Protests in China Aren't As Rare As You Think | Opinion

For people in China to assemble on behalf of any cause, much less to express opposition to Beijing's policies and governance, is to risk beatings, arrest, and even years in prison or death in custody. But if pushed far enough by their government, people anywhere will defy the risks and push back. Over the past weekend, a sensational wave of protests against the regime's COVID-19 restrictions sprang up in cities and at universities across the country, building on months of growing frustration with draconian lockdown measures, and captured the attention of the world.

Despite the government's propaganda image of a society marching in lockstep behind the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), these protests are far from unique: between June and October of this year, Freedom House's China Dissent Monitor tracked at least 822 public expressions of dissent, with incidents scattered among 27 provinces.

There is no denying that Chinese citizens have a lot to protest about. The CCP has created one of the most repressive governments in the world. Since 2008, conditions in China have gone from bad to worse: the regime has decimated the already limited space for religious freedom, academic freedom, and civic activism; internet freedom and privacy protections have become practically nonexistent; private businesses, including foreign corporations, have been increasingly subjugated and surveilled by Beijing; and the relentless persecution of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang Region has become one of the most outrageous and horrifying atrocities of this century.

The outcry of the past week was initially triggered by the tragic deaths of at least 10 people in an apartment fire in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi—deaths that many people believe could have been avoided if not for the regime's draconian enforcement of its zero-COVID policy, which may have delayed firefighters' response or prevented residents from escaping the building. But the protest movement is ultimately the manifestation of Chinese people's frustration with years of mounting government infringements on their fundamental freedoms, which have only worsened since the onset of the pandemic.

While acts of defiance are far from a rarity in China, the nationwide demonstrations sparked by the tragedy in Urumqi have been unusual in their interconnectedness, as well as in their sheer scale. Most of the dissent Freedom House has tracked in China involves standalone incidents in specific cities. By contrast, over the course of just three days, the eruption of protests on November 25 expanded into a decentralized movement consisting of dozens of demonstrations—some attended by more than 1,000 people, including at Tsinghua University, the alma mater of CCP leader Xi Jinping—with synchronous timing, as well as shared symbolism and messages.

The CCP, resorting to a classic authoritarian tactic, has claimed that these protests were fomented by outside forces. In addition to being patently false, such claims are an insult to the determination and agency of the Chinese people, who are more than capable of articulating and acting on their dissatisfaction, and have been doing so for some time. Indeed, the current movement did not appear out of thin air: between June and October, Freedom House recorded at least 79 public expressions of dissent against the government's draconian pandemic controls, reflecting widespread discontent with rolling lockdowns and excessive or arbitrary social controls related to the pandemic.

Nor do the protesters have any illusions about the root of the problem. Many are making specific political demands of the regime. One of the most salient images to emerge from this movement is that of people holding up blank sheets of paper as a critique of pervasive censorship, and chants of "democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression" have been heard in some cases.

The Chinese people are not risking their freedom for a lost cause—nearly one in four of the anti-lockdown protests recorded by Freedom House from June to October resulted in concessions by local authorities, and there has already been reporting of Beijing "softening its tone on the severity of COVID-19 and easing some coronavirus restrictions" in response to the most recent demonstrations.

Since 1973, Freedom House has monitored the health of political rights and civil liberties around the world. In recent years, we've had a fair share of bad news to report—increasing collaboration between authoritarian leaders, record numbers of coups and sham elections, budding prodemocracy movements brutally crushed—but there are reasons for hope. On our darkest days, the profound human desire for freedom manifests in the most inspiring ways.

In China, thousands of people are bravely standing up to one of the world's most repressive regimes to demand the fundamental freedoms of movement and expression. For nearly three years in nearby Myanmar, people from all walks of life have risked everything to defy the brutal military junta, which has killed more than 2,500 people and arrested more than 16,000 since coming to power in a violent coup. Since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in custody of Tehran's morality police, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have turned out to protest the country's authoritarian theocracy. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian people continue to hold their own against Russian President Vladimir Putin's illegal and inhumane invasion of their home.

The Chinese demonstrators, along with millions of others around the world, are making extraordinary sacrifices to fight for their freedom, and in so doing, playing a vital role in the global fight against authoritarianism. Democracies should support them by vocally condemning the Chinese Communist Party's ever-worsening repression, working together to impose further multilateral sanctions on the agents and enablers of repression in China, and protect citizens' access to internet services, digital platforms, and methods for circumventing the Great Firewall.

It's not just governments and international organizations that have the power to support democracy and stand against authoritarianism: This holiday season, we can all use tools like the Uyghur Forced Labor Database to ensure our dollars aren't going to one of the nearly 2,000 companies with ties to forced labor in China.

At first glance, dozens of protests attended by thousands of people might seem small in a country of 1.5 billion—but knowing how tightly Beijing controls information leaving the country, what we see is likely just the tip of the iceberg. While he maintains broad support from CCP elites and regular citizens alike, Xi Jinping's ever-worsening campaign of repression is not a sign of strength, but of insecurity. The willingness of so many Chinese people to risk their lives for basic freedoms should give him serious pause—and give us a glimmer of hope.

Michael J. Abramowitz is president of Freedom House, a nonprofit, nonpartisan democracy organization that works to create a world where all are free.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.