Inside the country's Faustian political bargain.
By Dan Martin Senior staff editor |
During my several years spent living and working as a journalist in China under the increasingly stern rule of President Xi Jinping, it often felt as if the walls were closing in. |
Previously chatty sources gradually shied away from contact and became estranged, vocal government critics were arrested or cowed into silence, and reporting on something as politically innocuous as cosmetic surgery was routinely stymied when interview subjects got cold feet about speaking out. |
A palpable sense of fear had set in — especially when it came to consorting with a foreign journalist — and I often wondered if there was anything that could move the average citizen to step forward and be heard. |
For the past three years, China's people have borne the economic and psychological burden of incessant Covid testing, restrictions on movement and long lockdowns even after the rest of the world learned to live with the virus. But they were pushed too far. |
Under this unspoken Faustian bargain between the people and the Communist Party, the public surrendered all claims to political power in return for the party's providing the conditions for economic improvement. |
The government is no longer holding up its end of the deal, and, Wu writes, "a new generation, pushed to the brink by the government's zero-Covid obsession, has discovered its voice." |
Wu writes for us from Beijing, where last weekend protesters gathered — in scenes repeated in several other major cities across the country — to demand not only an end to zero Covid but also, in some cases, the introduction of broader political freedoms. |
The question hanging over China now is whether Xi can put that genie back in the bottle. |
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