The Long March to the White Paper Revolution: Understanding Recent COVID Protests in China

One curious aspect of the democracy protests that rocked China in 1989 was the way in which they took so-called China experts by surprise. Frank Pieke, one such China expert and one of my own mentors, was doing fieldwork in Beijing at the time. He only became aware of the protest, which came to be known as the People’s Movement, by chance, after stumbling upon an early demonstration in tian’anmen square while out for a walk. He commented later, “still, there were no indications that the tensions could lead to widespread social unrest in the near future.”1 as we all know, they later did. Beginning on the night of June 3, 1989, and lasting for several days, students occupying downtown Beijing were assaulted and fired upon by soldiers charged with clearing the demonstration by any means necessary. the final death toll will likely never be known, but most unbiased estimates place it at over a thousand.2 I cannot therefore help but feel a sense of déjà vu as I hear about new protest events that happened recently in China. I have to confess they took me by surprise as well given the Chinese government’s focus on promoting what, in the mid-2000s, President Hu Jintao called a “harmonious society,” a strategy of resolving social conflict and inequality through shared prosperity. although I am nearly certain we will not witness bloodshed on the same scale as three decades ago, the future of these protests and their impacts are not easy to predict. I will trace out the larger sociopolitical shifts in contemporary China that have brought us to this moment, while considering how these shifts have the potential to reconfigure the nature of China’s ongoing development. although on their surface the new protests are ostensibly about COVID restrictions and pandemic lockdowns, I would argue they are fundamentally tied to growing disillusionment with the post-tian’anmen social contract that has propelled China to its status as a global power.