Today, Explained - China’s biggest protests since Tiananmen Square

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

The protests in China might force the government to back down from its extreme Covid restrictions and ramp up its extreme surveillance programs. The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Chin explains. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and edited by Sean Rameswaram who also hosted. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Maybe you've heard the Chinese people have been protesting. Don't let the revolution change! But maybe you didn't hear, these are the biggest protests in China since Tiananmen Square over 30 years ago. And they're about COVID restrictions. They spread all around the country, including to college campuses. And they really are by far the most widespread, unified show of defiance that the Communist Party has seen

in at least three or four decades. Most surprising of all, the protests might prove to be effective. They might force the Chinese government to back down. That's ahead on Today Explained. Don't let the sun set you free! Don't let the sun set you free! Don't let the sun set you free! Don't let the sun set you free!

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from here with Josh Chin, Deputy China Bureau Chief at The Wall Street Journal, who's here to tell us about the, dare I say, historic protests in China. So these protests began actually in a really remote area of the country known as Xinjiang. It's in the far northwest, right on the border of kind of the doorstep of Central Asia. And they started because of a fire in a residential building there that ended up killing 10 people. Thursday night, just before 8pm local time, and a blaze basically broke out on the 15th floor of this apartment building, apparently due to an electrical socket.

And there's been questions since about whether or not residents were able to leave. One of the reasons people died, at least one of the reasons residents suspect people died, is that the fire trucks were obstructed by various zero COVID measures. The rescuers weren't able to get to the building to put out the fire in time. It took them roughly three hours. Videos show fire trucks unable to get close to the scene because the compound entrance was partially blocked. The video shows it's blocked with fences, tents, and metal barriers that are normally used as part of COVID measures. The backstory to this is that Xinjiang as a region has been under COVID lockdown for more than 100 days.

Restrictions have been in place there since August. They are some of the most draconian lockdowns in the country. You know, people there, like people elsewhere in China, but more so, are just run ragged by this experience, by living under lockdown. And this fire really catalyzed a sort of explosion of public anger in that city, and protests broke out there. Demonstrators apparently arguing with officials and chanting, lift the COVID lockdown, and trying to break through barriers too. Then they started spreading around the country.

Protests have erupted in Beijing, in Shanghai, in Wuhan, in Guangzhou. What's really interesting about this is that Xinjiang normally is a place that doesn't actually attract a lot of attention in China. It's a very locked down place even before COVID. The government there has been carrying out sort of ethnic re-engineering campaign there against Uyghurs the main sort of Turkic Muslim group that lives there but I think in this in this case because you have so many people in China uh living under lockdown or who have experienced lockdown in the past where you know maybe their doors were locked on them from

the outside or their buildings were obstructed a lot of people in China could look at this fire and easily imagine themselves being trapped in a building without rescue. Because during the COVID-0 policies, many Chinese people are living in hell. How does this tragedy lead to protest? How quickly does that happen? You know, in this case, the fire happened on Thursday night, last Thursday, and the protests broke out the next day in Urumqi, in the city where they happened. Extraordinary videos coming out of Xinjiang province, showing hundreds of people taking to the streets, protesting against this zero COVID chaos.

You know, I mean, this does happen from time to time in China. You do have localized protests. In fact, it happens all the time. People get angry with local governments and how they're handling things. And usually there's a little bit of tolerance for that. But in this instance, the protests didn't stay local. They spread, you know, around the country, which is actually a real nightmare scenario for the Chinese government. It's actually the one thing that they work the hardest to prevent is this sort of any kind of expression of nationwide, unified nationwide dissent. How exactly does that happen? And how does this get to be the biggest protest movement in China since Tiananmen?

Yeah, you know, I mean, it's really interesting in China, right? Because you just you assume that this place is under such heavy control by the Communist Party, there's a massive censorship. And so it is, you know, looking at it from the outside, it is quite surprising that people were able to, information was able to spread, you know, one way that this did spread was, I mean, it was on Chinese social media was able to take advantage of a sort of loophole or flaw in the Chinese censorship system, which is that there's always a bit of a lag between when some major event happens and when the censors are able to sort of figure out what people are saying

and train the censorship algorithms to take it down. So I think that's what happened in this case. You had a lot of people posting images of the fire just on WeChat, which is the super app in China that everybody uses, and on other social media platforms. The video shows smoke and flames coming from a high floor of the building, but the water failing to actually reach the fire. What adds to the tragedy is that those who died in the fire likely spent their last three months largely confined to that building, if not entirely.

It hit people with such emotional force that it spread like wildfire their last three months largely confined to that building, if not entirely. It hit people with such emotional force that it spread like wildfire before censors could really step in and stop it. Then over time, it kind of morphed into a much more overtly political and angry sort of event where eventually you even had a scene of people doing call and response where someone would say, Xi Jinping, and the rest of the crowd would say, step down. Communist Party, step down, which is, I have to say, someone who covered China, lived and worked there, you know, 15 years. I've never seen anything like that. And actually, you know, on the ground, a colleague who was there in Beijing at one of the protests, and, you know,

he did describe, you know, disagreements. Not everyone was willing or felt comfortable with calling for Xi Jinping to step down, but enough people did that you could hear them. You saw lots of images of Chinese protesters holding up pieces of paper. So yeah, that's really become, I, I think the, the defining visual, uh, symbol for these protests. Uh, and it's really a, it's a statement of, of defiance against censorship, but it really has become this clever way of pushing back against censorship, right? Because you have, as a result of this, you have these images of, of police sort of snatching blank pieces of paper out of people's hands, which is just kind of absurd on its face.

And that that image, I think, has really captured the imaginations of a lot of people in China. I think everyone who lives in China has lived in China for any period of time really feels sort of deep in their bones, the frustration of censorship. And so people really responded to that image. The most powerful symbol of these protests has been a symbol that says literally nothing and everything at the same time. Exactly. And how does Xi Jinping and his government respond? The first night, I think the police were just sort of stunned. They didn't know what to do. So they were just kind of standing there not doing anything. But then on the second night, they were out in force. They've been out in force ever since, kind of flooding the streets. Large numbers of police in personal protective equipment patrolling the streets with riot shields.

Barriers have gone up to stop crowds gathering again. Passers-by taking photos are being forced to delete them. Taking people to the side, demanding they hand over their cell phones, looking for apps that they might be using. They're also starting to track people down using their mobile phone data and data from apps that showed that they were at a protest site. So we're starting to see the sort of retribution phase of the government's response roll out. At the same time, though, what is interesting is they have changed their tone on the COVID policy in China. You had a health official in Beijing, slyly, subtly acknowledge the protest. He talked about he talked about problems that the masses had had reflected recently. So that was the first acknowledgement of the protest by the government.

And then they have also started talking about the symptoms of the Omicron variant as being less severe than previous variants, which is the first time they've actually said that. So it looks pretty clear that they're trying to prepare people for a loosening of restrictions. But that's been the narrative in this country for like 11 months at this point. But what you're saying here is that these protests will end up being successful and will end up moving the needle in one of the most repressive governments in the world. I mean, it certainly looks that way. And, you know, I don't think you'll ever have the Communist Party admit that it was doing this because of protests. It's just not in their DNA to be seen as responding to this sort of political expression. But you do definitely see them making some changes. So the protests may end up having an effect. It's not the effect that some people think. I think a lot of people see

these images in Beijing and they think, oh, you know, this is the end of Xi Jinping, the Communist Party might fall. I don't think we're anywhere near that. But in terms of nudging the Chinese Communist Party to rethink the way it does, it handles COVID, it does look like they could end up having some effect there. Josh returns when we do on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today Explained, we're back with Josh Chin from the Wall Street Journal, the Deputy China Bureau Chief over there, also the author of the new book about China's surveillance state. Josh, what I'm getting from you here is that despite living in a surveillance state, these protests found a path

through. Yeah, that is absolutely one of the most noteworthy elements of this is that this is happening at a time when the Chinese government has unprecedented levels of control as a result of their use of technology. And I think it says a couple things. One, it's a really just amazingly powerful statement about the levels of frustration and also the bravery of protesters that they know that they're subject to the surveillance. They know the government can know basically anything about them and is motivated to track them down. And yet they still came out and protested. And I think that's just, you know, I keep thinking about the state of mind you have to be in to be living inside a surveillance state and still go to the streets. And then the second thing is just, it does show

that there are some flaws in the surveillance state. It's not a perfect surveillance state yet. It's still under construction. And so when people move quickly enough or with enough emotion or anger or outrage, it can actually overwhelm that system, at least for a period of time. I mean, you said that the government hasn't perfected its surveillance state yet. Does that mean that they may use these protests as a test of their surveillance state and then make improvements. Yeah, I think so. You know, I mean, it's sort of surveillance state in China borrows a lot from Silicon Valley. A lot of its techniques, a lot of its technology. No one does surveillance in a more sophisticated way than Google. You mean the email client I have opened twice right now on this laptop that's running in the

background of everything I do? You mean that thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one that reads all of your emails and tries to sell you things based on what it knows about your behavior. You know, and like Google, like any other Silicon Valley company, the Communist Party likes to iterate its systems, right? It's constantly updating them and training them to be better. What's the origin story of the Chinese surveillance state? The origin of the surveillance state actually goes way back. All the way to the 50s, Mao Zedong, like a lot of other totalitarian leaders, had his own sort of domestic spying apparatus. But then on top of that, you had a Chinese scientist who actually was in the 1950s, he'd been working in the US most of his career,

was a brilliant missile scientist by the name of Chen Shui-sen. He was chased back to China during the McCarthy era. One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. The FBI suspected him of being a communist, so he left. And he had all these ideas that he'd actually picked up in the US about sort of new theories about the way that information could be used to exert control.

He initially used them as engineering projects. He helped build the Chinese missile system. But later, he started to apply them to society. And he had this theory that if you could collect enough information and use the right tools, you could essentially engineer society the way you would like a guided missile. And these ideas kind of really captured the minds of some people in the Communist Party and kind of over time became more and more popular. And so now you actually have Xi Jinping, someone who has really embraced that idea.

And just coincidentally, you know, with the way that AI technology has developed in the last decade, he now has the tools, the data and the sort of analytical tools to put those ideas into practice. Early days in China, sort of before the arrival of the internet, obviously, you know, surveillance in China was kind of done by hand, the old fashioned ways, or the same way that East Germans had pioneered. At its height in the 1980s, the Stasi had over 90,000 official employees, backed up by several hundred thousand informants out of a population of just over 16 million. The level of surveillance in East Germany was remarkably high and most citizens there

were at some point or another on the receiving end of Stasi inquiries. You know, but China was really interesting in that the Communist Party grasped very early on the power of the internet and of information technologies, and so they started actually building the foundations of this current system in the early 2000s, and actually with help from Western tech companies. You know, these companies like Cisco Systems. Cisco Systems, empowering the internet generation. You had Nortel Networks, which is now defunct, but it was a major Canadian telecom company. And they all came to China and basically helped China

build systems for sort of tracking and controlling the internet. And that was sort of the beginning of all of this. And, you know, over time, obviously China sort of built what is now by far the world's most sophisticated internet censorship. But it was also always sort of looking for ways to apply that level of digital tracking in the real world. Starting in the 2010s, you had these major leaps in the evolution of AI that made AI sort of actually useful in the real world, right? So you now have, whereas before

computers, you know, there were things like facial recognition, but it was really clunky, right? And it didn't work very well. And now you have computers and machines can identify someone in a crowd of 50,000 people in a matter of seconds. If they have enough cameras around your neighborhood, they can trace your movements, where you've been walking over the past week or whatnot. So they have this just amazing ability to track people at a really granular level. Already the authorities are using facial recognition to name and shame citizens, even for minor offenses like jaywalking. The first version of the surveillance state, the really sort of most complete version of it,

was built in Xinjiang, where all these protests started. And that was part of this campaign to track and analyze Uyghurs in the region who might pose a threat to the Communist Party, whose behavior sort of suggested future rebellion. And so, you know, they built this huge system for that. The authorities are using facial recognition cameras to scan people's faces before they enter markets. The system alerts authorities if targeted individuals stray 300 meters beyond their home. And it really at the time was the only place in the country where everyone was subject to surveillance. In other parts of the country, it was like certain groups of people, ex-cons, drug dealers, the mentally ill who were subject to that kind of surveillance.

And with the COVID pandemic, that changed. Suddenly, the government built these systems that were able to track the entire Chinese population in ways that were very similar to the way they tracked Uyghurs before. But so they, you know, they were able to adapt their systems and expand them. And they're almost certainly doing that now with the protests. And are North American companies still building the Chinese surveillance state infrastructure, or has that become less fashionable? Well, you've had a really interesting development recently, where for a long time they were. American companies were deeply involved in building the Chinese surveillance state. They were, you know, everything from the investment level all the way down to selling them, you know, the basic,

the sort of chips and hard drives that Chinese companies needed. But recently, you know, I think starting under the Trump administration, actually, you know, the US policy towards China started to get more confrontational. We're having a little squabble with China because we've been treated very unfairly for many, many decades, for actually a long time. And at the same time, you had news about what was happening in Xinjiang to Uyghurs with the surveillance there. And so you now have a really unique situation, I think, in the history of U.S.-China relations, at least since Tiananmen Square, where human rights concerns are a really major force in the relationship. So a lot of tech companies are pulling back or they're being forced to pull back from their partnerships with Chinese

surveillance companies. And so they're no longer sort of directly building it the way that they had been in the past. What is the thinking behind this surveillance state, Josh? Is it surveillance for the sake of surveillance? Or is it surveillance out of fear? Surveillance for the sake of control? I think it's control. What's unique about the Chinese Communist Party is that it was, you know, it began as an underground movement, heavily persecuted and hunted in 20th century China. And as a result of that, of being underground, of being a sort of guerrilla organization, it's always been very paranoid. And so it was constantly looking for systems that will allow it to identify threats, present or future. Has Xi Jinping, in all his power and wisdom, been able to sell this to the

Chinese people as a positive thing? Or is the surveillance state something that's, you know, swept under the rug and never spoken about? You know, actually, he had done a really remarkable sales job up until very, very recently, before Omicron arrived in the sort of earlier phase of the pandemic, you know, after the Communist Party had rolled out this expanded surveillance data. I mean, we definitely talked to people who thought it was creepy and weird that, you know, suddenly government officials knew where they had traveled or who they'd been exposed to. But people were sitting in China, reading the news, seeing death counts in New York City and, you know, London go through the roof. You know, they're looking around, they realize that

China at the time, you could go outside, it was fine. You know, the hospitals weren't being flooded with COVID patients. And so they actually were happy with it. They sort of, they felt like whatever the inconveniences, it was this life-saving system, right? That was better than anyone else's, you know, the zero COVID approach was the right approach. And the use of surveillance to maintain it was justified. You're starting to see that really change now.

And part of the issue is that Omicron just spreads too fast. Even China's surveillance systems can't really keep up with. And so what they started, what the Communist Party started doing instead was using the technology to lock people inside their homes. And so you had these really, these scenes in places like Shanghai, you know, this wealthy cities that had never really experienced the dark side of surveillance are suddenly locked in their homes and they're being, you know, they're being watched by like robot dogs and drones, right? I mean, just really kind of dark sci-fi kind of scenarios. And they are starting to feel

what I think a lot of Uyghurs felt. I mean, or similar to something that Uyghurs felt in Xinjiang, which is the really sort of hard edge of Communist Party control. And that's gone on for some months now. And I think that's basically what these protests are about. People are fed up with the control. But as you said earlier, the outcome here might be an easing of this zero COVID policy

in China, an easing of restrictions like we've seen in countless other countries around the world. Do you think ultimately this will be a win for the Chinese surveillance state in that they, who knows, they tighten the infrastructure and make it stronger or a win for the people in China who realized their power? That is the big question. And it's one I think it's really hard to answer, partly because we're just in uncharted territory. What I would say is the surveillance state has the higher ground, partly that's because unlike in the United States with Occupy, right, or with protests, other places, even in Russia, Chinese people have almost zero civil society to speak of,

because the Communist Party has just been systematically dismantling it. There are very few NGOs, for example, like non-profit groups. There are very few robust religious communities, church communities, anything like that. Organizations outside the government that can help organize resistance, none of that exists in China. On purpose, it doesn't exist. And so these protests are happening and they're kind of really raw. They're disorganized. They're a little chaotic. I think that's to the advantage of the Communist Party. It's amazing that people did gather for these protests, but it's also extremely hard for them to keep them going, to sort of organize

this into more of a movement. But what has happened, I think, in China, which is a problem for the Communist Party, is that there's been just an immense loss of political trust. And so the Communist Party can certainly crack down with the tools it's got. It can maintain control. But it has to figure out now how to regain that trust. Otherwise, it's going to be in a scenario where it is constantly cracking down.

And that may or may not be sustainable long term. Josh Chen, Wall Street Journal, he wrote a book with one of his colleagues all about China's surveillance state. It's called Surveillance State, Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control. This episode of Today Explained was produced by Amanda Llewellyn. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and mixed by Paul Robert Bouncey.