First, a backstory.
A few years ago my wife and I befriended a Chinese couple who were residing in the United States for an academic year. The husband was here on a PhD fellowship. The four of us became quite close, even traveling the Midwest together. I wanted them to see rural America as well as the more commonly attended urban centers.
They were among the most charming people I have ever met, The wife made Chinese dumplings for us; at a poker game with some of my university friends, the quadrilingual husband, having won several hands, declared ironically with especial delight in English, "I'm winning money, and I am a communist!"
One day, while the four of us were on the road coming back from another state, I mentioned the Tiananmen Square incident and asked the husband what his thoughts were. The what incident? was his reply. I reviewed its brief history and the news it made worldwide. The husband not only denied all knowledge of Tianammen, he denied it ever occurred. I assured him it did, but he again nodded no and I left it at that, not wanting to embarrass him.
I did not believe — I do not believe — that he was lying. He honestly had never heard of Tiananmen Square; the news blackout in China had been that effective. Plus the husband — who aspired to a high-level position in the Chinese government, which is why I have elided names — had been raised on the Beijing party line, that the foreign press was prone to invent stories about China's sociopolitical problems. He was presupposed to agree.
Flash forward to the present. "Protests erupted in cities and on campuses across China this weekend as frustrated and outraged citizens took to the streets in a stunning wave of demonstrations against the government’s 'zero covid' policy and the leaders enforcing it." The Washington Post adds that "such demonstrations are extremely rare in China, where authorities move quickly to stamp out all forms of dissent. Authorities are especially wary of protests at universities, the site of pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 that spread across the country and ended in a bloody crackdown and massacre around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square."
Even though the 1989 demonstrations themselves "spread across the country," news of the Tiananmen Square incident reached only a small portion of the Chinese population. Most citizens, such as our visiting friends, never heard or learned of the incident. Chinese news blackouts are that efficient. And if the blackout fails to impose quiet, the government's "bloody crackdown" will.
Which brings me to this. Yesterday I came across this tweet by Mr. Wittes, a Brookings senior fellow in governance studies whom I follow also because of his Lawfare site.
Regime change: China.
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) November 28, 2022
Wittes's tweet was the most economical among the many I had seen predicting a revolution. But his tweet especially stood out because its author is a scholar of government studies. And yet even he appears to believe that Xi Jinping's enhanced technological artistry in censorship and imminent brutal crackdown will fail to quell China's unrest.
My personal story is but anecdotal, I grant you that. But the experience made me appreciate what two utterly different worlds the Chinese people and we "others" live in. I don't know how many among China's population of 1.4 billion people are aware of today's protests in Shangai and the like, but I'd wager the number is minuscule, speaking relatively. And of those who are aware, an even tinier fraction is likely to brave a bloody crackdown, which, I imagine, President Xi is now planning and shall soon execute.
Would that it were not so. I join Wittes et al. in hope, however the hope is colored by realism — shades of Stalin's reflection on potential social unrest leading to revolution: "How many divisions does the pope have?"
Someday, perhaps. Not today, though.