The cause of individual freedom has a new hero. He is the Chinese man who stood atop a highway overpass in a busy section of Beijing on Oct. 13 and draped the structure with two large protest banners, in full view of passing motorists.
This was just three days before Chinese Communists assembled for their 20th party congress, the likely outcome of which is to ratify a third five-year term for Xi Jinping as the country’s ruler.
Yet in bold red characters, one of the banners condemned this impending coronation: “Remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping”.
Like “Tank Man”, who bravely blocked the path of a People’s Liberation Army tank amid the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing, this individual risked all to defy the regime. Unlike Tank Man, who has never been named, the man on the overpass has been identified, unofficially, as Peng Lifa. (Another difference between the two cases: We still don’t know for sure what happened to Tank Man, but video shows that Peng was arrested.)
China’s censorship machine quickly snuffed online discussion of the incident. Yet Peng probably spoke for millions. His reason for advocating Xi’s ouster was widely shared: frustration with Xi’s “zero-covid” policy, which has kept China subject to rolling lockdowns, involving tens of millions of people, long after most other countries in the world have moved to a more normal posture. Peng’s second banner read: “We want to eat, not do coronavirus tests; reform, not the Cultural Revolution. We want freedom, not lockdowns; elections, not rulers. We want dignity, not lies. Be citizens, not enslaved people”.
Xi intends the assembly of 2,000-plus party members, meticulously purged of all but steadfast loyalists, as a show of strength — for his leadership and for Chinese Communism. His stubborn, inflexible implementation of the zero-covid policy could be undermining both. If political change ever does occur in China, historians might record Peng’s protest as the moment it began.
China Change, a U.S.-based human-rights nonprofit, whose website identified Peng, calls Xi’s zero-covid policy “the equivalent of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward” — and it’s a provocative, but apt, analogy.
No, China is probably not headed for another famine like the one that killed millions as a result of Mao’s insistence on a disruptive bid for simultaneous industrialization and agriculture collectivization between 1958 and 1962.
What’s comparable, though, are the mind-sets of Mao and Xi. Both set ostensible policy objectives — economic growth, public health — and called for party-led mass mobilization to achieve them. For both, party-led mass mobilization itself is the true point of the exercise.
Now, as then, the party will settle for nothing less than superhuman effort. “People must conquer nature”, Mao instructed during the Great Leap Forward. “Fighting against the epidemic is both a material struggle and a spiritual confrontation. It is a contest of strength and a contest of will”, an editorial on Xi’s coronavirus policy in People’s Daily recently said.
Mao proclaimed Chinese economic development would overtake that of Britain. Xi promises China will outperform Western countries at fighting the pandemic, without the help of their vaccines.
Xi’s speech to the congress Sunday offered no hint of a new approach, despite counterproductive results ranging from the crash of a bus carrying people to a quarantine facility, in which 27 people died, to a markedly slowing economy.
China postponed the scheduled release of its third-quarter gross domestic product figures, which were due Tuesday. There was no official explanation — though it surely wasn’t because the economy was outperforming the government’s 5.5 percent annual target.
Also in doubt are the long-run public health benefits of Xi’s policy. It has kept cases and deaths to 1 million and 5,226, respectively — according to official figures. China’s population of 1.4 billion remains highly vulnerable, however, because people have neither received the vaccines that work best against highly contagious variants nor acquired immunity through exposure. China is stuck: Continuing Xi’s strategy could risk the economy, jobs and income; abandoning it could risk a huge outbreak of disease.
As during the Great Leap Forward, China Change notes, “everyone knows” the zero-covid policy “is a terrible mistake but no one is able to correct it”. Mao did eventually back away from the Great Leap Forward, as more sensible Communists, such as Deng Xiaoping, gained influence.
Soon enough, though, Mao launched a new mass mobilization, the Cultural Revolution, in which Deng and his allies were purged; millions suffered death, forced labor, imprisonment or career destruction before Mao’s death brought the disaster to a halt in 1976.
Among the persecuted were Xi Zhongxun, a party elder, and his son Xi Jinping. In one of history’s more fateful ironic twists, the younger Xi survived the Cultural Revolution and emerged more committed to Communism.
Like Mao, Xi believes fervently in one-party rule, and that one-party rule, in turn, hinges on mass mobilization and internal purges. He, too, risks putting China through yet another cycle of popular discontent, party upheaval and violent repression.
Charles Lane is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, and a weekly columnist.