December 2, 2022 - 7:00am
In the space of a few weeks, Xi Jinping has gone from an acclaimed leader to a man under pressure to restore public order and defuse anger over Zero Covid policies. A generation brought up on a politically sanitised version of history seems to be experiencing an awakening in increasingly fractious times. Chinese anger over Covid policy has acted as a lightning rod for accumulated angst about rising repression and even for opposition to Xi and the ubiquitous control of the CCP. The recently announced death of former leader Jiang Zemin, who was associated with happier times in China, couldn’t have come at more precarious time for Xi and the party.
This month’s Politburo meeting will have to steer China through the current upsurge in Covid cases over the winter, with the Chinese New Year holidays looming in just two months. Premature easing of policy could lead to an outbreak of infection and deaths, especially in a population that remains under-vaccinated and that has had relatively little exposure to the Covid pandemic. Repressive lockdowns, on the other hand, will surely fuel further unrest.
Though the CCP has important public health and social control reasons not to abandon Zero Covid policies as such, it will likely try to make it more sustainable. This week, the National Health Commission said it would speed up the roll-out of vaccinations for older citizens and of initial boosters for two-thirds of over-80s. This followed the slight easing of Covid restrictions in the 20-point plan announced in early November.
For all the focus on Covid, though, we should also remember that these protests have activated frustrations extending beyond the virus. Recently, workers, students, and the middle class have been articulating slogans on subjects ranging from working conditions and unpaid wages to democracy and free speech, extending to outright opposition to Xi and the CCP.
Two things could further inflame the unrest. The first, still open to conjecture, is whether Zero Covid might divide the CCP. Local government party officials, for example, are under huge pressure to carry out an impossible array of tasks under major financial constraints. They bear the brunt of unpopularity for carrying out Beijing’s Zero Covid policies, and they also foot the bill for expensive mass testing programmes — estimated to cost about 1-1.5% of China’s $17 trillion GDP. Local tax revenues are dwindling as the property market sinks; welfare obligations will only rise, and policy choices are limited to even more debt issuance, public spending cuts, or sales of public assets and services.
The second, already a feature, is the weakness and latent instability in the wider economy, even without the effects of Zero Covid policies. China’s GDP growth has pretty much stalled, having halved first to about 5-6% a year during the 2010s, but, worryingly, is set to halve again in the 2020s. Periods of ‘recession with Chinese characteristics’ are starting to become common. Unemployment, which is improperly measured, may be significantly higher than the official rate of 5.5%, and youth unemployment, estimated at around 19%, carries the risk of significant adverse social consequences.
At the moment, it is hard to see how conditions will improve in the short or medium term. Growth will remain under pressure from the deadweight of excessive indebtedness; the real estate market has to shrink; there is no strategy to boost consumption and services; a more Leninist governance regime is stymying private enterprise and initiative. Meanwhile, geopolitics is pushing economic decoupling or disengagement in supply chains, and in key areas such as semiconductors.
The nature of the CCP system is being revealed to citizens through a Covid lens, but the platform on which unrest might evolve is determined by other, more systemic, factors. The economy is in a poor state, with a rising risk of instability; the government and its critics are in a quandary over Zero Covid with a bias towards restraint; none of the policy options have favourable outcomes; and the entire economics and finance leadership team will be out of office and replaced primarily by loyalists next March. Stay tuned.
George Magnus an economist and author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy. He is an Associate at the China Centre at Oxford University.
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SubscribeSheer cowardice from Spitfire’s CEO! He could have just ignored it.
What kind of bottom crawling spineless creep is Will Evans.
Great opportunity to shaft his co-founder?
I thought it a piece of opportunism on Evan’s part too. Just like denunciation was used in Stalinist Russia and China to move rivals on. Sadly the creative sector is full of this bullshit.
Yeah, with Spitefire
“accusations of “hate” are hurled at anyone who merely disagrees ”
Just further evidence that all the tactics, and the underlying philosophy for the Trans brigade is simply borrowed from quasi- Marxist feminist/black rights/gay rights movements.
Taken on its own, the trans jokers are nothing. But a world where blacks must be elves and clone troopers, girls must be allowed into boy scouts, gay pride must be celebrate, you must pretend women footballers or tennis players are as good as men. And anyone suggesting otherwise (Damore) gets sacked.
Is also a world where you must pretend “trans women” are women, there is no difference between them and normal female athletes, they must be allowed into girls bathrooms, and anyone suggesting otherwise gets sacked.
…except it’s got nothing to do with Marxism, feminism or black rights or gay rights, but everything to do with the culture of rampant consumption and the supremacy of the individual!
100% It’s a backlash against women’s rights, and it’s being used to prop up the very forces of Capitalism that it pretends to seek to oppose.
“they must be allowed into girls bathrooms”
No they must NOT. They should be castrated for the first offence and crucified for the second, no ifs or buts.
Could someone please explain what all this ‘trans’ nonsense is about? Until this excellent essay I was completely unaware of it. Here in Arcadia we live a very simple life, in perhaps the most idyllic landscape on earth, untrammelled by any such excitement.
It seems it involves deliberate child mutilation:Is that possible in the Western World in the early twenty first century? Or is it some form of religious cult whose antics I have stupidity misinterpreted and thus inadvertently vilified?
It is a construct created by a man called John Money. He is worth looking into if you want to find out how far the rabbit hole goes.
Many thanks indeed!
What a truly appalling account.
Money deserved to have been hanged, and he would no doubt have made a great colleague of the late (Dr) Joseph Mengele and his Auschwitz cronies.
Thanks for the name – I’ve just read the Wikipedia entry and would recommend that most people would be appalled at the influence of someone so obviously . . . I can’t think of an appropriate word to go here.
Malevolent?
R Wright is either ignorant of the historical facts or deliberately lying as part of a sly agit-prop campaign.
Trans people are NOT a “construct by a man called John Money”.
We have historical records of trans people across cultures & geography stretching back millennia.
Modern research on trans people dates back to Dr Magnus Hirschfeld whose work began in the late 1800s. His huge research library in gay and trans people was one of the very first book burnings by the nazis once they came to power.
Anti trans activists such as R Wright need to stop lying – whether through ignorance or deliberate mendacity – in their efforts to hide the research in & history of trans people. It didn’t work in 1933. It shouldn’t work today.
Surely these are the people we used to refer to as either “fairies” or “butch”. They were quite harmless and didn’t go around castrating children as far as I recall. So what is the problem now may I ask?
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Read the interim Cass report and understand why the Tavistock clinic has had to close. This poisoness ideology which flies in the face of truth is well organised and everywhere. Schools, hospitals, prisons, media.. if you agree that a man can become a woman fine, but if you question it welcome to the club of concerned individuals, parents and families who need to protect ourselves whilst fighting back to reveal the nonsense which threatens us.
Jeez Charles, it’s been written about extensively on Unherd, or are you just joking?
Sorry, not paying attention!
Just watched GB News interview of Andrew Doyle about his new new book on this issue – if all of us don’t fight against this witch hunt and quasi religious movement that seeks to cancel all of us, then humanity is lost. We must all stand up and fight this bigotry. If we let these minority kunts win, then we might as well declare our country a communist fascist state. Unherd and Gb News we support you. JK we support you.
Just ordered his book
It’s the lack of religion that causes this. People are taught as children that being “nice” is one of the highest moral imperatives, but ordinary life gives very few opportunities to demonstrate to others that you’re a nice person. Especially so if you work in management and must deal with the realities of running a company. Being pious used to provide lots of rather arbitrary ways to show that you’re a nice, well socialized person. With those gone, people get desperate and engage in these destructive acts.
If you’re not on the left you can probably handle this because your worldview is that the world sometimes sucks, sometimes being nice leads to bad outcomes for all and so on. On the left, not so much. Result: the moment someone says “here’s an opportunity to show how nice you are” they grab it, unthinkingly. Punishing the person who “hurt” others, who wasn’t “nice”, is a way to show how nice that person is.
Of course it could also be just a way for people on the left to purge non-progressivists. Just as they always have, throughout history. At some point maybe this needs to turned around on them and people need to start getting cancelled for saying woke things. Such people sure are dangerous to have around!
I’ve met plenty of horrible “Christian” people who seem to think asking God for forgiveness on a Sunday excused them for their nasty midweek behaviour. Personally, I think the internet has magnified the problem. Keyboard warriors and virtue signalling, that’s where the problem is.
Exactly that. Before Twitter and FB we didn’t have anonymous abuses or cancel culture. If one were to be confronted with bigots we could have a real fight because both parties’ ID is known. Now, the social networks have failed us by allowing anonymous bigots to attach people without sanction: what happens to good old fashion debates?
An interesting description for what the term “gender”(as in “gender ideology”) carries within it, is given by Carl Trueman. He elaborates on a sociological phenomenon call Expressive Individualism. I would call it Gnostic Expressive Individualism.
Expressive individualism is the notion that every individual has an inner core of feelings and in order to be authentic I need to be able to give outward expression – one might say I need to be able to live outwardly consistent with my inner core of feelings. […] My primary responsibility is towards myself and my own authenticity. […] the real me is this inner core of feelings. So the most significant things that can be done to me are the things that affect that inner core of feeling or stop me giving full expression outwardly to that inner core of feeling,…
This ties together four features I have noted from expressions of social justice ideology – the primacy of the feelings of self, and of their full expression/performativity, authenticity and a seeming narcissism or self absorption.
How ironic, and depressing, that this media company exploits a name, Spitfire, that represents the best of Britain at a time, with the Queen, when we were sticking up for tolerance against tyrants. Now we have modern Puritan tyrants like Evans. Who’ll save us from these bampots?
“Spitfire”? More like a damp log.
The last time I looked we are in a country that has freedom of speech and expression!
Stop this madness Christian Henson and JK Rowling are the good guys. I support them both.
hey cool
What actually is cool?
Can we have a bit more?
Wow. Just never ending with the Soviet metaphors. Did a communist hurt you? Like, as a kid? P.S, it is up to the CEO how he runs his company. Transphobia might not be good for business.
Except it’s not necessarily transphobia, though. It seems to be more to do with the treatment of children who experience gender dysphoria, and whether or not there are only two sexes (with the occasional intersex person). You are right about one thing though, unfortunately, it does appear that it is now bad for business to challenge some particular views – or is it? They don’t seem to want to risk it.
re: “It’s not necessarily transphobia.”
You should remove the word “necessarily”. Supporting JK Rowling and being concerned about children’s safety have nothing whatsoever to do with transphobia. JK Rowling has never uttered a transphobic word, though trans activists desperately want the world to think otherwise.
Let us see how consistent you are. If a CEO should decide that it would be good for business to have an all-male, all-white, all-heterosexual staff, or that any female employees should be young, beautiful and wearing high heels, would you still back his sovereign right to decide?