In the past few weeks, widespread protests have swept across China, from Guangzhou to Xinjiang and from Apple’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou to elite university campuses in Beijing and Shanghai. Protesters have been chanting “We want freedom, no more lockdown!” and “Down with Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party!” The sizes of the protests have varied widely—mostly in the hundreds, though considerably larger in Xinjiang and Wuhan—but their pervasiveness across multiple localities is unprecedented since the 1989 Tiananmen crisis.
Only a month ago, Xi Jinping was anointed as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for a third term. He filled the CCP’s upper echelons of power—the Politburo Standing Committee, the Politburo, and the Central Committee—with his loyal followers. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, was publicly removed from the Party Congress under the gaze of international media, likely as a staged performance of Xi’s unparalleled power. A few weeks later, Xi traveled to Bali, Indonesia, where he greeted U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders at the G-20 summit with exuberant confidence, building on what seemed like consolidated domestic political power.
Why has Xi’s seemingly unprecedented strong grip on power been met with social resistance of unparalleled scale throughout China? How has Chinese society reached this boiling point?
