China’s White Paper Protests Are A Preview Of The ‘Soft Despotism’ Coming For America

The West may be tempted to think the recent angry and seemingly fearless protests across dozens of China’s major cities over the prolonged, brutal lockdowns might pose a real threat to dictator Xi Jinping’s tyrannical rule.

Chinese political commentators living overseas who harbor a deep hatred of the murderous party and its dictatorship share the same, irresistible temptation. For the Chinese who desire freedom, how could they not hate the evil CCP and hope for its demise?

But I do not share the temptation.

One must understand the nature of the protests, unclouded by wishful thinking, to make a reasonable judgment of what has happened in China and what will happen in the future.

For the first time, slogans like “Down with the CCP!” and “Down with Xi Jinping!” were chanted. The protests, however, were not political movements but venting anger. They lacked specific political objectives and demands that can only be answered by changes of a political nature.

Perhaps the biggest deficiency was and is the lack of support from ‘the masses.’ Historically, the masses have been the only force that stood a chance of making a political impact. Sadly, the Chinese masses of today are no longer up to the job, having been tamed for decades by the CCP.

The Chinese masses refer to themselves as: 老百姓 (lao bai xing). The concept of lao bai xing denotes a unique political being. They are a ruled class in a caste society who voluntarily submit to the ruling class, i.e., the CCP. 

Who are those people?

They are the 950 million Chinese who live on a monthly income of 2,000 yuan ($300), according to the National Statistical Bureau’s 2020 yearbook. They are also the 200 million migrant workers, largely a rural populace, whose life goal is to return to the countryside to build a nice house after they have earned enough money from working in cities.

They are poorly educated and financially limited. They are not technically savvy and therefore bereft of the capability of climbing over the Great Firewall, accessing information that will help them resist state propaganda. They certainly have no knowledge of Twitter and the other apps used outside of China.

These people, whom I know very well because I lived among them, know very little about the real world. Nor do they care to know. People from my hometown cooperatively locked themselves at home simply because the government asked them to do so.

Do not assume that middle-class Chinese desire freedom or democracy.

Freedom is too costly — it requires tremendous sacrifice to pursue, as evidenced in Hong Kongers’ defiance against the CCP tyranny and brutality in 2019.

Democracy is also costly — it demands no small amount of time and effort to participate in common affairs or deliberation in the public sphere. On most occasions, the middle class is unconcerned with political deprivation so long as their purchasing power is guaranteed and increased.

What they have grown accustomed to is despotism — or as Tocqueville writes, a “soft despotism” that provides them with stability and security.

Modern American liberals are no different.

True, it seems that some college students are awakening from their apathy toward politics. They do cry out for “freedom” and “democracy” this time, but those slogans carry very little substance, if any. The freedom they seek is essentially a license to do what they want, similar to how American millennials and Gen Zs understand the word.

The freedom the American founding fathers fought so hard for, on the other hand, is a completely different species: it is self-rule and self-reliance.

Freedom of that nature has never been in the Chinese nation’s DNA.

White Paper ‘Revolution’? 

At the peak of the protests, a resident living in Chengdu, China, asked me if China should anticipate an upheaval in the near future. “No,” I said.

The white paper protests were by nature different from the Tiananmen Square protests. 

Students of the 1980s had been very political proceeding the protests. The 1980s were the only period of time through the CCP’s reign when China was relatively free. Professors — mostly American educated — were allowed to teach separation of power, rule of law, and freedom of speech. Students enthusiastically read Western political philosophies and debated with each other on campus. They were idealists who wanted to bring liberty to China. 

Today’s Chinese college students, born at the dawn of the 21st century and growing up in a world of comfort, entertainment and various consumptions, are materialistic and would love to migrate to Western countries if they can. They are not rebels, let alone revolutionaries. 

Since the Tiananmen massacre, there have been dispersed protests throughout the past three decades. Chinese individuals or certain groups such as Falun Gong practitioners took their oppositions to the streets. 

Their actions were received with imprisonment and torture. Their voices echoed into a void — the other Chinese, whose self-interests were not affected, stood aloof.

This time is different,