China’s zero-Covid policy has been an obvious disaster, but the timing of uprisings in authoritarian societies can be impossible to predict.
China’s zero-Covid policy has been an obvious disaster, but the timing of uprisings in authoritarian societies can be impossible to predict.
T he protests throughout China against the communist government have caught the world by surprise. China’s zero-Covid policies have been brutal for over two years, but only now are we seeing widespread demonstrations against them. And of course, zero-Covid is far from the only thing the Chinese government does that is worth protesting. Yet protests are relatively rare.
It’s not only because the Chinese government strictly controls information, although that is part of the reason. The overarching reason is the same reason that protests in authoritarian states almost always catch outside observers by surprise.
The economist Timur Kuran calls it “preference falsification.” It’s the idea that people in authoritarian regimes lie about what they truly believe as a matter of course. They don’t do it because they are bad people, but rather because it’s how to get along in an authoritarian society.
Kuran looked at preference falsification in the context of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the late ’80s. Hardly anyone saw it coming, even people who studied the region very closely and even people who lived there. In 1988, the Federal Research Division published a nearly 500-page country study on East Germany. At no point would a reader of that text in 1988 get any sense that the country would effectively cease to exist only one year in the future.
Were they just not paying close enough attention? Kuran argued against that conclusion.
In a 1992 paper, Kuran argued that “political revolutions will unavoidably continue to catch the world by surprise.” The key word there is “unavoidably.”
Most stories of how revolutions happen say that some set of necessary conditions must obtain, then some event occurs that sparks the revolution. On this theory, we can observe whether the necessary conditions (e.g., an economic downturn, loosening control of the military or police, or brewing ethnic strife) are taking place, then watch for an event to spark the revolution. That should make uprisings at least somewhat predictable.
But Kuran argues that account misses some key facts about how uprisings work. “A mass uprising results from multitudes of individual choices to participate in a movement for change; there is no actor named ‘the crowd’ or ‘the opposition,’” Kuran wrote. Hardly any of those individuals change their mind with respect to the government. What changes is that they are willing to express their true opinion instead of the one they know they’re supposed to have.
PHOTOS: China Covid Protests
It’s a very risky proposition, and the Chinese people opposing the government right now are in some cases putting their lives on the line. It’s pretty clear what the Communist Party’s line on zero-Covid is. Xi Jinping has made it a centerpiece of his governance, and he just won a third term as paramount leader. Each individual, even if he opposes the policy, knows that the government’s policy is very unlikely to change no matter what he says, so speaking up is all risk, no reward.
Going along to get along, on the other hand, carries personal benefits. In China, being a good party member is an important part of social advancement. People living in authoritarian states also have families and dreams. In The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz, who lived under both the Nazis and the communists in Poland, wrote about how totalitarian regimes play on people’s intellect and get them to rationalize preference falsification into being a good thing.
There are likely many people in China who behave this way. It’s extremely common in authoritarian societies, where powerful regimes expect people to believe things they know are wrong. China’s zero-Covid policy is one of those things. No other country in the world has adopted it. In much of the rest of the world, Covid is no longer a society-wide concern. Yet Chinese cities, with millions of people, can still be locked down at will by the government if a few cases of Covid show up.
But we can’t know how likely people are to speak up about it. Those thoughts are locked up in each individual’s head. A country could be on the knife’s edge of a revolt or the government could be in total control; it’s impossible to know as long as most people are falsifying their preferences.
Kuran wrote that his theory “depicts the individual as both powerless and potentially very powerful.” When everyone is going along to get along, one person speaking out is not going to accomplish anything, but if it pushes enough other people who, unbeknownst to him, privately hold the same views to also speak out, it could make all the difference in the world. That’s the incredibly difficult moral calculus that people living in authoritarian regimes live with every single day.
More Chinese people than normal are speaking out right now. It’s by no means a revolution, but it is a rare example of widespread public dissent from the party line. So long as Xi continues to expect Chinese citizens to support obviously disastrous policies, he should expect more cases of individuals making the calculation that speaking out is worthwhile. And, in what will be a complete surprise both to him and to outside observers, one of those cases could someday result in his downfall.