger yesterday at “American Thinker” by presenting Eric Hoffer’s idea of the “newly poor” which he wrote about in his book “The True Believer” as a decisive trigger. Look up “Eric Hoffer can tell us a lot about what’s going on in China right now” by Monica Showalter.
“Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay. … It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in their veins.” – Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”
Maybe Gordon Chang, after much derision, will be proven right.
Gordon Chang is one sharp cookie. I’m not surprised when the brightest are ridiculed. They are always seen as a threat because they demand action and cowards don’t want to hear anything that requires change or action.
Will they deploy the Tanks on them like they did before?
The Chinese people know so much more about the world to compare with their situation now than they did in 1989. Then they had smuggled VHS tapes of life elsewhere. Their protests in Tiananmen Square demanded democracy and displayed the Statue of Liberty. Communications since then are much more advanced, despite being limited. Many have studied abroad. They have brought much knowledge back, some as spies, but all as witnesses. The current conditions and dismal futures must seem to many as worth risking more than before.
The thing the CCP has these days is Digital surveillance. It is a new power over the people. If you have not found the Chinese reporter Jennifer Zeng, who got out of China after being in a forced labor camp and nearly dying, she has a website and YT channel. The thing that got her through it all was the idea that she would someday expose “them.”
For some time it’s been known, although not widely disseminated, China is a very seriously divided society. The ethnic Han are the dominant ethic group, and are hated by the other ethnic groups.
Their massive population of almost 2 billion people mostly live in an area no bigger than the land mass east of the Mississippi River in the US. The rest of China is either too mountainous or too dry to support a large population, all of which creates issues over economics, opportunities, and even food.
A very large number of their citizens do not consider their government to be a legitimate government, especially those living outside the main population centers, but they’re incapable of doing anything to change that….at least now.
However, China’s leaders will crush these protests as they did in the Tiananmen Square massacre. But I think we have to ask: Is there now a difference from that time? Will this go away as it did after Tiananmen? I don’t think so.
Those demonstrations were crushed but were followed by changes in their economic system. One that embraced some small forms of capitalism, and their economy thrived. That’s not going to happen this time. China’s in deep economic trouble, and Xi has committed China to Marxist/Maoist economics, and he’s going to take them right down the toilet. When their economy collapses, tanks may not be able to stop a national upsurge of rebellion.
Proverbs 16:18 “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
The CCP resurrected Mao some time ago, apparently thinking that his evil paroxysm of mass murder had been forgotten. Xi Jinping is guilty of burning people alive in the crematoriums, welding citizens into homes that became prisons, and rattling sabers at every opportunity. Perhaps his easy success in dealing with. an American crackhead and his child molesting moron of a father got Xi a little ahead of his skis. Now Jinping will need more troops to stay at home to protect his rule. Those with considerable power who feared Jinping may now see an opportunity to grab the ring of power. Fears will multiply in Jinping’s head. There are too many wild cards circulating in this world.