The CCP, as the Chinese Communist Party is informally known, has now lost hearts across the country.
China throughout the Communist period has witnessed demonstrations, but most of them are, as Burton noted, "highly localized" and "directed at malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence of lower level Communist functionaries."
Now, however, the anger is directed at the Party itself. In short, as evident from the spontaneous demonstrations of the weekend, the Chinese people have had enough of Xi Jinping and CCP rule. They recognize the fundamental fact that the Party's system does not work.
The Chinese people are not only angry over Xi Jinping's "dynamic Zero-COVID policy;" they are also troubled by a crumbling economy and the collapse of the all-important property sector. New-home prices in 70 cities, for instance, fell in October for the 14h-straight month.
There have been abnormally few sales in recent months as the market is "frozen," with big spreads between what sellers demand and what buyers are willing to pay. These drops in prices and sales are of great concern because some 70% of Chinese household wealth is tied up in property.
China's people, as a result, were not happy even before Thursday's fatal blaze.
Fomenting hatred of America, to save the Communist Party from popular unrest, would not be a big step for Xi.
The Chinese people are not only angry over President Xi Jinping's "dynamic Zero-COVID policy;" they are also troubled by a crumbling economy. Now their anger is directed at the Communist Party itself. In short, as evident from the spontaneous demonstrations of the weekend, the Chinese people have had enough of Xi Jinping and CCP rule.
Extraordinary protests quickly spread across China over the weekend, including major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, since a fire Thursday claimed a reported 10 lives in an apartment block in Urumqi, in the north western part of the country.
China's people were enraged by the regime's COVID controls, which had prevented firefighters from reaching the scene of the tragedy in time. "This is people past their breaking point," tweeted CNN's Selina Wang on Sunday.
Also on Sunday, the Telegraph's Simina Mistreanu reported on Twitter that a crowd numbering at least 100 began marching toward Tiananmen Square, in the heart of the Chinese capital. Police, however, stopped demonstrators after only a few blocks, at the Liangma River. "The fact that they intended to protest at Tiananmen," she wrote, "is wild."
Mistreanu is right. Observers say the weekend disturbances — China was quiet on Monday — are the most significant since mass demonstrations rocked the Chinese capital and some 370 other cities in the Beijing Spring of 1989. In many respects, however, the ongoing protests are more dangerous to China's Communist Party.
As Charles Burton, a China scholar at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told Gatestone, even the 1989 Tiananmen Movement "did not challenge the fundamentals of Party rule over China." Protestors then only wanted hardliners like Premier Li Peng removed to make way for "democratic reforms;" in other words, "Party-mediated democratization of China," as Burton termed it.
Today, however, many Chinese want to get rid of the Party. As Mistreanu reported, the demonstrators she witnessed in Beijing were chanting "We want freedom, equality, democracy, rule of law." "We don't want dictatorship," they shouted.
The weekend's demonstrations also resemble the protests in 1949. That year, Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek's ruling Nationalists. Then, Chiang commanded far superior armies than the Communists, but his regime nonetheless quickly fell.
Why did that happen? Chiang's Nationalists had, the acclaimed China historian Yu Ying-shih once told me, "lost people's hearts." The CCP, as the Chinese Communist Party is informally known, has now lost hearts across the country.
China, throughout the Communist period, has witnessed demonstrations, but most of them are, as Burton noted, "highly localized" and "directed at malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence of lower level Communist functionaries."
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Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
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Pictured: Xi speaks to the media on October 23, 2022 in Beijing. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
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