Dennis Kwok was a member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council from 2012 to 2020. He is now a distinguished scholar at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and a partner at Elliott Kwok Levine & Jaroslaw LLP in New York.
A few years ago, when we democrats were still allowed to hold our seats in the Legislative Council, we protested against the suppression of free speech in Hong Kong. Authorities were charging anyone displaying a pro-democracy slogan with sedition and other offenses under the National Security Law; to defy this, we held up blank pieces of white paper in the council chamber to show how little we were allowed to say.
It is saddening to look back on that protest and know that most of my colleagues are now in jail; many of the others have left Hong Kong. But it is also incredible to now see it being replicated by so many people across mainland China, from Guangzhou and Shanghai to Wuhan and Beijing.
These protests, sparked by outrage around a deadly building fire last Thursday in the locked-down city of Urumqi, represent the largest act of mass public dissent in Chinese society since 1989′s Tiananmen Square demonstrations. After almost three years of Beijing’s zero-COVID lockdown policy – which started as an emergency measure in Wuhan after the initial breakout of the novel coronavirus, but has become the way of life for millions across China – people are holding up blank pieces of paper and chanting slogans, including “down with the Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping.” Their message to the government: Enough is enough.
China’s lockdowns have been necessitated by the fragile state of its public health care system. The reality is that many of the elderly in China are still unvaccinated, and those who are have received the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccines, which authorities know are less effective than the Western mRNA vaccines that are banned from entering the country. China’s furthest-along mRNA vaccine is still going through clinical trials, and it will take time for factories to manufacture it in significant numbers if approved. If COVID-19 cases spread in China like they did in the rest of the world upon reopening, it could break the state health system.
Yet political considerations seem to be the main driver of Beijing’s decision-making. Xi Jinping has held up his zero-COVID policy as a massive personal success, and has used it to criticize the West; he even defended it in October’s Communist Party Congress, where he earned a historic third term as leader. However, the Chinese people clearly cannot abide these largely arbitrary lockdowns any longer – nor can the Chinese economy, which has stalled. This makes sense, given that employers can’t be sure which employees will turn up to work next week, retail companies can’t plan without knowing which areas will be under lockdown next, and manufacturers cannot guarantee production when workers refuse to be potentially forced to quarantine in factories suddenly and indefinitely. The protests and fear at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou campus, the world’s largest iPhone factory, should make all Apple users consider the human costs of their consumption.
Judging from our experience in Hong Kong, Chinese authorities will likely crack down hard on the “white paper” protest. Already, police have been out in force in cities, and protests have reportedly quieted after state censors worked overtime to suppress dissent on social media; Beijing has also started offloading blame for lockdowns to local authorities. I know firsthand that this regime will not back down when faced with the voices of the people, since the Communist Party’s legitimacy – and Mr. Xi’s – stems not from the people, but from the government’s brutal, authoritarian ways.
But the corollary of this is that the pressure rests entirely on Mr. Xi to resolve the crisis. How can he quash the protests in the long term, contain COVID-19 and restore the national economy, all without damaging his personal authority? It seems like an impossible task.
The same dilemma is playing out in Hong Kong. Its Beijing-approved Chief Executive John Lee is working to assure international finance and legal elites that things are back to normal, even while authorities launch an international investigation over the accidental playing of May Glory Be To Hong Kong – an anthem for the 2019 pro-democracy movement – at a rugby match in South Korea. And when pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai sought to have a top British barrister defend him on national security law charges, Mr. Lee asked China’s National People’s Congress to overrule Hong Kong’s top court so that foreign lawyers would be banned from such cases – another serious blow to judicial independence.
This is the Chinese paradox – and it feels increasingly untenable.