‘Alongside traditional methods of coercion, the party-state has increasingly relied on new technologies supporting the control and spread of information as well as blanket surveillance and facial and other forms of physical recognition to either preempt protests or to go after the “troublemakers”. Image source: AP

Don’t count out Party-State’, The Indian Express, 5 December 2022. p.10. Published online, ‘China Protests: The party-state can’t be underestimated — neither can the Chinese people’, 1 December 2022.

Mao Zedong once declared that “the outstanding thing” about China’s people “is that they are ‘poor and blank’”. He called it “a good thing” for “poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution”. Absolute poverty and economic impoverishment might be things of the past, according to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but the latest protests across China suggest that its zero-Covid policy is clearly making the people “poor” once again and not just in monetary terms.

These protests against the CCP’s zero-Covid strategy had erupted following a fire last week that killed 10 people in a high-rise building in Urumqi, capital of China’s minority-dominated Xinjiang province. The perception was that it was callous and unthinking enforcement of anti-Covid measures that prevented rescue services from reaching the building on time.

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