With Xi Jinping handed an unprecedented third term as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at its 20th national congress earlier this month, you might think the country’s authoritarianism is unquestioned.
Indeed, the tightly choreographed ceremonies of one-leader, one-party domination seem intended to remind everyone of the regime’s tight social control.
But you don’t have to look too far beyond the Party’s showpiece to see a different China.
“Remove that authoritarian traitor Xi Jinping,” read the banner, handwritten in red on a Beijing bridge just before the Congress.
You may think that’s a one off, but that’s just what the Party wants you to think. And it’s not true.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chinese government published statistics on the number of “mass incidents” of protest in the country, which grew from 8,700 in 1993, to over 87,000 in 2005.
Then, the government stopped publishing the statistics, but protests have continued in China, and other people have been keeping track of them.
Citizen journalists Lu Yuyu and Li Tingyu, for example, began documenting incidents in 2012 – from workers’ strikes to environmental demonstrations – and counted 28,950 such events in 2015 alone. In 2016, both were detained.
Dissent happens online, as well, in the virtual spaces beyond China’s Great Firewall. My colleague Maya Wang, Senior China Researcher, explains some of the forms it takes. These include things like a video of Xi’s gaffes that has 1.9 million views, and democracy activists constantly fighting battles in online forums with those who hold pro-government views.
Real-world incidents like the anti-Xi banner on the bridge send jolts through China online. People see these things before intense censorship kicks in.
And in itself, the authorities’ extreme effort to quickly snuff out such small protests tells you something. It reveals both that they know there’s significant dissent under the surface and that they are very nervous about the hope for freedom it demands.
