China’s Middle Class May Be Xi Jinping’s Biggest Threat
While many assumed the government had bought off this influential group with decades of rising incomes, its political awakening may have just begun.
Constant testing and arbitrary lockdowns have angered many.
Source: Bloomberg
Myths take years to propagate and only days to puncture. In addition to shocking China’s seemingly unprepared authorities, recent Covid protests in major Chinese cities have claimed two enduring myths about the People’s Republic.
One obviously is the purported superiority of China’s top-down authoritarian system. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stuck to harsh Covid Zero policies mainly to demonstrate that it can do a better job than Western liberal democracies at suppressing the pandemic. With new infection rates rising to record levels and public anger growing, China’s strategy and the political system behind it are clearly failing, not succeeding.