Author:
Publication: Threadreaderapp.com
Date: November 28, 2022
URL:      https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597170690830237696.html?s=03

One interesting aspect of the protests in China is that they shatter several persistent myths about the country.

1) Chinese people can’t protest. There are actually 100s, if not 1000s of protests in China every year. The visibility of those particular protests - because they...

...happen in many places at once (which is very rare) - make it clear to the world that contrary to widespread belief Chinese people actually do protest!

2) China is a police state. Many videos circulating on Twitter of people - often rather smugly to be honest - arguing with...

...policemen, where it’s clear there is actually very little fear of the police in China.

Something that really surprised me when I first arrived in the country 🔽 (Chinese people are more confrontational with policemen than in most other nations)
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Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand

That was one of my biggest surprises when first in China, seeing people shout at the police (surprisingly common). I was like "wait, don't those people get disappeared?"

Once in Tianjin I even heard a policeman tell a woman "if you bite the police again, you'll get arrested!"
https://twitter.com/i/status/1514774863512162310

Apr 15, 2022

3) The Chinese don’t know what’s happening in their own country. This is one of the dumber myths: my experience is that the Chinese are actually much more aware of what’s happening in China than foreigners, duh!

Those protests, in several cities throughout China at the same...

...time, demonstrate this: they happened because of a fire that killed 10 people in Xinjiang that, so the narrative goes, the firemen couldn’t access in time due to 0-Covid.

And let me tell you: that’s not the official state media narrative…

...Despite this, that’s the info that got spread everywhere around China almost instantly. It demonstrates that there are widespread information networks that reach the whole population even if the information in question don’t agree with state media.

4) The Chinese government has “total control” of the population: social credit score, bla bla bla.

For the nth time, the social credit score is a myth, and no, obviously, the Chinese government doesn’t have total control of the population. If the people widely disagree with...

... something, as is increasingly the case with zero covid, the situation can obviously fast become unsustainable for the government.

5) It also destroys the myth that for the past 30 years there was a lot of repressed and hidden anger at the government in China.

Many studies, such as this one from Harvard 🔽, showed this was utterly false but this protest movement also demonstrate it: if the Chinese people could in fact protest all along, if China is not a police state, if the government doesn’t...
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Arnaud Bertrand@RnaudBertrand
Replying to @RnaudBertrand

Also here is the Harvard Kennedy School study she refers to in her talk.

Conducted over 13 years by Harvard researchers on the ground in China, it found that over 93% of Chinese people are satisfied with their government!
 

Oct 23, 2022

...have “total control” AND despite all this there was no mass movement of complaint in China… it demonstrates that for the past 30 years the Chinese people were in fact fairly happy! Understandably so given China's incredible rise of living standards in that period...

6) Last but not least, it shows that you’ve largely been lied to about China, that the mainstream picture - a dark monster of a government with a population utterly brainwashed and under their total control - is a far cry from reality which is of course much more nuanced.

Now that’s not to say that the Chinese government is powerless. China does have a very strong state, no question about that.

But it is far from all-powerful and, most importantly, it does rely on the people’s satisfaction, as China’s history has proven time and time again.

The old Chinese saying made famous by Tang dynasty emperor Taizong - that all Chinese people know - still applies: 君主如船，百姓如水，水既能使船安稳地航行，也能使船沉没 (the ruler is like a boat, and the people like water. Water can make the boat sail smoothly or sink it)