It Could Happen Here - Workers Protest in Modern China, Part 2

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Mia finishes her conversation with Cornell professor Eli Friedman and talks about the recent protestsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that you're listening to right now. It's your host, Christopher Long, and we are back with part two of our interview with Eli Friedman about the recent protests in China. i don't know movement discourse that was happening last year because it seems like the the kind of i don't know if nihilism is the right word but this kind of like collective understanding that the whole sort of bargain of the chinese social system of you know and this was to some extent extended to everyone right like the the bargain of the chinese social system of everyone keep your head down we'll all get rich together it suddenly became clear that this just wasn't going to happen.

I think in some sense it's possible to – you can put on your hard materialist hat and you can look at the number of hammers banging out and you can just look at the Chinese GDP graph over the last decade and be like, and be like okay well so eventually like when it when it when it hit like two percent eventually we were going to have protests but yeah i i guess i guess i i wanted to talk a bit about like yeah what lying flat was we covered this on the show a long time ago when it was happening but and then also sort of how that attitude shift was important or wasn't important. I don't know. Maybe it wasn't. I think it was, but yeah. I think it's very important, right? So yeah, you can't just be a crude materialist and like mechanically read social protest off of some chart of, you know,

falling profitability or something like that. But it is a cultural expression of real fundamental changes in the organization of the Chinese economy. Uh, you know, we already talked about how the post 89 generation was like, you go to college and like you come out and you know, you'll, you'll be middle class, right. On average. And that's just not at all the case anymore.

And young people in China and, and older people, middle-aged people, you know, who have children who are going through the system feel immense pressure and like immense competition in all spheres of life, beginning from a young age in elementary school all the way up through high school, through the super competitive and intense university admissions process. intense university admissions process. And then after graduating university and getting a job, and then getting a job that can, you know, can earn enough money to be able to afford an apartment. And so here we have to understand, you know, the cost of housing and all of the other costs associated with social reproduction. So like the cost of care workers, right? If middle-class people in places like Shanghai and Beijing expect to have domestic workers, you know, looking after their children, they expect to be able to hire tutors who can, you know, who can tutor their children in English or in math. And so just people feel under unbelievable pressure. And this is in a situation that part of the reason that the pressure has really ramped up is that there

are fewer um good paying jobs you know youth unemployment now in china is is around 20 percent um and so one of the responses to that is just forget about it or you know we're gonna lie flat uh we're gonna we're gonna reject all of this there's different expressions and i don't actually the other the sort of like you know sociologist in me is like And I don't actually, the sort of like, you know, sociologist in me is like, well, we don't actually have numbers to know how many people are lying flat. And like, that is true. Like maybe most people are still just going to work and, you know, doing their job, but there's enough, you know, stories and certainly in terms of cultural resonance of people just doing the bare minimum at work or working for short periods of time,

earning just enough money to survive and not worrying about meeting those kind of social expectations around buying a car, buying an apartment, getting married, having kids, because people just see it as kind of hopeless. And so I think that's a really important backdrop because we have to understand at some level that these protests are about a sense of hopelessness, right? Be it economic opportunities, be it the political system where Xi Jinping is going to reign as long as he wants, or be it zero COVID where, you know, at any given moment, you're going to be locked inside your apartment and you're not going to be able to see your friends or do anything. So, yeah, so I think it's very relevant. Yeah. And I wanted, I guess, also to, this is something I talk about on this podcast a lot, but I need to like – I want to like drill into people's heads.

Like just the sheer amount that people in China are working, just like the number of hours, the number of days a week, the amount of effort that is being put in is like – it is, it is, it is a level of raw surplus value extraction that like, like, like most places in the world haven't seen in like a quarter, like in, in like half a century, it is like, or even longer than that. Like it is, it is a,

a truly stunning, like a truly stunning level of exploitation in terms of things like 996, in terms of the people who are working schedules that are way worse than that, who don't really ever get like, talked about because they're not tech workers or they're not people who have sort of like a platform

Chinese society. Yeah. It's extremely normalized. You know, I mean like, the 996 thing which which first of all it is maybe worth mentioning that china legally has a 40-hour work week you're only allowed to work 36 hours of overtime a month right so probably you know not more than 49 or 50 hours a week that's that's like the legal yeah the legal standard nobody even remotely pretends like that is a thing in any industry.

There's legal debates about whether it applies to professional white-collar salaried workers or not. But when the 996 thing came out and there was a pretty cool, I think, movement based mostly online among tech workers, it was great. It was very inspiring. And also every single blue collar worker in China was like, we've been waiting for decades, you know? Um, and so, so it is, it is very normal across these, these different kinds of, of stratum for sure. Um, one of the cool things about nine eight six is people were, were, were revolting against it and saying like, this is an unacceptable way to live. And again, it comes back to this whole thing of like all of these feelings of, you know, these enhanced pressures, right. Where it's just

like, how do I live in this city? How do I find like decent housing? Like if, you know, if I want to have like a social life, which is the thing that some people in their 20s want to have, you know, like, how do I do that? It's impossible under those circumstances. So so again, like you can't read these movements mechanically off of these these these structural changes. But like that is a thing that has been happening that is unresolved. It's not at least for the, you know, the the the blank paper protesters the kind of the more elite students and stuff they haven't specifically articulated um their grievances as labor demands um but it's it's at least an important backdrop to what's happening today yeah and i think it's

i remember like. I think I think this was like mid 2019. I'm trying to remember when I when I saw this specific video, but there was a video from the Hong Kong protests that was like in some ways it was like literally one of these classic like like sort of Twitter things. But like, what do you want out? What do you want to do after the revolution? And it was like most of it was like,, what do you want out? What do you want to do after the revolution? And it was like, most of it was like, I want to start a bakery. Like I want to work in a library.

And it strikes me that there's these things that get subsumed under, you know, when you see a pro-democracy movement, right? When you see, you know, like the sort of, well,

I guess there's something interesting to hear about the like, like day one of the protest, there were a lot of videos that were talking about Iran. And that kind of seemed to like – like the very early videos were about sort of solidarity with the protest in Urumqi. And then like it was like specifically tying that to Iran and then to sort of pro-democracy demands. iran and then to sort of pro-democracy demands and then later on you get the sort of like uh like the the shanghai like down with the party down with xi jinping like we want democracy and free speech stuff but it strikes me that like a lot of the times when you see people making those demands it's because they think that like you know it's like there there's a whole set of of like things that they like things that they

believe about the future and about what will happen in the future that are like not articulated in the demands but if you talk about if you talk about them like if you talk to people about what they think is going to happen after that there's this whole sort of like opening up of social stuff that they think will be like the necessary results of like the end of the one party state and it's like you know i don't want him like i i don't know i had of the one party state. And it's like, you know, I don't want him like, I don't know. I had this debate a lot with like, like there's a specific kind of like Chinese international student you get

in the U S who like comes to the U S and is like immediately like enormously enamored with us. It's sort of the mirror image of how we have a bunch of people who are like incredibly enamored with the Chinese state. And then you get people who come here and are like incredibly enamored the american state and it's like well yeah okay this politician will see you and they will talk to you however comma in about two years they will be voting to throw you in prison so like yeah but like obviously like both people in china understand the chinese system sucks and that the promises that people like in the u.s believe about it are fake and then people

in the u.s understand that you can get a multi-party democracy and things could still be absolutely shit but yeah yeah you know it strikes me that there's a lot of stuff sort of embedded in in in these demands that are like not really explicitly articulated until later and that's also i guess been a hard part about these protests is that like i don't know it's hard to get information out. You can get short interviews with people. Mostly what you're getting are like 30 seconds of footage of people yelling at a cop. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot going on. opening and then instantly you have protests in like all of these cities all over the country dozens of universities protest among you know working-class migrants like middle-class people in shanghai like you know all across the country like that suggests that people have a variety of sets of grievances and they're kind of funneling them through this this meta-narrative around ending the lockdown which is not to diminish the significance of the actual lockdowns, which are causing real human suffering. But there's definitely a lot going on.

And, you know, one of the big ones is what's happening in Xinjiang. Like, we still don't really know how Uyghurs are feeling about all of this. The fact that, like, all the protests in the big Eastern cities are about commemorating what happened in Urumqi in a fire that killed mostly, if not exclusively Uyghurs, like that, that, that deserves to be talked about.

We don't really know how like the Han people on the streets in the Eastern cities, like if they're thinking about this, this backdrop of, you know, massive repression, surveillance and mass internment of, of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities um but that's another thing uh and and I think the same thing goes for the treatment of migrant workers in in Foxconn and these other um blue-collar workers who are put into the closed loop like to what extent

are urban um Han people still kind of willing to go along with sacrificing migrant workers and treating them as second class citizens? Or is there a possibility of developing some real sense of solidarity with ending not just the closed loop, but ending, you know, like hukou based discrimination, ending the camps in Xinjiang? You know, I mean, you can kind of spin out from there if you are interested in thinking about what it would mean to democratize China in like a, in a robust sense of the word. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter.

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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.

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and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think points that I never think about these protests that are complicated, right? Which is that like, they are cross-class in a lot of ways but i don't know it seems to me like the way they're manifesting is very much down class lines like okay i i genuinely don't understand what's going on in guangzhou that like every single video i see out of guangzhou is like 70 people throwing bottles at a cop and

like every video i see out of like shanghai is like six people holding bottles at a cop. And like every video I see out of like Shanghai is like six people holding a piece of paper. But it very much seems like, you know, like when, when, when, when the cops are getting to like these,

these sort of like these working class neighborhoods, these neighborhoods that are like informal housing, these neighborhoods that are full of migrant workers, there are these really, really intense conflicts with the police in ways that like kind of aren't happening. Well, I mean, okay, that's because that kind of stuff seems to be happening in a room. And I think it's happening there partially because, you know, this is like, well, OK, I don't know off the top of my head whether that's more militarized than Tibet.

But like one of the most militarized, like one of the most heavily policed places in China. Also, people are just really like the immediate and palpable anger seems to be the highest there because, you know, I mean, like, like it, you're going to be more pissed off when it's people in your city or like, you know, you, you maybe were like three blocks away from this fire. Yeah. As it like kills these people. But yeah, one of piece about about urmchi is that they've been in some form of lockdown for like 100 days yeah you know yeah so that's not and and part of that has to do with the fact that it is this colonial setting where they feel like they can do things to people that they can't do in beijing and china like people in china are not going to do that right it's just like it's inconceivable um there's obviously a lot of Han people and Ernqi is actually a majority

Han city. Yeah, I think it's like 70% Han now. Yeah. I think. Yeah. That sounds right to me. And Xinjiang is increasingly Han as well, although I believe Uyghurs still constitute a plurality. So, you know, there's just like each

the lockdowns kind of filter down to these different localities and into different communities with their different social and class compositions in different kinds of ways and have different kinds of effects, right? So you can put people in lockdown in Xinjiang for 100 days and they're going to be really pissed when they get out. In the case of Guangzhou, you know, this was also part of the sequence that I think has been written out of the official narrative. It's not, it wasn't just Foxconn. You had the initial Foxconn escape in late October, early November, and then you had these pretty intense riots that happened in Guangzhou, but those were in these urban villages, so-called urban villages, largely informal housing, very densely populated that are overwhelmingly migrant workers. And in this case, it was mostly people from Hubei, which is where Wuhan is. And so just those migrant communities were put into lockdown in Guangzhou.

So if you were over in Tianhe District, which is the newer, fancier part of Guangzhou with lots of high rises, you know, those places were not under lockdown. Jesus! And so they put the migrant communities, and I saw some like really not nice stuff, you know, people just being like, oh yeah, you know, the local Guangzhou people on the other side of the river are just like going about their life and they're okay with what's happening to the migrants.

And the migrants were, as is the case in some of these earlier lockdowns, actually facing real subsistence crisis. Like they didn't have enough food to eat and they couldn't leave to try to get food. So that's why you saw these super intense riots. And that's why you see them confronting the police and, you know, screaming at them, throwing things at them. You see tear gas, all of these things. Yeah, I think that's the only place I've seen tear gas so far.

Like maybe in a room sheet. There may have been a video. I don't remember specifically about a room sheet, but definitely like Guangzhou is the only place I've seen that level of repression. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, you know, the Zhengzhou Foxconn was probably the most violent in the largest scale. But, you know, that was a little bit different.

Guangzhou, it's kind of like smaller streets. They're fighting street by street. So they have a different experience. People in Shanghai, again, not to minimize their demands, and I think it's important for people to find points of commonality against this policy. But it's not like that if you're a middle class person, Han person in Shanghai, which is, again, not to minimize the very real difficulties that those folks have been facing as well. Something this kind of, you know, I think there's like another group of people who we

should probably talk about a little bit, which is like this sort of downwardly mobile class of business owners who've been kind of just getting annihilated by the lockdowns and this is that that happened in the u.s too although yeah the chinese version of it seems they're like less marginally less absolutely psychotic like they haven't tried they haven't tried to like kidnap a governor yet like they're not like they're not as fascist as their american counterparts fewer guns for sure yeah but it's it's it seems it seems like there's a kind of interesting i don't know there's there's a class dynamic that kind of reminds me of occupy in that you have this sort of like kind of tenuous alliance between like some some parts of the

working class these elite students and like this downwardly mobile middle class but it strikes me that you know i mean the the sort of defining thing about occupying i think like the defining thing about the whole sort of 2011 2013 wave of protests was that like it was it was really really easy to get people together into a physical space and when when you were in that single physical space it was like you know it's not like class disappeared but it was like you know it was it was it was it was it was a way in which sort of like classes were mixing and you could form this new kind of like identity based around like what you're doing in this place and it doesn't really seem like that's possible here it really seems like i don't know like it

there's these huge like you know it this this is a protest that is like happening in a lot of different places at the same time but it's like it doesn't they're segmented yeah they're segmented they don't they don't they don't really have a sort of like cohesive social identity that in a way that you could get out of a bunch of people being in the same place. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean, they're spatially segmented. Someone pointed out on Twitter, I can't remember who, but they're drawing comparisons to the 1989 protests and the kind of the physical arrangements where people were living. And so particularly given the online censorship, like that's been really important. So you have these

worker dormitories and Foxconn, like you can organize by actually talking to people or student dormitories. Right. And then you have much smaller protests among the, you know, the middle class people who are able to circulate things online. And so the consequence of that is they are pretty segmented. And I think, you know, everyone has their own grievance with zero COVID. But those grievances are actually pretty different, right? So the Foxconn workers don't like the closed loop management system where, you know, where they can't leave or where they're subjected to unsafe conditions, etc. You know, the petty bourgeoisie, like they don't like the fact that there's no foot traffic, you know, coming into

their shops, right? And I don't know if you saw the video of the guy like kicking down the wall with a soup ladle on his yeah yeah i was thinking about that specifically yeah i mean it was it was very theatrical and dramatic and uh and a great video you know in terms of like the class position i'm yeah you can see how it can kind of capsize into fash yeah quickly um and then like the students uh you know they want to be able to live normal student lives and like leave their dormitories and that's a thing that i think students anywhere can associate with so it's like yeah they're all against the zero covid policy but then it's kind of like what are their politics after that and i think if if this is going to open up um you know some kind of more

expansive political vision like it's going to be hard to maintain that like that unity right the students are already talking about like you know censorship freedom of speech those things which i support i think are very good you're probably not going to get the petty bourgeoisie to like risk arrest and violence with the cops you know over like holding up a blank white piece of paper, you know, and then the migrant workers have another whole set of things, you know, around like basic like health infrastructure, like, you know, can they get access to decent health care in the places where they're where they're living? And that's not going to resonate to the same extent with the students. So, you know, yeah, the one I think about a lot was like there was a video going around

at this guy being like, I don't care about politics. I just want to go to the movies. And I was like, this is the most American person in China. Like, this is the one person that I'm like, OK, like, you know, and like there is that kind of sort of like I just I just want to live my normal life. Like, sure. Thing that's happening. And then that I think is a kind of recognizable American impulse, but then you have the stuff that's like, did you see, did you see those pictures that were going around of like the, the, the, the hospitals they were putting migrant workers in were just like the entire bathroom floor is just like covered in poop. And like, no, it's awful.

Yeah. It was like the whole, whole bathroom floors are just flooded. There's like, just like the, the, the, the, you can't flush toilet paper down it. So there's just these like mountains of toilet paper. you can't flush toilet paper down it so there's just these like mountains of toilet paper and i think like oh god yeah it's awful like the difference between the people whose things are like i want to go to the movies and the people whose demand is like please stop locking me in this like like like you know that was i guess i guess the other sort of lost thing that seemed to be pretty big in Chinese social media that I don't that wasn't talked about much here was that there was this bus that capsized that killed like 27 people who were being taken like to a facility specifically to hold.

Like, you know, this is like one of these sort of like I don't I don't even really want to dignify them by calling them hospitals because they're like just a complete disaster. But where people were being held because they had COVID. Quarantine centers. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know. It seems like there's a really big sort of like – I guess it's like the protests are reflecting all of the sort of like existing class divides in Chinese society in ways that I think are pretty obvious

if you look at it which I guess in some sense like this does strike me as the most Tiananmen-esque thing the most Tiananmen-esque thing about it is the way that the media has been like specifically covering the grievances of exactly like two groups of people which is like

the students and like the petit bourgeois and then all of the labor stuff has just vanished after about day two yeah yeah yeah for sure um and i i mean i don't have much optimism that that that the coverage will change um but you know, there is an experience that middle class people, I think, have had pretty acutely going back, at least to the Shanghai lockdown, of this realization that there actually are no limits on state power.

Yeah. Right? And that to them was kind of like a shock. You know, they're like, oh, like I thought I was just going to be able to go about my life, like as long as I didn't thought I was just going to be able to go about my life. Like as long as I didn't, you know, demand to be able to vote for the president, like I can have a job. I can, you know, go eat hot pot or, you know, get whatever kind of delicious food I want living in these big cities.

I can travel internationally. You know, all of these things are, you know, more or less OK. There's been lots of, you know, there's lots of other people in Chinese society for whom that's never been the experience, right? Most importantly, the minorities and the workers and the migrant workers who have always, you know, experienced that raw and unchecked power of the state. And so, you know, does this have the capacity to kind of bring them together? You know, it's going to be extremely difficult to do, especially because there aren't like spaces for political organizing and working through these differences in a constructive way. Yeah, I mean, I will say the one thing that kind of that strikes me is something that like is just different about this cycle.

Is it like I don't know, I don't like i don't think i've ever seen in my lifetime outside of like really tiny maoist sex like people openly calling for the downfall of the government yeah like just in in a kind of like large systemic way and like it it it seems like i don't know maybe the censors will sort of get control back, but it really seems like there's been this kind of floodgate that's opened where suddenly, like, there was this brief moment where, like, it suddenly became possible to talk about things where, you know, like two months ago, it was like one guy laid a sign on a bridge and, like, this was like the biggest thing that had ever happened in Chinese society, whatever, et cetera, et cetera. And then suddenly, like, you know, you just have people on the streets of Shanghai, like just chanting stuff that wasn't even on that banner. And like, yeah, I don't know, like it really seems like. Like, it's not like they've actually like fully lost control of the country or anything like they're not even close to that, but it's like the sort of like the sort of regime of terror and fear that had been in place to keep people from doing this kind of stuff has fallen off a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I'd be very curious to know what the vibe is like in China, and obviously I have not been there for a while.

But like, and this is wildly speculative, and if you have any Chinese listeners who want to correct me, I would be glad to have some more information about this. But my feeling from afar is that, you know, like Xi Jinping is just like you can't you can't say anything about him. And that even in like private spaces, you know, people just like don't feel like the ability to kind of imagine something different. And like, that has been changed. Like, I don't think we're going to see a lot more people on the streets chanting down with Xi Jinping, down with the communist party. Like that's, you know, it's a risky, it's a risky thing to do. But I do think that like now at least people know that there's other, other people in the country that are thinking the same things that they're thinking. And then at least within, you know, like know like you know face-to-face interactions

that people might be a little bit more willing to kind of say like oh like these protests happen that was pretty crazy like let's talk about that um and so so that to me is optimistic um and i do hope that more of this organizing can take place you know offline because i think that's the only safe way to do it yeah um so so yeah i i i think something has changed significantly and you see it here you know i mean i've been teaching chinese students for 10 years um there's no question that people are interested um in talking about things now in a more open way than was the case a couple of years ago. And like here at Cornell,

we had, we had a little vigil for, um, for him. She as well. And people were chanting, you know, down with Xi Jinping,

um, which is kind of like, okay, you're, you know, you're in Ithaca, New York. Like it's not dangerous.

Well, I think students feel it to be dangerous and definitely a month or two ago would have felt it to be quite dangerous so yeah and i guess we probably shouldn't like completely downplay the fact that like the ccp has international networks in a way that's for sure like the way it tends to get covered in the press is very sort of like this kind of like right-wing fear-mongering but it's like no these people do exist and like yeah like it is possible for you to like tweet something while you're in the u.s and then like someone in china finds out about it and things start to go very badly for you very quickly and that's for sure like that's that's

that's a real danger that yeah and and regardless of of how many spies there are how pervasive they are like it is a real experience a real fear that chinese students here have right they don't feel comfortable you know they might feel more comfortable speaking openly here than they do actually within china but they still don't feel totally free and and that is a very widespread sentiment welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. 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.

Experience the horrors 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 podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has 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 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 Thank you. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I guess sort of in closing i don't know my i don't think anyone can really have much of an analysis that's better than them guessing about what's going to happen next because this already was something that like two weeks ago like if you'd ask anyone like anyone in

china or outside of china who wasn't like i don't know like in the fallen gong or something whether whether they were suddenly going to be large still like protested china everyone would have been like are you nuts yeah but yeah i'm wondering how what you think is going to happen next i don't know my my my sort of tentative read of it was like it it seems like I don't know it seems to me that for for a very very long time the Chinese political system was specifically set up to stop this like like this this was the exact thing it was it was designed to make sure there would never be another sort of like like there would never be a a large well you know we don't know how how long this is going to go on right but there was there was never there would never be a large well you know we don't know how how long this is going to go on

right but there was there was never there was never supposed to be another street movement that was like coordinated between cities that was large and that had real political demands and you know you know i like i i i don't know i maybe maybe i could i could be the most wrong i've ever been but i i cannot imagine this like this specific round of protests really like challenging the government at all. Like, I don't know, something would have to like, I don't know, like aliens would have to like descend from the sky or something. Like, I don't know. I don't think they can do it. But the frequency at which these kinds of things break out has been increasing steadily for the past probably 20 or 30 years.

I mean, the 90s are sort of a low point for this stuff. But, you know, like if you're in a country like Ecuador, right, you've seen like two pretty large scale like mass street movements in like three years. Right. mass street movements in like three years right and you know it seems to be sort of broadly the the there's there's been this sort of like the the the decaying economic conditions are combined with this like the general decaying ability of the state to prevent like a subsequent movement from from unfolding and so i don't know like i i i my sense is that this one's not going to do anything but we might see another one of these in like three years or something yeah i don't think we're gonna see this movement in the in the weeks and months to come to like

cohere into this like massive politically potent force that has the capacity to either continue to exert demands on the central state or threaten state power like i don't think that that's going to happen um i do think i think i think the first thing is to acknowledge and to chalk up the victories that have already been um won yeah so foxconn foxconn workers got paid you know they went out they rioted ten thousand or something like that foxconn's like here's ten thousand out and they rioted. Yeah, they got like 10,000 yuan or something like that. Foxconn's like, here's 10,000 yuan for you to leave, not even for you to do your job.

And those were workers that came in after the other workers escaped. So they had been there in quarantine for like a couple days, rioted, got 10,000 yuan, which is like almost 1,500 US dollars. So they did really well. But I think more broadly, around the zero COVID, the government has already made changes. They will never acknowledge we're doing this because people protested, like that's not how they operate. But, you know, they said, okay, we're actually going to get more serious about vaccinating people, which is what they need to do in order to have sort of an exit

strategy. There've been some, some signals, low key ones about further loosening. I mean, I think that there's a real question about how they go about doing this, because if they just let it rip tomorrow, like actually hundreds of thousands of people will die. Yeah. So like, I think that what they need to do is they need to vaccinate people and they need to build a real public health infrastructure that includes migrant workers. But you know, that's, we'll see if that happens. So, so I think that those are already victories like which, which we should, which, you know, we should take account of. And I think moving forward,

the ability to repress like the, the, the street demonstrations should not be under underestimated. Like the state has immense resources at its capacity. I don't think that we're going to continue to see people chanting, you know, down with the communist party in the streets regularly. Um, so I think that they'll be able to at least push that down a little bit. And maybe with some concessions, people will be satisfied. You know, the, the guy who just wants to be able to go to the movie, like next year, this time, there's a good chance he will just be able to go to the movies to kind of of continue with my labor-centric perspective, though, I think it's going to be harder for workers. I think it's

going to be harder for them to repress that. As long as the closed-loop management systems are in effect and lockdowns are happening, I mean, it just puts insane demands on these workers. And there were revolts against it when it first happened in Shanghai back in April. And I think that those will continue to exist. But I think we'll probably see this kind of reversion to what's existed for the last couple of decades, which is lots of, you know, small scale, somewhat manageable and localized protests. The question is like, does this kind of open up the possibility of politicization, which we have not really seen since 1989 in a robust way at least? And so does this kind of

open up some of those possibilities so those local protests can begin to speak to each other with some sort of common language and cohere some kind of political force that's harder for the state to tame um we'll see yeah and i guess i guess the the other sort of x factor here is like can can can the ccp get the growth rate above like five percent no but yeah like that's like yeah i i i don't i don't know how they do it like that i don't know like i i short of like short of like actually just letting all of the sort of like like all all of the sort of like slack and excess capacity just get like you know just just like intentionally tanking the entire economy and just like running all of these sort of unprofitable businesses into the ground like

yeah i don't see how they do that and that does seem to me like you know to be a kind of like the the sort of like looming horizon over i mean this and this is really true of everyone like the the sort of looming horizon over like every government in the world has been that the growth rate has been collapsing for like the last 40 years and yeah china was you know the chinese economy was like the last thing that was really driving it and that's like not really true anymore it's it's a disaster i mean and then even even without covid it was sort of like not going great i mean it wasn't like you know i mean it hadn't reached like it hadn't like reached like you know like recession or it hadn't really reached like sort of post-industrialized country levels of like here's your two percent growth every year

be happy with it but like i don't know yeah but but the growth i mean this is maybe like another whole conversation but like the growth has become less effective right yeah? Yeah, yeah. It's this like investment-led growth. There's massive growth in debt. And they can, you know, build another bridge, build another airport. I mean, they're not building the apartment blocks as much anymore, but they do that. They can prop up their growth a little bit, right? But like the fundamental problem

that they've been unable to address is like increasing domestic consumption, having a more equitable model of growth. And the reason that they can't do that is fundamentally a political problem. They can't figure out a way to give working class people more money and to give them some social protections. And until they resolve that political problem, I just don't see them being able to deal with with that economic problem so that means you are going to continue to have this kind of ongoing forms of stagnation zero covid really hurts it a lot more of course the geopolitical conflict with the u.s and and biden you know

trying to economically kneecap them like that doesn't help and then the demographics of you know like all of these things are making making making their lives much more difficult. And so one way to interpret what's happened, um, under, under zero COVID is the expansion of a massive and terrifying surveillance state that will allow them to weather whatever political storms are coming in the future. Yeah. And I guess, I don't know. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll see. We'll see whether that works for

them i am somewhat skeptical in that like i don't know like good luck uh actually terrible luck i hope it goes badly for them the worst of luck yeah for sure yeah so eli thank you so much for coming on the show yeah it's been a pleasure, and okay, where can people find you and find the stuff that you do? Well, I'm on Twitter, as long as it's still there, Eli D. Friedman. And yeah, I'm on the internet. That's the main place. If you're in Ithaca, come on by. All right.

Yeah, this has been It Could Happen Here. Drag every government into perpetual and terminal crisis until it stops existing. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the 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 Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.