We live in an age of uprising. From Haiti to Hong Kong, from Ecuador de Sudan, from Chile to Myanmar, from the US to Iran, an entire generation has been confronted with the horror of our world and took the simple expedient of picking up a brick and throwing it at a cop. Yet as the uprising swept the globe, there was one country where it was considered impossible. Every expert, every policymaker, every kid on a street corner new there was simply no chance of a mass treet movement in China.
On Monday, it was unimaginable. On Friday, it was everywhere welcome to it could happen here. What we've been watching for the past three weeks now is the failure of one of the most sophisticated political regimes in human history, a political, social, and economic regime designed specifically to stop this one moment. After thirty years of repression, the national mass street movement has returned to China. This is what
it was all about. Everything from the censorship policies to union busting to subsidize mortgages from a rising Chinese middle class. It was about keeping people from going back to the streets to make even the idea of it impossible. And yet here we are. In one sense, the party is little to fear from the round of protests, barring an immense intensification of violence, which at the moment seems extremely unlikely.
But in another sense, the CCP is perhaps the last regime on earth that truly remembers the previous age of revolution, that remembers when the workers took Shanghai in sixty seven, very nearly took Beijing and eighty nine. These are people who understand that China's political system is built on shaving a sleeping bear, and no matter how profitable that system is, there's always a chance that one day that bear is going to wake up. Now the bear isn't fully awake yet.
We are not shing in China full scale uprising a la Sudan or Myanmar, But that bear, the air to maybe the most militant working class and modern world has ever seen, is starting to open its eyes. So what is the CCP currently facing. Since about November, there have been widespread anti government protests in China, Unlike anything we've seen in the last thirty years. These protests are everywhere.
They're in Beijing, They're in Nanjing, They're in Shanghai. There in guang Show, there in shing John, We'll get back to that one in a second. There in Wuhan, reports I saw said that there were protests at seventy seven universities. That number is almost certainly an under account now, and these student protests are not just taking place at small colleges in the middle of nowhere. There were protests at singh Qua University, which for an American audience, I would
compare to China's version of Harvard. It's the college that produces the upper echelon. If the Chinese ruling class, Hi Jimping graduated from there, so did his predecessor, Hu Jintao. And the only reason that jujuin how his predecessor did not graduate from there, is that that guy was so old that he went to college under the Japanese occupation.
When I was originally writing this, I had a joke here about how the only city where there haven't been protest is Harbin, which is the city in the absolute middle of nowhere in northn China. But no, I googled it, and it turns out there have been protests in bloody Harbon. For people who aren't very good at Chinese geography, which is probably most people, this means these protests are everywhere. There in the north, there in the south, there in the east, there in the west, there in the far West.
And it's true that a lot of these protests are not that big, although some of them are absolutely massive. But the importance here is that this is the first time in thirty years that we've seen widespread national protests over a single issue in China, the anormity of which is compounded by the fact that people in the streets of cities like Shanghai are openly calling for the fall of the CCP and si Jianping, something that by itself can get you a decade in prison just for saying.
We can ask what these protests are acts Lee about. The version you see in the American press is that these are anti lockdown protests, are protests against China's COVID zero policy, or that there's also pro democracy protests against the entire regime. And this is sort of true as far as it goes, but it doesn't capture the core of what's going on, which is that what we're seeing is a widespread fusion of labor rebellion, anti police brutality, protests,
and a revolt against the authoritarian state. The thing that's brought all of this together is the CCPs COVID policy. But that's because that policy is the most visible and most concentrated expression of the state's general authoritarian is a bit brutal war against the working class. We can learn a lot about what's actually been happening by going back a little bit to the very start of the protests.
There are three specific events that sparked the protests, two of which are pretty well covered, and one of which has been basically ignored because of how long ago it happened. The first arc is essentially an event in its own right. This is what I would call the fox Con revolts, a series of worker uprisings against the manufacturer of the iPhone, which with a single factory, controls vast portions of the regional economy of Hainan Province. Whereas large as factory is based.
The fox Con revolt is I'm brewing for a long time. It begun essentially when fox Con began to impose what's called the closed loop system. The closed loop system was originally developed by the NBA to run an NBA season during the beginning of the pandemic. The idea is that you keep everyone inside a closed loop. This means that everyone in the production process has no contact with the outside world at all for as long as the manufacturing
cycle goes. The CCP started adopting the closed loop as they hit problems with their twin imperatives to both stop COVID and also to make sure that fox Con hit its production targets so Apple could have enough iPhones for the Christmas rush. The result was that as an October wave of infections hit Hangan province, where fox CON's largest factory was located, two hundred thousand workers were put into a closed loop system, which meant they were trapped in
the factory in their dormitories. In order to keep this factory running, fox Con needs about a hundred thousand migrant workers. The problem, from Capital's perspective with microt workers is that they can, if things get bad enough, just go home, and that's exactly what happens. Workers inside the fox Con plants started to be quarantined with people who were sick in the same dormitory and It's worth noting here that
these dormitories are tiny. The conditions even outside of lockdown are atrocious, and when people were suddenly getting quarantined with people who were sick, workers essentially just said no and started to stage massive breakouts. There are incredible videos of these trains of people like along the road walking home as sort of hitching rides on people's trucks fleeing if factory. We don't actually know how many workers escaped, but it
was enough to be a massive problem for Capital. Again, they need these workers in order to make enough iPhones to sell for Christmas. Current estimates suggest that Apple is somewhere between eleven and fifteen million units behind what it needs to make the Christmas rush. So Fox Con had the local government recruiting people to go work in the factory.
What they told these workers was that if they entered the closed loop for thirty days, they'd be given three thousand yawn, which is about four hundred and fifteen dollars to live on for the next month, and then get paid thirty on or about four dollars an hour, and then after the end of the next dirty days they'd get another three thousand john in the US, this would be a subminimum wage poverty job for a Chinese worker. This is a lot of money, or it would have
been had it not been for one minor problem. All of it was bullshit. Fox Con and the CCP were lying out of their asses after workers who are already in the closed loop. They learned that the two three thousand yuan bonuses weren't going to be paid until March and May of next year, meaning that in order to get what they were promised for two months of work, they were going to have to work for seven months. Also, the thirty you on an hour wage that they were
promised was a lie. They were getting paid substantially less than that. So on Tuesday the November, workers who had emerged from quarantine to start work only to learn that they had been systematically lied to by both the governments and Chinese and Taiwanese capitalists, came out of their dormitories and demanded that they either get their money or be
allowed to leave. There's another part of this account that I think complicates a lot of the sort of narratives that we've heard about what the Chinese prostor about that did not make the Western press at all, which is that these workers were also demanding that their bosses, quote, implement pandemic prevention and control measures. Um, it's not entirely
clue what the specific demands refers to. It seems to be about not quarantining sick people in the same dorms as healthy people, a thing that seems relatively obvious, but capitalism regardless. The product of bosses ignoring these demands was
several days of full scale fighting with the police. On November twenty three, a bunch of videos began to spread of workers taking those metal police barricades that you see all the time in the US that are essentially an arch with a bunch of bars and not get into a flat base. You've you've probably seen these picking them up and straight up throwing them at cops or grabbing them and beating police riot shields with them. I have I have never seen anything like it. It was absolutely wild.
At this point, after several days of fighting, after their own regular security people literally refused to show up to go fight these workers, and police from outside had to be called in. Fox Con gave up said okay, we will give you ten thousand yond to literally leave right now. Please just stop, and a lot of people took the money and left, And in any other year, in any other moment, that would have been the end of it.
The Fox Con riots would be another episode in the never ending series of they tried not to pay us riots that are the most common one of the most common forms of workers protests in China. Instead, on Thanksgiving Day in the United States, videos started to circulate of a fire in a residential block in a room Cheet, the capital of shing Jong. There are several videos of the fire. In one that journalists were able to verify, you can hear people screaming from inside the building as
they tried and failed to escape the flames. Further videos showed that cops had barricaded off the streets with metal wires as a way to enforcing John's one hundred day long lockdown, which prevented firefighters from getting to the scene. Firefighters can be seen firing water hoses at the building, only for the hoses arc to fall shorts trapped behind
barricades that prevented them from any closer. Speculation about whether the doors of the apartment building themselves have been sealed shut with locks or barricaded from the outside, as had happened to so many other people's homes during the lockdown ran rampant. One video I saw from another city appeared to show workers and has met suits who become known as the Big Whites, literally welding someone's door shut to
keep them in. To make matters worse, the head of the rooms she city Fire rescue department blamed the families for their own deaths, saying quote some residents abilities to rescue themselves were too weak. These are the videos the fragments of nightmares brought to life that started the mass protests. This is a revolution scene. At thirty second intervals, everyone is trying to beat the sensors. Clips float back and
forth between weach at, Twitter, Telegram back to Weachat again. Ironically, many sensors were already home for the weekend, allowing clips and posts that otherwise would have been removed immediately to circulate for hours, sometimes even days. These brought back the memory of the Third Spark, the one that's basically been forgotten about in the West, if anyone even cared to
know about it in the first place. In September, a bus full of people with COVID and Guangzho that the government was shipping to a quarantine center, crashed and killed twenty seven people, wounding twenty others. Conditions in these centers, which COVID patients are often forced to go to rather than quarantining in their homes, are atrocious. Pictures and videos circulate constantly of bathrooms covered in human ship from failing
drainage systems. As China has already over tax medical systems simply failed to keep up with the demands on a place by the government, which, like the American government has and continues to systematically refuse to invest in medical infrastructure. Intimate familiarity with these wretched conditions and the raw horror at the s and Xing John and Guangzho sparked protests
across the country. In a room sheet and now seventy Han City under constant police occupation, Han protesters appeared to be moved in solidarity with the weaker families killed in the fire and fought the police with a ferocity unmatched anywhere but the migrant worker villages of Guangzho along the
Parer River Delta, one of China's great manufacturing hubs. These desperate struggles were given relatively little attention by a Western media class enamored with the image of students carrying blank, white pieces of paper to protest the censorship, a common form of protests in places like Hong Kong. This time, at least, they were tied to a particularly funny piece of media censorship. As protests mounted, people started posting an article version of a speech by Mao called let the
People Speak, The Sky will Not Fall. Chinese censors quickly ran into a classic CCP problem, which is that in a state whose heroes are communist revolutionaries, celebrated historical figures produce an immense repertoire of slogans and quotes for subsequent generations and revolutionaries to draw from, which has caused the CCP, at various points in time to ban the opening of its own national anthem arise Ye who refused to be slaves. As sensors banned Let the People speak, the Guy will
not Fall. People began posting the article, but with the words replaced by squares. This too was also deleted, and then posting simply blanks white squares themselves, which saw their reflection in the students in the streets. The CCP, in turn retreated to its traditional tactic of blaming the protests on foreign forces interfering in China, a claim which is less than credible on a country that has rolled up the CIA's entire in country intelligence network at least once
in the last decade. There's an incredible exchange that has made the rounds between a cop who is telling a group of protesters that there are quote foreign forces around manipulating the protests, who is immediately yelled at by a guy screaming, who are the born forces? Marks and angles Stalin and Lenin. Another man appears and asks, Hi, can I ask if it was foreign forces who started the fire in Shing John? Was the guigo bus overturned by foreign forces? Another man grabs the mic and says, was
everyone told to come here by foreign forces? The crowd shouts no. He then makes an incredibly obvious point, we can't even access to foreign internet. How are foreign forces meant to be communicating with us? Another man says, we only have domestic forces, not allowing us to govern themselves.
Where are these foreign forces from the moon? Still managing these accusations to become a constant part of the protests, with calls from protesters to stop chanting things like down with the CCP, and attempts to keep the demands focused on COVID policy like ending COVID zero. And this is where things get incredibly muddled by a Western press that decided to stop giving a shit about COVID deaths a year ago, and a set of contrarians are ring that no, actually,
China's COVID policy is actually good. This entire debate hinges on the conflation of the state of government policy of zero COVID, which is an attempt to stop all cases of COVID, and the actual execution of the policy, which has taken the form of a war against China's working class and a set of draconian police state abuses. One thing that Western quote unquote experts have been quick to point out is that will the CCP has to keep doing COVID zero or one point five million people will die.
There was a tiny bit of truth to this in that one reason Chinese COVID restriction so so harsh is that if COVID was simply let rip like it has been in the US, it would go through China's largely unvaccinated rural elderly population like a chainsaw, and unlike in the US, if a million people died in China because the government fucked up a pandemic response, party officials will
be getting beaten to death in the streets. And part of the reason for the crisis in China in the first place is that the rest of the world a up on trying to contain COVID entirely. If the rest of the world had, you know, done their jobs and stamped out the virus, none of us would be here
right now. On the other hand, no, absolutely not. You do not actually need to wild people into their houses or drag them by force out of their home so they can die and bus crashes on their way to unsafe and unsanitary pseudo hospitals with bathroom floors literally covered
ship in order to contain the pandemic. Lots of pandemics across human history have been contained without doing this ship just because the two great world powers have decided that the COVID responses are kill a million people by forcing everyone back to work so that no one has to actually deal with the political consequences of telling a bunch of unbelievably deranged and heavily armed fascist no and lock two people in a factory and force them to make
iPhones and then beat the absolute shit out of them when it turns out you lied to them about their pay. Doesn't mean that there aren't other options that we could take for pandemic responses if we decided to stop letting a bunch of venal and corrupt assholes rule us all. And this is something that people in China also understand.
Even if the Western press corps dead set on presenting their demands as if they're American anti maskers, you can tell obviously the Chinese protesters are not simply a copy of right wing American fascists. By simply looking at a picture of a protest and seeing how many people are wearing masks. China is not the US. Regular people actually do care about containing the pandemic. This is why there is a real pandemic response in the first place, after
the government utterly boshed it. If you look at the actual demands of the protesters, you will see things that normally would seem more at home with liberal American protesters attempting to see pandemic restrictions enforced properly, Things like our pandemic response must be based on science. But people, even people who don't want to die of a plague, do not want to be horribly abused by cops or horrifically exploited by the state and capitalists. And that, I think
is something we do all understand. Only time can tell what will happen to these protests. The government is quietly making concessions and not so quietly hunting down people who took to the streets. It is entirely possible that the protest will simply die, and that in two or three
years most people will have forgot they ever happened. From a sort of brutal materialist perspective, however, it seems unlikely China's social system could function fine as long as growth was at fifteen percent or ten percent, or even eight percent. But when growth inevitably comes down to two percent, but the deal of keep your head down and everyone will
get rich starts to look a lot less attractive. COVID is simply intensified all of the traditional contradictions inside Chinese society and made visible the horrors that previously had been obscured, and it seems unlikely that those contradictions will someday vanish. But here in the presence, the impossible continues, and every day it does is another day that the gates of possibility and sh a bit further open. This espina could Happen here. You can find us that Happened Here pot
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