Interview with Weekendavisen on the protests in China

I was recently interviewed for an story on the protests against the zero-covid policy China. The article is available on the Weekendavisen’s website (https://www.weekendavisen.dk/2022-48/samfund/partiets-raedselsfulde-aar) in Danish and behind a paywall. Here is a excerpt of the piece translated into English.

The party’s terrible year. The protests are just the latest in a series of mishaps to befall the regime during 2022. But it has spent decades preparing for just this kind of crisis.

By Peter Harmsen

"China's former president Jiang Zemin is dead, and the timing couldn't be worse. The announcement that he has passed away at the age of 96 has come towards the end of a year that for the Communist Party has in many ways developed into an annus horribilis – a horrifying one of its kind….

…One year haunts many comments from recent days: 1989. Several observers have drawn a parallel with the situation at the time, which ended with the bloody crackdown on protests in and around Tiananmen Square, with a large and unknown number of people killed follow.

The news of former President Jiang Zemin's death has only fueled the comparisons. Back then 33 years ago, the protests were also initially triggered by a death.

Hu Yaobang, a popular reform politician, died of a heart attack and tens of thousands of mourners gathered in the heart of Beijing. Later it turned into protests against, among other things, corruption, and eventually turned into an open challenge to the Communist Party's monopoly of power.

It's not that strange, and basically not unique either. Grief can do something in terms of mobilizing the masses, according to Timothy Hildebrandt, who researches social movements in China and other countries at the London School of Economics.

"Grief seems to be a very common starting point for lots of different protests. It allows people to come together and express their feelings. But there is something about human emotions that you cannot always predict how they will manifest,' he says.

He points not only to China in 1989, but also to the reaction to the death of George Floyd in the American cities two years ago as an obvious parallel, where grief quickly turned to anger, and the result was mass protests.”….