FPI / December 1, 2022
Geostrategy-Direct
By Richard Fisher
For the first time in 33 years the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) is threatened by massive, nation-wide and staunchly anti-CCP protests, though not yet rising to the level of an existential challenge to the Party.
These protests also give Western leaders a generational opportunity to help Chinese to shed a vicious dictatorship that seeks global hegemony and the destruction of all democracies.
The largely peaceful Tiananmen protests of 1989 that spread to many cities beyond Beijing were fueled by intellectuals and students seeking simple reforms of the CCP.
In contrast, while the protests of the last week were also fanned by participation of a reported 79 Chinese universities, they were very angry and anti-CCP.
One national “meme” emerged on Nov. 27 of two professors, reportedly from the Fudan University journalism school, standing in front of a phalanx of police, much like the lone Tiananmen protester who held up a line of tanks.
These protests were grounded in a deep revulsion of the Party’s draconian “Zero Covid” lockdown policies plus fairly wide public understanding that the CCP was ultimately responsible for the virus, with a spark provided by humanitarian outrage over a local government’s Nov. 26 refusal to “unlock” a burning building in Urumqi, Xinjiang, causing 10 people to die.
Also stunning was that that the protests spread nationally in a flash: Several locations in Beijing and Shanghai and spreading to major provincial cities like Chengdu in the south and central Zhengzhou, Tianjin south of Beijing, Nanjing near Taiwan and Guangzhou near Hong Kong and also Urumqi.
Their very rapid national spread, and even the almost immediate national adoption of the blank “White Paper” carried by so many protesters, to symbolize “what we can’t say,” and to foil all-pervasive national police surveillance systems, is a strong indication of a stunning failure by the government to prevent the ability of Chinese to communicate and broadcast nationally.
In so many earlier protests the government was able to limit the spread of protests by managing to maintain strict controls over the means of national communication; a nearby village would often have no idea that pitch-battle protests were taking place in the next village.
Despite reports of sporadic violence by police it appears that the CCP has not yet decided to unleash the full force of the People’s Armed Police (PAP) and the national security state on the likely many millions of Chinese joining the protests; in 1989 it was CCP leadership battles that prevented an early violent crackdown.
The PAP is credited by some sources as having 1.5 million troops, whereas the People’s Liberation Army has about 2 million, and like the PLA Ground Force, the PAP has been heavily modernized with light armor and helicopters to improve its ability to suppress Chinese.
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