Speaker 1: We live in an age of uprising. From Haiti to
Speaker 1: Hong Kong, from Ecuador de Sudan, from Chile to Myanmar,
Speaker 1: from the US to Iran, an entire generation has been
Speaker 1: confronted with the horror of our world and took the
Speaker 1: simple expedient of picking up a brick and throwing it
Speaker 1: at a cop. Yet as the uprising swept the globe,
Speaker 1: there was one country where it was considered impossible. Every expert,
Speaker 1: every policymaker, every kid on a street corner new there
Speaker 1: was simply no chance of a mass treet movement in China.
Speaker 1: On Monday, it was unimaginable. On Friday, it was everywhere
Speaker 1: welcome to it could happen here. What we've been watching
Speaker 1: for the past three weeks now is the failure of
Speaker 1: one of the most sophisticated political regimes in human history,
Speaker 1: a political, social, and economic regime designed specifically to stop
Speaker 1: this one moment. After thirty years of repression, the national
Speaker 1: mass street movement has returned to China. This is what
Speaker 1: it was all about. Everything from the censorship policies to
Speaker 1: union busting to subsidize mortgages from a rising Chinese middle class.
Speaker 1: It was about keeping people from going back to the
Speaker 1: streets to make even the idea of it impossible. And
Speaker 1: yet here we are. In one sense, the party is
Speaker 1: little to fear from the round of protests, barring an
Speaker 1: immense intensification of violence, which at the moment seems extremely unlikely.
Speaker 1: But in another sense, the CCP is perhaps the last
Speaker 1: regime on earth that truly remembers the previous age of revolution,
Speaker 1: that remembers when the workers took Shanghai in sixty seven,
Speaker 1: very nearly took Beijing and eighty nine. These are people
Speaker 1: who understand that China's political system is built on shaving
Speaker 1: a sleeping bear, and no matter how profitable that system is,
Speaker 1: there's always a chance that one day that bear is
Speaker 1: going to wake up. Now the bear isn't fully awake yet.
Speaker 1: We are not shing in China full scale uprising a
Speaker 1: la Sudan or Myanmar, But that bear, the air to
Speaker 1: maybe the most militant working class and modern world has
Speaker 1: ever seen, is starting to open its eyes. So what
Speaker 1: is the CCP currently facing. Since about November, there have
Speaker 1: been widespread anti government protests in China, Unlike anything we've
Speaker 1: seen in the last thirty years. These protests are everywhere.
Speaker 1: They're in Beijing, They're in Nanjing, They're in Shanghai. There
Speaker 1: in guang Show, there in shing John, We'll get back
Speaker 1: to that one in a second. There in Wuhan, reports
Speaker 1: I saw said that there were protests at seventy seven universities.
Speaker 1: That number is almost certainly an under account now, and
Speaker 1: these student protests are not just taking place at small
Speaker 1: colleges in the middle of nowhere. There were protests at
Speaker 1: singh Qua University, which for an American audience, I would
Speaker 1: compare to China's version of Harvard. It's the college that
Speaker 1: produces the upper echelon. If the Chinese ruling class, Hi
Speaker 1: Jimping graduated from there, so did his predecessor, Hu Jintao.
Speaker 1: And the only reason that jujuin how his predecessor did
Speaker 1: not graduate from there, is that that guy was so
Speaker 1: old that he went to college under the Japanese occupation.
Speaker 1: When I was originally writing this, I had a joke
Speaker 1: here about how the only city where there haven't been
Speaker 1: protest is Harbin, which is the city in the absolute
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere in northn China. But no, I googled it,
Speaker 1: and it turns out there have been protests in bloody Harbon.
Speaker 1: For people who aren't very good at Chinese geography, which
Speaker 1: is probably most people, this means these protests are everywhere.
Speaker 1: There in the north, there in the south, there in
Speaker 1: the east, there in the west, there in the far West.
Speaker 1: And it's true that a lot of these protests are
Speaker 1: not that big, although some of them are absolutely massive.
Speaker 1: But the importance here is that this is the first
Speaker 1: time in thirty years that we've seen widespread national protests
Speaker 1: over a single issue in China, the anormity of which
Speaker 1: is compounded by the fact that people in the streets
Speaker 1: of cities like Shanghai are openly calling for the fall
Speaker 1: of the CCP and si Jianping, something that by itself
Speaker 1: can get you a decade in prison just for saying.
Speaker 1: We can ask what these protests are acts Lee about.
Speaker 1: The version you see in the American press is that
Speaker 1: these are anti lockdown protests, are protests against China's COVID
Speaker 1: zero policy, or that there's also pro democracy protests against
Speaker 1: the entire regime. And this is sort of true as
Speaker 1: far as it goes, but it doesn't capture the core
Speaker 1: of what's going on, which is that what we're seeing
Speaker 1: is a widespread fusion of labor rebellion, anti police brutality, protests,
Speaker 1: and a revolt against the authoritarian state. The thing that's
Speaker 1: brought all of this together is the CCPs COVID policy.
Speaker 1: But that's because that policy is the most visible and
Speaker 1: most concentrated expression of the state's general authoritarian is a
Speaker 1: bit brutal war against the working class. We can learn
Speaker 1: a lot about what's actually been happening by going back
Speaker 1: a little bit to the very start of the protests.
Speaker 1: There are three specific events that sparked the protests, two
Speaker 1: of which are pretty well covered, and one of which
Speaker 1: has been basically ignored because of how long ago it happened.
Speaker 1: The first arc is essentially an event in its own right.
Speaker 1: This is what I would call the fox Con revolts,
Speaker 1: a series of worker uprisings against the manufacturer of the iPhone,
Speaker 1: which with a single factory, controls vast portions of the
Speaker 1: regional economy of Hainan Province. Whereas large as factory is based.
Speaker 1: The fox Con revolt is I'm brewing for a long time.
Speaker 1: It begun essentially when fox Con began to impose what's
Speaker 1: called the closed loop system. The closed loop system was
Speaker 1: originally developed by the NBA to run an NBA season
Speaker 1: during the beginning of the pandemic. The idea is that
Speaker 1: you keep everyone inside a closed loop. This means that
Speaker 1: everyone in the production process has no contact with the
Speaker 1: outside world at all for as long as the manufacturing
Speaker 1: cycle goes. The CCP started adopting the closed loop as
Speaker 1: they hit problems with their twin imperatives to both stop
Speaker 1: COVID and also to make sure that fox Con hit
Speaker 1: its production targets so Apple could have enough iPhones for
Speaker 1: the Christmas rush. The result was that as an October
Speaker 1: wave of infections hit Hangan province, where fox CON's largest
Speaker 1: factory was located, two hundred thousand workers were put into
Speaker 1: a closed loop system, which meant they were trapped in
Speaker 1: the factory in their dormitories. In order to keep this
Speaker 1: factory running, fox Con needs about a hundred thousand migrant workers.
Speaker 1: The problem, from Capital's perspective with microt workers is that
Speaker 1: they can, if things get bad enough, just go home,
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what happens. Workers inside the fox Con
Speaker 1: plants started to be quarantined with people who were sick
Speaker 1: in the same dormitory and It's worth noting here that
Speaker 1: these dormitories are tiny. The conditions even outside of lockdown
Speaker 1: are atrocious, and when people were suddenly getting quarantined with
Speaker 1: people who were sick, workers essentially just said no and
Speaker 1: started to stage massive breakouts. There are incredible videos of
Speaker 1: these trains of people like along the road walking home
Speaker 1: as sort of hitching rides on people's trucks fleeing if factory.
Speaker 1: We don't actually know how many workers escaped, but it
Speaker 1: was enough to be a massive problem for Capital. Again,
Speaker 1: they need these workers in order to make enough iPhones
Speaker 1: to sell for Christmas. Current estimates suggest that Apple is
Speaker 1: somewhere between eleven and fifteen million units behind what it
Speaker 1: needs to make the Christmas rush. So Fox Con had
Speaker 1: the local government recruiting people to go work in the factory.
Speaker 1: What they told these workers was that if they entered
Speaker 1: the closed loop for thirty days, they'd be given three
Speaker 1: thousand yawn, which is about four hundred and fifteen dollars
Speaker 1: to live on for the next month, and then get
Speaker 1: paid thirty on or about four dollars an hour, and
Speaker 1: then after the end of the next dirty days they'd
Speaker 1: get another three thousand john in the US, this would
Speaker 1: be a subminimum wage poverty job for a Chinese worker.
Speaker 1: This is a lot of money, or it would have
Speaker 1: been had it not been for one minor problem. All
Speaker 1: of it was bullshit. Fox Con and the CCP were
Speaker 1: lying out of their asses after workers who are already
Speaker 1: in the closed loop. They learned that the two three
Speaker 1: thousand yuan bonuses weren't going to be paid until March
Speaker 1: and May of next year, meaning that in order to
Speaker 1: get what they were promised for two months of work,
Speaker 1: they were going to have to work for seven months. Also,
Speaker 1: the thirty you on an hour wage that they were
Speaker 1: promised was a lie. They were getting paid substantially less
Speaker 1: than that. So on Tuesday the November, workers who had
Speaker 1: emerged from quarantine to start work only to learn that
Speaker 1: they had been systematically lied to by both the governments
Speaker 1: and Chinese and Taiwanese capitalists, came out of their dormitories
Speaker 1: and demanded that they either get their money or be
Speaker 1: allowed to leave. There's another part of this account that
Speaker 1: I think complicates a lot of the sort of narratives
Speaker 1: that we've heard about what the Chinese prostor about that
Speaker 1: did not make the Western press at all, which is
Speaker 1: that these workers were also demanding that their bosses, quote,
Speaker 1: implement pandemic prevention and control measures. Um, it's not entirely
Speaker 1: clue what the specific demands refers to. It seems to
Speaker 1: be about not quarantining sick people in the same dorms
Speaker 1: as healthy people, a thing that seems relatively obvious, but
Speaker 1: capitalism regardless. The product of bosses ignoring these demands was
Speaker 1: several days of full scale fighting with the police. On
Speaker 1: November twenty three, a bunch of videos began to spread
Speaker 1: of workers taking those metal police barricades that you see
Speaker 1: all the time in the US that are essentially an
Speaker 1: arch with a bunch of bars and not get into
Speaker 1: a flat base. You've you've probably seen these picking them
Speaker 1: up and straight up throwing them at cops or grabbing
Speaker 1: them and beating police riot shields with them. I have
Speaker 1: I have never seen anything like it. It was absolutely wild.
Speaker 1: At this point, after several days of fighting, after their
Speaker 1: own regular security people literally refused to show up to
Speaker 1: go fight these workers, and police from outside had to
Speaker 1: be called in. Fox Con gave up said okay, we
Speaker 1: will give you ten thousand yond to literally leave right now.
Speaker 1: Please just stop, and a lot of people took the
Speaker 1: money and left, And in any other year, in any
Speaker 1: other moment, that would have been the end of it.
Speaker 1: The Fox Con riots would be another episode in the
Speaker 1: never ending series of they tried not to pay us
Speaker 1: riots that are the most common one of the most
Speaker 1: common forms of workers protests in China. Instead, on Thanksgiving
Speaker 1: Day in the United States, videos started to circulate of
Speaker 1: a fire in a residential block in a room Cheet,
Speaker 1: the capital of shing Jong. There are several videos of
Speaker 1: the fire. In one that journalists were able to verify,
Speaker 1: you can hear people screaming from inside the building as
Speaker 1: they tried and failed to escape the flames. Further videos
Speaker 1: showed that cops had barricaded off the streets with metal
Speaker 1: wires as a way to enforcing John's one hundred day
Speaker 1: long lockdown, which prevented firefighters from getting to the scene.
Speaker 1: Firefighters can be seen firing water hoses at the building,
Speaker 1: only for the hoses arc to fall shorts trapped behind
Speaker 1: barricades that prevented them from any closer. Speculation about whether
Speaker 1: the doors of the apartment building themselves have been sealed
Speaker 1: shut with locks or barricaded from the outside, as had
Speaker 1: happened to so many other people's homes during the lockdown
Speaker 1: ran rampant. One video I saw from another city appeared
Speaker 1: to show workers and has met suits who become known
Speaker 1: as the Big Whites, literally welding someone's door shut to
Speaker 1: keep them in. To make matters worse, the head of
Speaker 1: the rooms she city Fire rescue department blamed the families
Speaker 1: for their own deaths, saying quote some residents abilities to
Speaker 1: rescue themselves were too weak. These are the videos the
Speaker 1: fragments of nightmares brought to life that started the mass protests.
Speaker 1: This is a revolution scene. At thirty second intervals, everyone
Speaker 1: is trying to beat the sensors. Clips float back and
Speaker 1: forth between weach at, Twitter, Telegram back to Weachat again. Ironically,
Speaker 1: many sensors were already home for the weekend, allowing clips
Speaker 1: and posts that otherwise would have been removed immediately to
Speaker 1: circulate for hours, sometimes even days. These brought back the
Speaker 1: memory of the Third Spark, the one that's basically been
Speaker 1: forgotten about in the West, if anyone even cared to
Speaker 1: know about it in the first place. In September, a
Speaker 1: bus full of people with COVID and Guangzho that the
Speaker 1: government was shipping to a quarantine center, crashed and killed
Speaker 1: twenty seven people, wounding twenty others. Conditions in these centers,
Speaker 1: which COVID patients are often forced to go to rather
Speaker 1: than quarantining in their homes, are atrocious. Pictures and videos
Speaker 1: circulate constantly of bathrooms covered in human ship from failing
Speaker 1: drainage systems. As China has already over tax medical systems
Speaker 1: simply failed to keep up with the demands on a
Speaker 1: place by the government, which, like the American government has
Speaker 1: and continues to systematically refuse to invest in medical infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Intimate familiarity with these wretched conditions and the raw horror
Speaker 1: at the s and Xing John and Guangzho sparked protests
Speaker 1: across the country. In a room sheet and now seventy
Speaker 1: Han City under constant police occupation, Han protesters appeared to
Speaker 1: be moved in solidarity with the weaker families killed in
Speaker 1: the fire and fought the police with a ferocity unmatched
Speaker 1: anywhere but the migrant worker villages of Guangzho along the
Speaker 1: Parer River Delta, one of China's great manufacturing hubs. These
Speaker 1: desperate struggles were given relatively little attention by a Western
Speaker 1: media class enamored with the image of students carrying blank,
Speaker 1: white pieces of paper to protest the censorship, a common
Speaker 1: form of protests in places like Hong Kong. This time,
Speaker 1: at least, they were tied to a particularly funny piece
Speaker 1: of media censorship. As protests mounted, people started posting an
Speaker 1: article version of a speech by Mao called let the
Speaker 1: People Speak, The Sky will Not Fall. Chinese censors quickly
Speaker 1: ran into a classic CCP problem, which is that in
Speaker 1: a state whose heroes are communist revolutionaries, celebrated historical figures
Speaker 1: produce an immense repertoire of slogans and quotes for subsequent
Speaker 1: generations and revolutionaries to draw from, which has caused the CCP,
Speaker 1: at various points in time to ban the opening of
Speaker 1: its own national anthem arise Ye who refused to be slaves.
Speaker 1: As sensors banned Let the People speak, the Guy will
Speaker 1: not Fall. People began posting the article, but with the
Speaker 1: words replaced by squares. This too was also deleted, and
Speaker 1: then posting simply blanks white squares themselves, which saw their
Speaker 1: reflection in the students in the streets. The CCP, in
Speaker 1: turn retreated to its traditional tactic of blaming the protests
Speaker 1: on foreign forces interfering in China, a claim which is
Speaker 1: less than credible on a country that has rolled up
Speaker 1: the CIA's entire in country intelligence network at least once
Speaker 1: in the last decade. There's an incredible exchange that has
Speaker 1: made the rounds between a cop who is telling a
Speaker 1: group of protesters that there are quote foreign forces around
Speaker 1: manipulating the protests, who is immediately yelled at by a
Speaker 1: guy screaming, who are the born forces? Marks and angles
Speaker 1: Stalin and Lenin. Another man appears and asks, Hi, can
Speaker 1: I ask if it was foreign forces who started the
Speaker 1: fire in Shing John? Was the guigo bus overturned by
Speaker 1: foreign forces? Another man grabs the mic and says, was
Speaker 1: everyone told to come here by foreign forces? The crowd
Speaker 1: shouts no. He then makes an incredibly obvious point, we
Speaker 1: can't even access to foreign internet. How are foreign forces
Speaker 1: meant to be communicating with us? Another man says, we
Speaker 1: only have domestic forces, not allowing us to govern themselves.
Speaker 1: Where are these foreign forces from the moon? Still managing
Speaker 1: these accusations to become a constant part of the protests,
Speaker 1: with calls from protesters to stop chanting things like down
Speaker 1: with the CCP, and attempts to keep the demands focused
Speaker 1: on COVID policy like ending COVID zero. And this is
Speaker 1: where things get incredibly muddled by a Western press that
Speaker 1: decided to stop giving a shit about COVID deaths a
Speaker 1: year ago, and a set of contrarians are ring that no, actually,
Speaker 1: China's COVID policy is actually good. This entire debate hinges
Speaker 1: on the conflation of the state of government policy of
Speaker 1: zero COVID, which is an attempt to stop all cases
Speaker 1: of COVID, and the actual execution of the policy, which
Speaker 1: has taken the form of a war against China's working
Speaker 1: class and a set of draconian police state abuses. One
Speaker 1: thing that Western quote unquote experts have been quick to
Speaker 1: point out is that will the CCP has to keep
Speaker 1: doing COVID zero or one point five million people will die.
Speaker 1: There was a tiny bit of truth to this in
Speaker 1: that one reason Chinese COVID restriction so so harsh is
Speaker 1: that if COVID was simply let rip like it has
Speaker 1: been in the US, it would go through China's largely
Speaker 1: unvaccinated rural elderly population like a chainsaw, and unlike in
Speaker 1: the US, if a million people died in China because
Speaker 1: the government fucked up a pandemic response, party officials will
Speaker 1: be getting beaten to death in the streets. And part
Speaker 1: of the reason for the crisis in China in the
Speaker 1: first place is that the rest of the world a
Speaker 1: up on trying to contain COVID entirely. If the rest
Speaker 1: of the world had, you know, done their jobs and
Speaker 1: stamped out the virus, none of us would be here
Speaker 1: right now. On the other hand, no, absolutely not. You
Speaker 1: do not actually need to wild people into their houses
Speaker 1: or drag them by force out of their home so
Speaker 1: they can die and bus crashes on their way to
Speaker 1: unsafe and unsanitary pseudo hospitals with bathroom floors literally covered
Speaker 1: ship in order to contain the pandemic. Lots of pandemics
Speaker 1: across human history have been contained without doing this ship
Speaker 1: just because the two great world powers have decided that
Speaker 1: the COVID responses are kill a million people by forcing
Speaker 1: everyone back to work so that no one has to
Speaker 1: actually deal with the political consequences of telling a bunch
Speaker 1: of unbelievably deranged and heavily armed fascist no and lock
Speaker 1: two people in a factory and force them to make
Speaker 1: iPhones and then beat the absolute shit out of them
Speaker 1: when it turns out you lied to them about their pay.
Speaker 1: Doesn't mean that there aren't other options that we could
Speaker 1: take for pandemic responses if we decided to stop letting
Speaker 1: a bunch of venal and corrupt assholes rule us all.
Speaker 1: And this is something that people in China also understand.
Speaker 1: Even if the Western press corps dead set on presenting
Speaker 1: their demands as if they're American anti maskers, you can
Speaker 1: tell obviously the Chinese protesters are not simply a copy
Speaker 1: of right wing American fascists. By simply looking at a
Speaker 1: picture of a protest and seeing how many people are
Speaker 1: wearing masks. China is not the US. Regular people actually
Speaker 1: do care about containing the pandemic. This is why there
Speaker 1: is a real pandemic response in the first place, after
Speaker 1: the government utterly boshed it. If you look at the
Speaker 1: actual demands of the protesters, you will see things that
Speaker 1: normally would seem more at home with liberal American protesters
Speaker 1: attempting to see pandemic restrictions enforced properly, Things like our
Speaker 1: pandemic response must be based on science. But people, even
Speaker 1: people who don't want to die of a plague, do
Speaker 1: not want to be horribly abused by cops or horrifically
Speaker 1: exploited by the state and capitalists. And that, I think
Speaker 1: is something we do all understand. Only time can tell
Speaker 1: what will happen to these protests. The government is quietly
Speaker 1: making concessions and not so quietly hunting down people who
Speaker 1: took to the streets. It is entirely possible that the
Speaker 1: protest will simply die, and that in two or three
Speaker 1: years most people will have forgot they ever happened. From
Speaker 1: a sort of brutal materialist perspective, however, it seems unlikely
Speaker 1: China's social system could function fine as long as growth
Speaker 1: was at fifteen percent or ten percent, or even eight percent.
Speaker 1: But when growth inevitably comes down to two percent, but
Speaker 1: the deal of keep your head down and everyone will
Speaker 1: get rich starts to look a lot less attractive. COVID
Speaker 1: is simply intensified all of the traditional contradictions inside Chinese
Speaker 1: society and made visible the horrors that previously had been obscured,
Speaker 1: and it seems unlikely that those contradictions will someday vanish.
Speaker 1: But here in the presence, the impossible continues, and every
Speaker 1: day it does is another day that the gates of
Speaker 1: possibility and sh a bit further open. This espina could
Speaker 1: Happen here. You can find us that Happened Here pot
Speaker 1: on Twitter or Instagram. We have a website, cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com where you can see the sources for
Speaker 1: this and other episodes. Enjoy your week, and remember that
Speaker 1: you too can defeat your own ruling class. It could
Speaker 1: Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 1: zone media dot com or check us out on the
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Speaker 1: to podcasts. You can find sources for it could Happen Here,
Speaker 1: updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.