MAINTENANCE – After major protests, Beijing lifted most of the existing health restrictions. For researcher Hugues Eudeline, despite this easing, the country’s complicated economic situation could prompt Chinese urbanites to take to the streets again.
Hugues Eudeline is an associate researcher at the Thomas More Institute. A former naval officer, PhD in Military History, Defense and Security from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE, Paris) and certified French and American university lecturer, he devotes his research to the geopolitics and geostrategy of the world ocean.
LE FIGARO. – After three years of an extremely strict health strategy called Zero-Covid, China has largely relaxed its measures since early December. Is it more to do with the historic mobilization against Beijing’s policies than the country’s economic situation?
Hugues EUDELINE. – The mobilization against the political system is due to the country’s economic situation, so the two are really connected. Recent economic news is particularly bad. China’s exports and imports have shrunk much more than in previous years, foreign demand is falling, we can also note the worsening of the Covid crisis and everything related to it. There is also an export problem that is particularly serious as the drop occurred in the middle of the Christmas season, which is the time when export activity is at its best.
China is experiencing a major economic slowdown. This country is based on a consensus that power allows the Chinese to make money in a capitalist way provided they do not engage in politics and do not touch the Communist Party. But there the social movements openly criticize the party. The economic problem is essential because it remains the great success of the Chinese Communist Party since Deng Xiaoping until today, but this phenomenal growth seems to be slowing down at the moment, as there should be a growth of the order of 3%, which is very low for China.
For Beijing, does the political risk take precedence over the health risk?
China has always been a country that has seen extremely harsh revolts throughout its history. However, Chinese thinking is always long-term. They look to history because when it fails to predict the future, it brightens it up abundantly. So the leaders know very well that the revolts, once started, become very important and can hinder, even overthrow, power.
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Is the Chinese regime opening Pandora’s box by giving in on the streets? Can we expect further social movements against the regime in the coming years?
However, the risk of these moves multiplying in China is limited. The population control system is very sophisticated, very efficient, so I don’t think they will let anything go wrong. However, it is clear that the population and especially young academics are very dissatisfied as they are currently having a really hard time finding work due to the economic slowdown. And the economy, as people work less, weakens the economy even more. It is a doom-loop.
XI Jinping promised to lift the whole country out of poverty in 2020, and he clearly hasn’t kept his promise.
Hugues Eudeline
As for whether this is dangerous for leaders, consider that the President has never had as much power as he does now. He holds the reins of the country firmly and I find it difficult to see how things could be moved with such a capacity for internal power. The situation really needs to get a lot more serious.
You quote young academics: do young people suffer the most from the country’s economic situation?
Probably yes, although all workers are suffering from the closure of businesses and the economic recession. There is no social security there, so we can understand that even though we provide food to people who are stuck at home, they are not very happy with the situation. But, as always, it is the young people who react the quickest and most violently.
Has the social heterogeneity of the demonstrations, mixing young academics and factory workers, urban and rural dwellers, helped worry Chinese power?
I don’t think there’s a big risk in the countryside because there are fewer people there than in the big cities. However, since the number of cities with more than one million inhabitants in China is very important, many housing could be won through social movements.
I don’t think we can speak of revolt, rather of dissatisfaction. But this can degenerate, we must not forget that in 2020 President XI Jinping promised to lift the whole country out of poverty and he clearly did not keep his promise. And the Chinese know that the measures taken against the epidemic in the rest of the world were not as drastic as in their country, and that most countries are now operating at full capacity, which is not the case for them.
In China, some are decrying a political sleight of hand by a regime that is abruptly changing course without living up to its responsibilities. Do you share this observation?
Chinese regimes have often changed course and without ever explaining it, when you have the power for yourself you have no problem freely changing direction. At the moment it is only responding to a domestic policy problem, and it can do so with a lot of violence, as we have seen in some provinces. Personally, what I fear is that the crisis will not develop further and that, in order to divert attention from internal problems and the line of the October 16 Presidential speech at the XX. Congress will not decide to use force against Taiwan. The risk is that they will decide to favor external nationalist operations in order to make them forget about internal problems. This is of course not very obvious. The president spoke again about Taiwan in his speech, but Russia’s example in Ukraine is likely to encourage Chinese strategists to be more cautious. Everything depends on the dissatisfaction of the population and in particular of the young university graduates, around 50% of whom are no longer able to find employment.
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