Beijing bridge protest: One-off or ‘canary in the coal mine’?

Last week, as the world’s media covered the impending Chinese Communist Party Congress, an unknown protester dared to string two banners across a Bridge in Beijing. The first one read: “No Covid test, we want to eat. No restrictions, we want freedom. No lies, we want dignity. No Cultural Revolution, we want reform. No leaders, we want votes. By not being slaves, we can be citizens.” The other banner called on residents to “go on strike at school and work, remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping.”

As a longtime student of protest, I excitedly e-mailed a colleague who studies Chinese politics to share the news. He replied with one word: “Iran.”

In one sense, my colleague was clearly right: The month-long Iranian movement is much more “eventful” than the one-day protest in Beijing. More than the “Green Revolution” — which surged in response to a fraudulent election in 2009 — Iranian women have launched a composite cycle of contention combining a demand for women’s rights, anger at the state of the economy, and, increasingly, outrage at a regime that is run by isolated octogenarians who have unleashed savage repression at the peaceful protesters.

In the decade since the Green Revolution, savvy young Iranian protesters have learned to transmit video evidence of their protests and the ruthless repression to the international media. On Oct. 12, The Guardian had enough information on the rapid diffusion of the movement to display a map of the number of days of protests in various Iranian cities, which already ranged from 25 in Tehran to the Kurdish city of Mashhad in the East with 16.

In contrast, the bridge protest in Beijing was an isolated event that soon gave way in the international media to the coronation of Xi Jinping for an historic third term at the Party Congress. In its lead article on Oct. 1, The Economist was already dubbing the Chinese leader “The Prince,” speculating that he was well on his way to Mao-like lifetime rule.

But unrest has been growing quietly in China at the government’s draconian COVID lockdowns, at rising prices, and at the country’s grave property crisis. In a recent guest essay in the New York Times, Susan Shirk, author of “Overreach: How China Derailed its Peaceful Rise,” argued that Xi has gradually whittled away at the model of the “peaceful superpower” that he inherited from his predecessors.

In its foreign policy, Xi’s government has been threatening Taiwan with invasion. Domestically, he has ruthlessly done away with his competitors and tried to reach a state of zero-COVID, at enormous cost to the populace and the economy. As Shirk puts it: “Officials nationwide are overzealously imposing mass lockdowns and surveillance in a bandwagon dynamic that has echoes of the Great Leap Forward, when officials over-complied with Mao’s damaging directives.”

Shirk gives only passing attention to the protests that have begun to pop up here and there under Xi’s rule. But with an economy that is in trouble, a foreign policy that has triggered alarm among China’s neighbors, and the “Dictator’s Dilemma” that Shirk documents in her book, the isolated protest on a bridge in Beijing may turn out to be a harbinger of much broader movement.

Don’t expect an Iran-like wave of protest in China. The impact of a movement does not always depend on protest in the streets. Think of the outrage in Russia after Vladimir Putin began to mobilize thousands of men for his failing campaign in Ukraine. Although there have been scattered street protests against the move, its major resonance has taken place at Russia’s borders, where protest — in Albert Hirschmann’s words — has taken the form of “exit.”

The Iranian movement continues to spread — not only among the women who began it at the outrages of the “morality police,” but among college students, workers, and minority ethnic groups like the Kurds. Yet while the vast diffusion of the movement demonstrates “people power,” it has also provided a highly visible target for the forces of repression. The result — as in Syria over a decade ago — may well be the militarization of the movement as outraged Iranians take up arms against the regime.

In China, by contrast, the isolated Beijing bridge protest may be a “canary in the coal mine.” Its resonance may diffuse subliminally as China’s “Prince” continues to insist on his zero-Covid policy amid the accolades of his party comrades. Stay tuned — but over the long term.

Sidney Tarrow is Emeritus Professor of Government at Cornell University and an adjunct professor at the Cornell Law School. His most recent book is “Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development,” from Cambridge University Press.