An outbreak of student-led protests across China has sent a sharp message to Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping and the broader population, according to analysts and some dissidents.
“We haven't seen that since 1989,” said American Enterprise Institute nonresident fellow Michael Mazza, referring to the Tiananmen Square protests. “The fact that this could happen in an environment in which the tools of government surveillance and control are so much more pervasive and effective than they were in 1989 is a really striking and really interesting development.
“So now we know,” Hu Guo, a Chinese man studying at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told Radio Free Asia. “The desire of the Chinese people for freedom and democracy has never gone away. It has just been suppressed by the Communist Party's brutal stability maintenance system and by internet censorship.”
Xi’s immunity to such outbreaks could face a stiffer test if he does in fact ease coronavirus restrictions, a move that will bring the risk of a surge in coronavirus cases. Yet the triumphalist regime also refused to make use of Western vaccines, while the less-effective Chinese vaccines have not been popular among Chinese people.
Some of Peng’s slogans were echoed by the protesters in China last weekend, Heritage Foundation research fellow Michael Cunningham noted. The remembrance of his example underscores the threat, from the regime’s perspective, of protest contagion. “There is precedent for protests, for demonstrations to arise following the deaths of senior Chinese leaders — the most prominent example of that is 1989. ... That was sort of the spark for the Tiananmen Square protests,” Mazza said. “It was a more optimistic time [under Zemin]. ... The Chinese government is very aware of this, and they’re going to make that difficult.”
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