20th National Congress: Will Xi address growing dissatisfaction of Chinese nationals?
On October16, a weeklong National Congress of the Communist Party of China began in Beijing with President Xi Jinping comfortably placing himself in the front to become party leader for a third term. But delegates of the 20th National Congress would be reading the tea leaves.
As just before the beginning of the once in five-year National Congress in Beijing, a rare sign of public anger against the country’s authoritarian system hit the East Asian nation on October 13. Thousands of WeChat users amplified anti Xi Jinping narratives in freewheeling manner after a youth near a ring road bridge in Beijing burnt a tire and hung two banners from the bridge written with demand of removal of “dictator and traitor Xi Jinping.”
The banners also decried zero covid measures and called for an end to lockdowns and bringing revolutionary change in the country, adding “We need to vote; we don’t want to be slaves.”
These banners might have been significantly embarrassing for President Xi Jinping as they slipped through China’s tight surveillance system ahead of a highly important meeting. More worrisomely, it showed how dissatisfaction has gripped the Chinese society, especially in the wake of the administration’s zero-Covid policy that favours draconian measures like targeted lockdowns, sealing of homes, mass testing and quarantine. In Beijing alone, in an attempt to completely rid the city of any sign of Covid, tens of millions of residents are being tested every three days, with screening for entry to all buildings being made mandatory, said a BBC report.
Earlier, in Shanghai, where in order to achieve zero-Covid policy goal, thousands of people were separated from their families and children after they tested positive for Covid. Delay in essential medical treatment and food supplies to affected families had become routine. Some social media users have still pinned in their accounts videos that showed hungry residents in Shanghai, which underwent a brutal lockdown from April to May 2022, banging pans and pots on the sealed gates of their flats. These videos showed Shanghai residents yelling “give me back my freedom” while asking for food and other supplies.
In a democratic country, any unnecessary ruthless handling of Covid could have been questioned by lawmakers, but in China, no one can question the authority of the CPC leadership and those who have dared to do so have been silenced. To this regard, examples are galore and especially, China’s Wuhan speaks volumes of such brutalities. Dozens of bloggers, academicians, and activists, including Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi, prof Chen Zhaozhi, Chen Mei and Cai Wei were cruelly silenced by the Chinese government after they posted stories, interviews, and personal sufferings of people due to Covid in Wuhan in April 2020.
In Communist China, the history of crushing dissent is as old as the CPC and in 1989, Chinese authorities showed the world that their high handedness against protests would go to any extent. More than 10,000 youths, largely students, protesting the Communist regime’s restrictions on freedom of speech and censorship, were crushed to death at the Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Protest was, in fact, spurred on by the death of Hu Yaobang, a high-ranking CPC official who was the party Chairman from 1981 to 1982 and the party General Secretary from 1982 to 1987. Hu was a liberal Communist leader who relentlessly fought against the CPC led purges and sought to overturn Mao era’s ideological shibboleths. He was a supporter of students’ demand for democratic reform. But he was removed from the top position in 1987 and on April 15, 1989, he died.
His death sparked shock and anguish among reform-minded people of China. A week after his death, about 100,000 students marched towards Tiananmen Square in a powerful display of anger and sympathy for Hu. The show of public anger later snowballed into several weeks of student-led pro-democracy protests and hunger strikes which eventually ended with a bloody military crackdown on June 4, 1989.
Since then, Chinese leaders have not allowed even a murmur of dissent against the party and the system; under the leadership of Xi Jinping, Communist China has rather become more ruthless than what was seen earlier in the country. Over the past 10 years, Chinese authorities have become hypersensitive to protests, dissent, social movements, and mass resistance. The CPC under the stewardship of Xi Jinping has left no space for any NGOs or activists to function even in a limited manner.
Anyone who tries to do so is hounded and severely punished. Modern surveillance systems, with their widespread presence across the East country, allow no one to easily escape their range and coverage. According to The Wall Street Journal, China’s annual national spending on public security has doubled since late 2012. In 2019, China had, as per the US daily, spent about $211 billion on surveillance of its people. This money is spent in collection of data related to an individual person’s identity, activities, and social connections. From putting in place facial recognition technology to collecting voice prints of individuals to using phone-tracking devices—the Chinese government uses all available means to keep people under surveillance and maintain its authoritarian rule.
In China, there is already an age-old practice to introduce fear of system among people through forced disappearances, arrests, torture, physical abuse, and prolonged detentions without trial. In the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), as per media reports, a Tibetan named Norsang went incommunicado after his detention for refusing to participate in China’s political re-education training in 2019. He was allegedly tortured to death.
The Human Rights Watch maintains that entire residents of Tengdro monastery and its nearby village of Dranak in Tingri county in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) were raided and 20 Buddhist monks detained by the Chinese police in early September 2019 after it was revealed that they contributed to the relief for Nepal-based Tibetans after an earthquake hit the Himalayan country in 2015. The New York-based human rights body said three days after the police raid on Tengdro monastery and Dranak village in the TAR, LobsangZoepa, a monk committed suicide in apparent protest the Chinese authorities’ treatment of his family and community.
Then the saga of torture of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region is known to the entire world. Even a few weeks before the 20th National Congress, China intensified a crackdown on Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims with mass arrests and detentions, reported ‘Bitter Winter,’ a magazine covering human rights and religious freedom. Since 2014, the Communist regime under Xi Jinping leadership is alleged to have unleashed a systematic move to crush Uyghur and other minorities in China.
Although on October 6, the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council voted down a US, Canada, and Britain-led motion to hold debate about alleged human rights abuses by China against Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, Beijing’s alleged crime against humanity cannot be put under the carpet. The October 13 incident that took place in the middle of Beijing served as an eye opener to the Chinese leadership. But will they bring a change in their outlook towards their own fellow citizens? This is a million-dollar question. –(TheGenevaDaily)
