It Could Happen Here - The Uprising Returns to China

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Mia Wong introduces the new wave of mass street protests and worker uprisings in ChinaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. We live in an age of uprising. From Haiti to Hong Kong, from Ecuador to Sudan, from Chile to Myanmar, from the US to Iran, an entire generation has been confronted with the horror of our world, and took the simple expedient of picking up a brick and throwing it at a cop. Yet as the uprising swept the globe, there was one country where it was considered impossible. Every expert, every policymaker, every kid on a street corner knew there was simply no chance of a mass street movement in China. On Monday, it was unimaginable. On Friday, it was everywhere.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. What we've been watching for the past three weeks now is the failure of one of the most sophisticated political regimes in human history. A political, social, and economic regime designed specifically to stop this one moment. After 30 years of repression, the national mass street movement has returned to China. This is what it was all about. Everything from the censorship policies to union busting to subsidized mortgages for a rising Chinese middle class. It was about keeping people from going back to the streets, to make even the idea of it impossible. And yet, here we are. In one sense, the party has little to fear from this round of protests, barring an immense

intensification of violence which, at the moment, seems extremely unlikely. But in another sense, the CCP is perhaps the last regime on earth that truly remembers the previous age of revolution, that remembers when the workers took Shanghai in 67 and very nearly took Beijing in 89. These are people who understand that China's political system is built on shaving a sleeping bear. And no matter how profitable that system is, there's always a chance that one day, that bear is going to wake up. Now, the bear isn't fully awake yet, we are not watching in China a full-scale uprising a la Sudan or Myanmar, but that bear, the heir to maybe the most militant

working class the modern world has ever seen, is starting to open its eyes. So what is the CCP currently facing? Since about November 26th, there have been widespread anti-government protests in China. Unlike anything we've seen in the last 30 years, these protests are everywhere. They're in Beijing, they're in Nanjing, they're in Shanghai, they're in Guangzhou, they're in Xinjiang, we'll get back to that one in a second, they're in Wuhan. Reports I saw said that there were protests at 77 universities. That number is almost certainly an undercount now. And these student protests are not just taking place at small colleges in the middle of nowhere. There were protests at Tsinghua

University, which, for an American audience, I would compare to China's version of Harvard. It's the college that produces the upper echelon of the Chinese ruling class. version of Harvard. It's the college that produces the upper echelon of the Chinese ruling class. Xi Jinping graduated from there. So did his predecessor Hu Jintao, and the only reason that Hu Jintao's predecessor did not graduate from there is that that guy was so old that he went to college under the Japanese occupation. When I was originally writing this, I had a joke here about how the only city where there haven't been protests is Harbin, which is the city in the absolute middle of nowhere in northern China. But no, I googled it, and it turns out there have been protests in bloody Harbin. For people who aren't very good at Chinese geography, which is probably

most people, this means these protests are everywhere. They're in the north, they're in the south, they're in the east, they're in the west, they're in the far west. And it's true that a lot of these protests are not that big, although some of them are absolutely massive. But the importance here is that this is the first time in 30 years that we've seen widespread national protest over a single issue in China, the enormity of which is compounded by the fact that people in the streets of cities like Shanghai are openly calling for the fall of the CCP and Xi Jinping, something that by itself can get you a decade in prison just for saying. We can ask what these protests are actually about. The version you see in the American press is that these are anti-lockdown protests or protests against

China's COVID zero policy, or that they're also pro-democracy protests against the entire regime. And this is sort of true as far as it goes, but it doesn't capture the core of what's going on, which is that what we're seeing is a widespread fusion of labor rebellion, anti-police brutality protests, and a revolt against the authoritarian state. The thing that's brought all of this together is the CCP's COVID policy, but that's because that policy is the most visible and most concentrated expression of the state's general authoritarianism and brutal war against the working class. We can learn a lot about what's actually been happening by going back a little bit

to the very start of the protests. There are three specific events that sparked the protests, two of which are pretty well covered, and one of which has been basically ignored because of how long ago it happened. The first spark is essentially an event in its own right. This is what I would call the Foxconn Revolt, a series of worker uprisings against a manufacturer of the iPhone, which, with a single factory, controls vast portions of the regional economy of Hainan province, where its largest factory is based. The Foxconn revolt has been brewing for a long time. It began essentially when Foxconn began to impose what's called the closed-loop system. The closed-loop system was originally developed by the NBA to run an NBA season during the

beginning of the pandemic. The idea is that you keep everyone inside a closed loop. This means that everyone in the production process has no contact with the outside world at all for as long as the manufacturing cycle goes. The CCP started adopting the closed loop as they hit problems with their twin imperatives to both stop COVID and also to make sure that Foxconn hit its production targets so Apple could have enough iPhones for the Christmas rush. The result was that as an October wave of infections hit Hainan province, where Foxconn's largest factory was located, 200,000 workers were put into a closed-loop system, which meant they were trapped in the factory in their dormitories. In order to keep this factory running, Foxconn needs about 100,000 migrant workers.

The problem from Capital's perspective with migrant workers is that they can, if things get bad enough, just go home. And that's exactly what happens. Workers inside the Foxconn plant started to be quarantined with people who were sick in the same dormitory and it's worth noting here that these dormitories are tiny the conditions even outside of lockdown are atrocious and when people were suddenly getting quarantined with people who were sick workers essentially just said no and started to stage massive breakouts there are incredible videos of these trains of people like along the road walking home and sort of hitching rides on people's trucks fleeing the

factory. We don't actually know how many workers escaped, but it was enough to be a massive problem for capital. Again, they need these workers in order to make enough iPhones to sell for Christmas. Current estimates suggest that Apple is somewhere between 11 and 15 million units behind what it needs to make the Christmas rush. So, Foxconn had the local government recruiting people to go work in the factory. What they told these workers was that if they entered the closed loop for 30 days, they'd be given 3,000 yuan, which is about $415, to live on for the next month and then get paid 30 yuan or about $4 an hour. And then, after the end of the next 30 days, they'd get another 3,000 yuan. In the US, this would be a sub-minimum wage poverty job. For a Chinese worker,

this is a lot of money. Or it would have been, had it not been for one minor problem. All of it was bullshit. Foxconn and the CCP were lying out of their asses. After workers were already in the closed loop, they learned that the two 3,000 yuan bonuses weren't going to be paid until March and May of next year. Meaning that in order to get what they were promised for two months of work, they were going to have to work for seven months. Also, the 30 yuan an hour wage that they were promised was a lie. They were getting paid substantially less than that. So, on Tuesday, the 22nd of November, workers who had emerged from quarantine to start work,

only to learn that they had been systemically lied to by both the government and Chinese and Taiwanese capitalists, came out of their dormitories and demanded that they either get their money or be allowed to leave. There's another part of this account that I think complicates a lot of the sort of narratives that we've heard about what these Chinese protests are about that did not make the Western press at all, which is that these workers were also demanding that their bosses quote, implement pandemic prevention and control measures. It's not entirely clear what the specific demands refers to, but it seems to be about not quarantining sick people in the same dorms as healthy people, a thing that seems relatively obvious, but capitalism. Regardless,

the product of bosses ignoring these demands was several days of full-scale fighting with the police. On November 23rd, a bunch of videos began to spread of workers taking those metal police barricades that you see all the time in the US, that are essentially an arch with a bunch of bars snuck into a flat base, you've probably seen these, picking them up and straight up throwing them at cops or grabbing them and beating police riot shields with them. I have, I have never seen anything like it. It was absolutely wild. At this point, after several days of fighting, after their own regular security people literally refused to show up to go fight these workers and police from outside had to be called in, Foxconn gave up, said, okay, we will give you 10,000 yuan

to literally leave right now. Please just stop. And a lot of people took the money and left. And in any other year, in any other moment, that would have been the end of it. The Foxconn riots would be another episode in the never-ending series of They Tried Not to Pay Us Riots that are one of the most common forms of workers' protests in China. Instead, on Thanksgiving Day in the United States, videos started to circulate of a fire in a residential block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. There are several videos of the fire. In one that journalists were able to verify, you can hear people screaming from inside the building as they tried and failed to escape the flames. Further video showed that cops had barricaded off the streets with metal wires

as a way to enforce Xinjiang's 100-day-long lockdown, which prevented firefighters from getting to the scene. Firefighters can be seen firing water hoses at the building only for the hoses' arc to fall short. Trapped behind barricades that prevented them from getting any closer. Speculation about whether the doors of the apartment building themselves had been sealed shut with locks or barricaded from the outside, as had happened to so many other people's homes during the lockdown, ran rampant. One video I saw from another city appeared to show workers in hazmat suits, who've become known as the Big Whites, literally welding someone's

door shut to keep them in. To make matters worse, the head of the Urumqi City Fire Rescue Department blamed the families for their own deaths, saying, quote, some residents' abilities to rescue themselves were too weak. These are the videos, the fragments of nightmares brought to life, that started the mass protests. This is a revolution scene in 30-second intervals. Everyone is trying to beat the censors. Clips flow back and forth between WeChat, Twitter, Telegram, back to WeChat again. Ironically, many censors were already home for the weekend, allowing clips and posts that otherwise would have been removed immediately to circulate for hours, and sometimes even days. These brought back the memory of the third spark, the one that's

basically been forgotten about in the West, if anyone even cared to know about it in the first place. In September, a bus full of people with COVID in Guangzhou that the government was shipping to a quarantine center crashed and killed 27 people, wounding 20 others. Conditions in these centers, which COVID patients are often forced to go to rather than quarantining in their homes, are atrocious. Pictures and videos circulate constantly of bathrooms covered in human shit from failing drainage systems, as China's already overtaxed medical system simply failed to keep up with the demands on it placed by the government, which, like the American government, has and continues to systematically refuse to invest

in medical infrastructure. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. To bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley podcast. from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Intimate familiarity with these wretched conditions and the raw horror at the deaths in Xinjiang and Guangzhou sparked protests across the country. In Arumqi, a now 70% Han city under constant police occupation, Han protesters appeared to be moved in solidarity with the Uyghur families killed in the fire, and fought the police with a ferocity unmatched anywhere but the migrant worker villages of Guangzhou along the Pearl River Delta,

one of China's great manufacturing hubs. These desperate struggles were given relatively little attention by a Western media class enamored with the image of students carrying blank white pieces of paper to protest the censorship, a common form of protest in places like Hong Kong. This time, at least, they were tied to a particularly funny piece of media censorship. As protests mounted, people started posting an article version of a speech by Mao called Let the People Speak, The Sky Will Not Fall. Chinese censors quickly ran into a classic CCP problem, which is that in a state whose heroes are communist revolutionaries,

celebrated historical figures produce an immense repertoire of slogans and quotes for subsequent generations of revolutionaries to draw from, which has caused the CCP at various points in time to ban the opening of its own national anthem, Arise Ye Who Refuse to be Slaves. As censors banned Let the People Speak, the Sky Will Not Fall, people began posting the article but with the words replaced by squares. This, too, was also deleted. And then posting simply blank white squares themselves, which saw their reflection in the students in the street. The CCP, in turn, retreated to its

traditional tactic of blaming the protests on foreign forces interfering in China, a claim which is less than credible in a country that has rolled up the CIA's entire in-country intelligence network at least once in the last decade. There's an incredible exchange that has made the rounds between a cop who is telling a group of protesters that there are quote foreign forces around manipulating the protests who is immediately yelled at by a guy screaming who are the foreign forces marx and angles stalin and lenin another man appears and asks hi can i ask if it was foreign forces who started the fire in xinjiang was the guizhou bus overturned by foreign forces? Another man grabs the mic and says, was everyone told to come here by foreign forces? The crowd shouts no.

He then makes an incredibly obvious point. We can't even access the foreign internet. How are foreign forces meant to be communicating with us? Another man says, we only have domestic forces not allowing us to govern ourselves. Where are these foreign forces? From the moon? Still, managing these accusations has become a constant part of the protests. With calls from protesters to stop chanting things like down with the CCP in attempts to keep the demands focused on COVID policy, like ending COVID zero. And this is where things get incredibly muddled by a Western press that decided to stop giving a shit about COVID deaths a year ago, and a set of contrarians arguing that

no, actually, China's COVID policy is actually good. This entire debate hinges on the conflation of the state of government policy of zero COVID, which is an attempt to stop all cases of COVID, and the actual execution of the policy, which has taken the form of a war against China's working class and a set of draconian police state abuses. One thing that Western quote-unquote experts have been quick to point out is that, well, the CCP has to keep doing COVID zero or 1.5 million people will die. There is a tiny bit of truth to this in that one reason Chinese COVID restrictions are so harsh is that if COVID was simply let rip like it has been in the US,

it would go through China's largely unvaccinated rural elderly population like a chainsaw. And unlike in the US, if a million people died in China because the government fucked up a pandemic response, party officials would be getting beaten to death in the streets. And part of the reason for the crisis in China in the first place is that the rest of the world gave up on trying to contain COVID entirely. If the rest of the world had, you know, done their jobs and stamped out the virus, none of us would be here right now. On the other hand, no, absolutely not. You do not actually need to weld people into their houses or drag them by force out of their homes so they can die in bus crashes on their way to unsafe and unsanitary pseudo hospitals with bathroom floors literally covered shit in

order to contain the pandemic. Lots of pandemics across human history have been contained without doing this shit. Just because the two great world powers have decided that their COVID responses are kill a million people by forcing everyone back to work so that no one has to actually deal with the political consequences of telling a bunch of unbelievably deranged and heavily armed fascists no, and lock 200,000 people in a factory and force them to make iPhones and then beat the absolute shit out of them when it turns out you've lied to them about their pay, doesn't mean that there aren't other options that we could take for pandemic responses if we decided to stop letting a bunch of venal and corrupt assholes rule us all. And this is something that people in China also understand, even if the

Western press corps is dead set on presenting their demands as if they're American anti-maskers. Corps is dead set on presenting their demands as if they're American anti-maskers. You can tell, obviously, that Chinese protesters are not simply a copy of right-wing American fascists by simply looking at a picture of a protest and seeing how many people are wearing masks. China is not the US. Regular people actually do care about containing the pandemic. This is why there was a real pandemic response in the first place after the government utterly botched it. If you look at the actual demands of the protesters, you will see things that normally would seem more at home with liberal American protesters attempting to see pandemic restrictions enforced properly. Things like, our pandemic response must be based on science. But people, even people who don't want to die of a plague, do not want to be horribly abused by cops or horrifically exploited by the state and capitalists.

And that, I think, is something we do all understand. Only time can tell what will happen to these protests. The government is quietly making concessions and not so quietly hunting down people who took to the streets. It is entirely possible that the protest will simply die. And that, in two or three years, most people will have forgot they ever happened. From a sort of brutal materialist perspective, however, it seems unlikely. China's social system could function fine as long as growth was at 15%, or 10%, or even 8%. But when growth inevitably comes down to 2%, the deal of keep your head down and everyone will get rich starts to look a lot less attractive.

COVID has simply intensified all of the traditional contradictions inside Chinese society and made visible the horrors that previously had been obscured, and it seems unlikely that those contradictions will someday vanish. But here in the present, the impossible continues. And every day it does is another day that the gates of possibility inch a bit further open. This has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter or Instagram.

We have a website, coolzonemedia.com, where you can see the sources for this and other episodes. Enjoy your week and remember that you too can defeat your own ruling class. iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast curious about queer sexuality cruising

and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.