The White Paper Revolution

This is also the first time we have seen serious mass opposition to Xi s Stalinist dominion. The valiant Peng Lifa may have dared to challenge Xi publicly, but never before have entire crowds called for his removal. At the Shanghai vigil on November 26th, protesters began by chanting Serve the people! (the old CCP motto repurposed as accusation). Soon they dared to go further, with demands to Apologise! An unidentified woman was the first to shout Xi Jinping, step down! the greatest of blasphemies, like a lone freethinker challenging Biblical orthodoxy in 15th-century Spain. Perhaps the crowd had liberated her, drawing up to the surface hidden heresies. I imagine her suddenly possessed by a deadly exhilaration: one terrible, vertigo-inducing moment in which she found herself willing to jeopardise everything.

After the initial shocked silence, a strident male voice was heard. Gong chan dang [Communist Party]! he roared. Xia tai [step down]! the crowd answered. And then: Xi Jinping! The spell was broken. Xia tai! Four times they repeated this call-and-response. Each time the volume increased, and with it a palpable sense of pleasure. Before long they were freely cursing China s President. We can find no precedent for this in 73 years of Party rule. Even at Tiananmen Square in 1989, those who defaced Mao Zedong s portrait were piously given up to the authorities by protesters (and then imprisoned, where one of them was tortured until he lost his mind). The Shanghai police were stunned, and it was hours before they roused themselves to act: scattering protesters, beating and arresting some.

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