“Looking East: China’s Jasmine Revolution in Comparative and Historical Perspective.”

Chapter 7

Looking East: China’s Jasmine Revolutions in Comparative Perspective

Patricia M. Thornton

The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ took many by surprise. With its early shoots first

appearing in Tunisia and branching quickly into Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria

and elsewhere, unprecedented waves of mass political protest reverberated across the

Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2011. In the wake of this wave of

collective protest, authoritarian regimes across the world scrambled to deploy the time-

honoured tools of concession and repression in hopes of placating increasingly restive

publics with ready access to new communications technologies. For Middle East

specialists, the largely unforeseen instability wrought by the Arab Spring provoked a

deeper reconsideration of the scholarly consensus of how ‘durable authoritarianism’

(Brownlee, 2007) might coexist with an information environment shaped by Al-Jazeera

and Arab satellite television, and internet-based communication tools like Facebook and

Twitter.

China’s leaders watched events unfolding in the MENA region with growing

alarm. Tunisia, the somewhat unlikely birthplace of the ‘Jasmine Revolution’, has been

recognised by some as a ‘miniature China’, characterized by a previously stable ruling

coalition that maintained relatively high economic growth rates, and the growth of a well-

educated middle class that appeared to tolerate the ‘shut up and consume’ tactics

employed by the Ben Ali regime (Parello-Plesner, 2011, p.2; Goldstein, 2011). Further

underscoring the similarities at the Munich Security Conference in early February 2011,

US Senator John McCain publicly compared the wave of recent self-immolations of

Tibetan activists in China to that of Tunisia’s Mohammed Bouazizi, and warned Chinese

Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun that ‘the Arab Spring is coming to China’ (Berman,

2011). Indeed, within a fortnight, a group of self-styled Chinese activists had staged the

first of what they projected would be a series of weekly ‘Jasmine’ protests, named for the

Tunisian uprisings that triggered the Arab Spring, in hopes of inciting similar actions

across several major Chinese cities (Fallows, 2011).

Some speculate that the 2011 wave of protest might represent the early stages of a

‘fourth wave’ of democratization unfolding as a series of regional domino effects or

contagions sweeping the globe, stretching from the Arab world into Asia (Hussain and

Howard, 2012). In this view, the MENA region served as ‘ground zero’ for social

mobilization triggered either by the implementation of the Bush administration’s

‘Freedom Agenda’ or by the availability of new information and communications

technologies that provide ‘digital scaffolding for civil societies’ emerging from

authoritarian repression (Berman 2011; Hussain and Howard, 2011, p.46). In keeping

with this view, although the restless publics that amassed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square,

Beijing’s Wangfujing and New York’s Zuccotti Park were motivated by a host of

economic and political grievances, it also appeared that they were also speaking directly

to each other through the medium of shared signs, images and slogans expressed in a

variety of languages aimed at global media audiences. The increased interconnectivity of

locally situated publics that place themselves within the context of global public spheres

was demonstrated by the numerous and varied examples of anti-Mubarak signs composed

in German, English and Chinese that suddenly appeared in Cairo (Zimmer, 2011), of

Chinese dissidents evicted from public plazas in Beijing and Shanghai after leaving

behind jasmine flowers symbolic of the recent Tunisian protest struggle (Chan, 2011),

and the declared aspiration of US-based protesters to turn lower Manhattan into an

‘American Tahrir Square’ (Agence France Presse, 2011).

However, the fate of China’s failed ‘Jasmine revolution’ reminds us not only that

activated and engaged global public spheres can and do coexist with various forms of

non-democratic rule, but also that they are bounded by political and economic forces that

benefit and empower the elites that shape and control them much more than they do the

grassroots dissidents who may briefly commandeer them in service to ‘people power’. As

Rebecca MacKinnon (2012, p. 15) recently observed, ‘if the events of 2011 have taught

the world anything, it is that although the internet empowers dissent and activism, it is

not an instant freedom tonic’.

The fate of the 2011 ‘Jasmine revolutionaries’ worldwide has shown that, despite

the ouster of a few unpopular autocrats, the structural forces underlying the ‘political

economy of authoritarian resilience’ remain largely unshaken, in the MENA region and

elsewhere. The public spheres that emerged during the ‘Arab Spring’ represent diverse

by-products of multi-national processes of economic liberalization and state retreat.

Hailed by international organizations as evidence of ‘budding’ civil society organizations

and ‘freer’ economic environments in which states have begun surrendering monopoly

control over sectors of the economy, in fact, what these emerging public spheres give

voice to is widening grassroots dissent over the withdrawal of social welfare benefits and

rising inequality (Haddad, 2012), both across the MENA region as well as in China.

The Budding of China’s Jasmine Revolution

The initial anonymous plea for a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China inspired by the

Arab Spring came from a Twitter account under the username mimisecret0. That account

was quickly disrupted and shut down, but not before the suggestion was taken up by an

anonymous Chinese writer on Boxun.com, a Chinese-language site run by overseas

dissidents based largely in the US, on 19 February 2011 (Goodman, 2011). The original

plan called for simultaneous collective action in thirteen Chinese cities each weekend

(Hille, 2011), with the anonymous organizers arguing that only ‘sustained action will

show the Chinese government that its people expect accountability and transparency that

doesn't exist under the current one-party system’ (The Guardian, 2011). Issued online by

an individual or group identifying itself only as Zhonghuo Molihua Geming Faqizhe

(‘China Jasmine Revolution Initiator’, hereafter, ZMGF), the proposal attempted to bring

together people affected by a long list of recent scandals and social problems in China:

Whether you are a parent of a baby with kidney stones [caused by tainted milk powder], or

someone who has been forcibly evicted, or share a collective flat, or are a demobilized soldier,

or a teacher at cooperatively-run school, or lost your pension to recent bank buyouts, or a laid-

off worker, or a petitioner … whether are a Charter 08 signatory, a Falun Gong practitioner, a

Communist Party member or representative of a democratic party; or even if you are just an

onlooker – at this moment, you and I are both Chinese people, and you and I are both Chinese

people who still have dreams for the future. We must take responsibility for our own future,

and for the futures of our children and grandchildren. All we need to do is to walk to the

designated places, surround and watch from the margins, quietly follow the flow, and then

seize the movement to bravely shout your slogan, and perhaps history will begin to change

from this moment. (ZMGF, 2011a)

The proposed slogans included ‘We want food, we want work, we want housing!’ and

‘We want fairness, we want justice!’. Other proposed demands included the initiation of

political reform, the protection of private property rights and of an independent judiciary,

an end to press restrictions and to one-party dictatorship (ZMGF 2011a).

The initial response by Chinese authorities was swift and overwhelming: the

police rounded up lawyers, activists and dissidents, and deployed massive numbers of

police to quash any demonstrations. Human-rights activists estimated that by the evening

of Sunday, 20 February, about 80 people had been either forced to leave their homes in

police custody, were put under house arrest or placed under various restrictions (Ramzy,

2011). Internet censorship was also heightened. Boxun.com, the website that picked up

the original Twitter call for copy-cat protests in China sent out by mimisecret0, was

knocked off-line for weeks beginning in late February by what its owners called ‘the

most serious denial of service attack we have received’ (Anna, 2011), which lasted until

at least late April (Goodman, 2011). As early as 30 January, searches for the word

‘Egypt’ on the micro-blog functions of major Chinese web portals such as Sina.com and

Sohu.com began returning automatic responses indicating either that the keyword could

not be found, or that the results of such searches could not be displayed in accordance

with local internet regulations (Reuters.com, 2011a).

These draconian measures were quickly traded for a ‘zero tolerance’ policy for

words or images that suggested collective action related to or inspired by the events in the

MENA region. The term ‘jasmine’ was blocked from searches on Sina Weibo, a popular

Twitter-like microblogging site. Some users also reported difficulties accessing services

like Gmail, Google's web-based email, and instead had to access their virtual private

network connections (VPNs), which enabled encrypted connections to websites blocked

by the so-called Great Firewall of the censored Chinese internet (Economist, 2011).

In Beijing, the proposed collective protest site was Wangfujing, a busy shopping

street in the city centre, a short walk from Tiananmen Square. In the afternoon of Sunday,

20 February, the usual crowds of shoppers and people out for a weekend stroll were met

with a massive police and media presence. A London newspaper reported that the appeal

might have been answered by 200 people in Beijing including, perhaps, US Ambassador

Jon Huntsman, who exchanged a few words with people in Chinese before departing. The

US Embassy spokesman later asserted that Huntsman had been unaware of the planned

protest, and ‘immediately left’ once he realized what was going on (Burr, 2011) – an

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excuse that did not dissuade Chinese bloggers from citing Huntsman’s brief visit to the

site as evidence of an ongoing American plot to destabilize Communist Party rule. One

Chinese website claimed that Huntsman was in fact monitoring a revolution stirred up by

the US, coordinating with the White House, and encouraging protesters to press for

regime change (Hollenhorst, 2011).1 The South China Morning Post reported that internet

searches for Huntsman’s name in Chinese were quickly blocked following the incident of

20 February (South China Morning Post, 2011a, p.4).

A large People’s Armed Police bus that conveyed more than two dozen helmeted

riot-police officers likewise appeared at the Egyptian Embassy, although it was not one of

the sites named by the protest organizers. One reporter described ‘black sedans parked at

odd angles on the street [that] disgorged men in black, almost certainly plainclothes

security agents, who loitered’ along the street, chasing foreign reporters from the area

(Tatlow, 2011).

Despite the draconian police presence and milling crowds at the proposed sites in

Beijing and Shanghai, there were no reports of any overt protest activity. Although the

early suggestion of the organizers that sympathizers called to the named locations might

1 Huntsman had been known to support and/or participate in protests against the Chinese government,

including extending his support to protests against China's treatment of Tibet that disrupted the torch relay

for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing during his term as governor of Utah. It had previously revealed that

in 1989, he protested outside the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. following the crackdown on pro-

democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Some Chinese bloggers suggested that Huntsman's taped

appearance in a black bomber jacket with an American flag on the sleeve might have been intended to

create a dramatic image for a future campaign video in preparation for a presidential bid.

‘bravely call out slogans’, no one made any visible gesture of protest. When one youth in

the crowd at Wangfujing moved forward carrying a small bouquet of jasmine flowers,

police officers whisked him away, and the crowds dispersed. The youth was later

released without incident. In Shanghai at the People’s Park, at least three members of the

crowd were dragged off by police, creating a minor skirmish. One bespectacled young

man resisted, and defiantly held up his hand in a ‘V for Victory’ sign to a crowd of

reporters on site as he was hauled away.

In Guangzhou, dozens of public security vehicles flashed their warning lights

around People’s Park, and uniformed police officers were posted at every intersection

leading to the proposed protest site, but no crowds gathered. In Harbin, according to the

Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, an unemployed

35-year-old woman was questioned and then taken away in handcuffs by police the day

before the second proposed protest action after reposting information about the protests in

Chinese chat rooms, along with two other Chinese internet users (Mingpao Instant News,

2011a; Mingpao Instant News, 2011b). However, according to another report (The China

Press, 2011, p.B6) the woman in question was seen shouting pro-democracy slogans and

‘urging public awakening’ in front of the Harbin Municipal Government offices nearly a

week earlier, on 20 February. No other arrests appear to have been made at known

protests sites.

Regime Counter-Offensive

On the heels of the massive police presence and swift repression of any

expression of dissent on 20 February, three days later, the web-based organizers issued an

even more scathing critique of the Party-state.

We can see that Chinese society is already completely crushed, with one poisoned food

product emerging after another, passing down to the next generation [which is] already

suffering grievous harm; China’s despotic regime has already lost faith, and become a profit-

and spoils-dividing organization incapable of saving itself, gradually fascistic; the regime’s

administration is corrupt, venal, and perverse, the independence of the judiciary has reversed,

and officials and their children have monopolized all of the resources within the system.

Social polarization is severe with even greater divides between rich and poor, inflation is

soaring, and property prices in particular are skyrocketing, popular discontent is seething. The

human rights situation is especially grave, with arbitrary detentions and forced disappearances

widespread, and increasingly stringent censorship, with journalists of good conscience

summarily dismissed; the constitution’s thirty-five articles exist in name only. The people’s

property has been plundered wantonly, with people’s deaths being caused by property

demolitions, and even self-immolations have occurred; China has already been reduced to a

black hole of natural resources, a polluted environment, a destroyed ecology, a disastrous

legacy for our children and grandchildren …. (ZMGF, 2011b)

The online organizers asserted that ‘the source of all of [these ills] lies with

China’s despotic regime’, with high-ranking members of the Party-state expropriating

private resources to serve their own interests and those of their family members under the

policy of expanding the state-owned sector, leaving the vast majority to struggle with

rampant inflation and the expanding property bubble afflicting major Chinese cities. The

organizers reiterated their call for protests to take place the following Sunday (ZMGF,

2011b) in the form of collective ‘strolling’ at sites spread across 18 Chinese cities

(Osnos, 2011). To circumvent censorship tools, they further proposed that Chinese

internet users switch the word ‘jasmine’ for ‘two sessions’ – a widely used term to refer

to the annual round of National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political

Consultative Conference meetings, held in Beijing every March. Accordingly,

instructions ‘to protest at a square’ would in the future be coded as ‘to hold two sessions

at a square’, a tactic apparently designed to circumvent the censorship apparatus which

would need to block communication related to the upcoming official Party and legislature

events that dominate China’s news cycle each year (Page and Chao, 2011).

Internet censorship was tightened even further: even searches for the word

‘Wangfujing’ on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blogging site, began returning

nil results (Pierson, 2011). To dispel popular discontent, Premier Wen Jiabao held an

online chat with Chinese netizens at 9 am on the morning of the second proposed round

of protests, during which he addressed several of the key complaints put forth by the

Jasmine organizers. In response to one participant’s question about rampant inflation,

Wen acknowledged that although the recent steep rise in commodity prices was a serious

problem, ‘The party and the government always regard stabilizing the general level of

commodity prices an important economic task’. Wen assured listeners that Chinese

officials had already ‘adopted powerful measures to control the rise of commodity

prices’. A listener who complained about the real estate bubble was told that central

authorities were committed to increasing the supply of affordable housing and reducing

opportunities for property speculation. With respect to widespread corruption, Wen

asserted that central authorities would ‘be able to make new headway … and win the trust

of the people’ as a result of a new measure ‘that requires government leaders to make

public their personal incomes, their assets, and the work of their family members,

including their children’ (Xinhua News Agency, 2011).

These online efforts were matched with beefed-up police presence and security

measures. Shortly after the release of the second notice, the Chinese police took

preventive measures that included installing corrugated metal fencing in front of the

McDonald's at Wangfujing, and outside the home of Nobel laureate and dissident Liu

Xiaobo (Pierson, 2011). Hundreds of uniformed police with attack dogs and plainclothes

agents with earpieces, as well as large numbers of public security volunteers wearing red

armbands, were posted to the protest sites in the largest cities. In the capitol, the massive

public security force was joined by at least one SWAT team armed with automatic rifles

and body armour.

Police first began checking identification papers of pedestrians in Wangfujing, but

then decided to clear the area half an hour after the designated assembly time. In addition,

local police blocked off a 200-yard section of the street as two street-cleaning machines

swept up and down spraying water on both sides of the street, flooding the sidewalks. A

small army of orange-clad sanitation workers appeared brandishing long brooms to

sweep the water toward the remaining journalists and other onlookers still in the area.

‘We have to keep Beijing clean’, one worker told a reporter (Johnson, 2011a).

In Shanghai, while the crowds appeared to be larger than normal around the

designated site – the Peace Cinema, an IMAX theatre along a major shopping street –

there were no visible signs of protest. Police dispersed the thick crowds by incessantly

blowing their whistles, pushing pedestrians along, and firmly escorted others out of the

designated protest zone. A few were able to speak briefly to foreign journalists, but seven

protestors were arrested in and around Shanghai’s Peace Cinema before the action

concluded.

In contrast to Shanghai’s quiescence, the massive police counter-offensive in

Beijing resulted in the beating and detention of at least four foreign journalists by plain-

clothes security officers. Bloomberg News later reported that one of its journalists was

attacked by at least five plainclothes security personnel in Wangfujing on the afternoon

of 27 February, who also took his video camera and detained him in a nearby store. A

Wall Street Journal reporter witnessed Bloomberg Television’s Stephen Engle being

grabbed and pushed to the ground by several security officers, before being dragged by

his leg, punched in the head and beaten with a broom handle by a man dressed as street

sweeper. Crowds of curious Chinese onlookers gathered, but did not intervene, as the

street was blocked off and uniformed paramilitary police marched down either side (Page

and Areddy, 2011). The police also assaulted at least two foreign journalists who tried to

record the heavy security presence. A freelance photographer on assignment for the New

York Times was carried from the scene when she tried to take pictures. A videographer

for a news service was wrestled to the ground and kicked and punched in the face,

according to journalists. Three other men were detained in front of the Wangfujing

Bookstore (Johnson, 2011b).

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From “Jasmine Revolution” to “Operation Smile”

On 1 March, the online organizers released a list of 41 demonstration sites,

including locales in 38 mainland Chinese cities, one site in Hong Kong, another in Taipei

and one in New York, for the upcoming weekend. ‘Three represents’ was recommended

as the new codeword to circumvent censorship.2 Secondary sites were also named in

several big cities in the event that public access was blocked, as occurred on 27 February

(ZMGF 2011f).

In light of the heavy-handed suppression of the previous event, the organisers

announced a tactical switch dubbed ‘Operation Smile’. Instead of confronting or

provoking public security forces, the organizers asked participants to refrain from overt

expressions of dissent and instead carry out a three-stage rebellion that would rely on ‘the

sound of laughter, singing and salutations instead of the sound of guns, cannons and

warplanes’ (Clem, 2011). The first stage of continued collective strolls was expected to

take ‘a few weeks, a couple of months, a year or even longer’, during which the

organizers envisioned increasing numbers of ‘people participating in walking, talking,

smiling and witnessing’. The second stage would include participants simply ‘holding a

2 The ‘Three Representatives’ is one of former President Jiang Zemin’s ‘important thoughts’ that Chinese

citizens and Communist Party members have been asked to study.

jasmine flower and [using] mobile phones or music players to play [the folk song] Such a

Beautiful Jasmine’ in public spaces. The third stage, would begin ‘when the street-

walking revolution is irreversible’, and would involve open mass criticism of the

government.

Clearly addressing themselves to an international audience, the organizers

proclaimed that theirs was a contribution to ‘a new history of revolution’ that was

proceeding ‘in a new way’. In learning from the ‘horrendous situations taking place in

Libya, it is fitting and worthwhile that we be patient and enduring’. Instead, drawing

from another example of institutionalized dissent elsewhere, they pointed out that ‘Thirty

years ago, when Deng Xiaoping wanted to regain power in the Communist Party, he said:

“Hyde Park is good!” Today, we will say it aloud to regain our basic human rights: Hyde

Park is good!’ They concluded their missive with three slogans: ‘Walking is Power!

Smiling is Power! Showing Concern is Power!’ (ZMGF, 2011c).

However, despite the global reach of their rhetoric, the organizers’ practical

ability to mount recognizable forms of collective dissent had arrived at an impasse.

Twitter traffic was quickly subverted, and state sponsored hackers crippled US-based

Boxun.com with denial of service attacks that lasted for weeks. While dissident bloggers

responded quickly, reposting the original call and creating a new online forum as early as

28 February (Goodman, 2011), other problems appeared: at least one widely circulated

message of 28 February from a user known only as cnjasmine redirected would-be

protesters to alternative sites not designated by the organizers (ZMGF, 2011). It is

unclear whether cnjasmine was a knowing accomplice of the public security apparatus

attempting to splinter and deflect the movement, or simply a misinformed activist, but the

incident flagged up the inherent vulnerabilities of the web-based movement. By 5 March,

because of the success of wiretapping and monitoring, participants were asked not only to

shut off their mobile phones on Sundays, but even to leave them at home in order to

prevent unwitting transmission of locational data to the police. Without the benefit of

their mobile phones, the exchange of real-time information among participants was

undercut.

For the event on 6 March, sympathizers were urged to gather near one of the fast-

food restaurants in the designated shopping areas to ‘take a stroll’, or to eat at one of the

restaurants: ‘the code of action [for 6 March] is the “set meal No.3” at McDonald's or

KFC’ (Shi, 2011). However, separate announcements on other websites warned that the

recommended codes for genuine participants would always be drawn from an agreed list

of official Chinese Communist Party slogans that also contained numbers, ‘two sessions’,

‘three represents’, ‘four adhere-tos’, ‘five stresses and four points of beauty’, creating

further confusion (ZMGF 2011d).

In addition to their online problems, the organizers faced additionally heightened

security in the run-up to the National People's Congress. Beijing had already deployed

739,000 police officers, officials, security guards and residents recruited into voluntary

local patrols in order to guard against any mishaps during that annual event (Reuters.com

2011b). Helicopters and extra police were deployed to help patrol areas deemed sensitive,

such as university districts, in the capital. New regulations were enacted in order to keep

the media out of the designated ‘strolling’ sites that led to the detention of several foreign

journalists in Beijing, and at least 15 reporters in Shanghai for ‘visa checks’.

Unsurprisingly, those journalists who made it through these roadblocks saw no obvious

sign of protesters (South China Morning Post, 2011b).

By mid-March, the massive police presence at and around the demonstration sites

had begun to wane as well. On 20 March, the date of the fifth planned round of protests,

more than 500 students at Shaanxi Northwestern Polytechnic University may have left

their dorms at the scheduled meeting time to take a silent ‘stroll’ around their campus in

apparent solidarity with the broader ‘jasmine community’, and large numbers of officers

and antiriot vehicles were dispatched to Quancheng Square in central Jinan in pursuit of

an alleged gathering there (Apple Daily, 2011). However, there appear to have been no

further reports of protests of any sort associated with the movement.

Nipped in the Bud

China’s Jasmine Revolution must be counted as a success for China’s massive

security apparatus. Not only were Chinese police authorities able to determine in advance

the site of planned protest actions and take preventive action, but even when the

organizers shifted tactics, the police used the possibility of ongoing action as a pretext for

widening their net and increasing surveillance over suspect groups. According to Human

Rights Defenders, an international NGO that monitors and reports on observance of

human rights across the globe, by early April the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had

arrested at least 26 people in connection with the ‘jasmine revolution’, 30 had

disappeared and were presumed to be held by security forces, and another 200 had been

placed under various restrictions. At least five were charged with inciting subversion of

state power.

Dissident artist Ai Weiwei, the artistic director for the ‘Bird’s Nest’ Olympic

Stadium, was taken into police custody in early April, ostensibly for financial

irregularities, but more likely for his illegal ‘tweets’. Early on in the protests, on 24

February, Ai posted the following on his Twitter account: ‘Didn’t care about jasmine at

first, but people who are scared by jasmine sent out information about how harmful

jasmine is often, which makes me realize that jasmine is what scares them the most. What

a jasmine!’ Ai's studio was raided by police, who took away laptops and the hard drive

from the main computer in the studio; eight staff members and his wife were taken down

to the local police station for questioning (Richburg, 2011).

Even weeks after even the modest Chinese protests had died down, on 10 May,

the Beijing police banned the sale of jasmine flowers at various flower markets, causing

wholesale prices of the popular flower to collapse. Some flower vendors stated that

Beijing police demanded written pledges that no jasmine flowers shall be sold in their

stalls; one even told a New York Times reporter that she had been instructed to report to

the authorities those even seeking to purchase jasmine and to jot down their license plate

numbers. The China International Jasmine Cultural Festival—a horticultural event—was

unceremoniously cancelled. A number of cut flower and live-plant business owners said

they had been either visited by the police in early March or given directives indicating

that jasmine had become contraband (Jacobs and Ansfield, 2011), perhaps in order to

prevent even the remote possibility that the online organizers of the protests might carry

out the second phase of their plan – to appear in public with jasmine flowers, or to

present bouquets of jasmine at major events.

With the protest movement successfully routed, the Central Communist Party

apparatus itself finally weighed in, firmly announcing on 10 March in a People’s Daily

editorial that China is ‘definitely not’ the Middle East:

Some people with sinister ulterior motives both inside and outside China attempt to divert

troubled water to China and ‘fan flames’ via the Internet in a hope also to ‘provoke street

corner politics’, so as to make China chaotic. But the country is definitely not the Middle East

anyhow … A formerly backward and impoverished nation has been turned into the second

biggest economy in terms of gross economic output, and the whole world holds it in high

esteem. All these feats are owed to the wise leadership and scientific guidance of the CPC

[Communist Party of China]. Steady progress in the reform of political arrangements has

inspired the standardization and institutionalization of the Party's leadership setup, from the

abolition of life-long tenure of leading officials to the establishment of a national civil service

... Furthermore, people in China enjoy freedom of participating in the practice of governance

and deliberating over government affairs under the existing legal framework and democratic

system. Under no circumstances should China allow ‘street corner politics’ to incite unrest to

attain the political objectives. (People’s Daily, 2011)

The following day, National People’s Congress Chairman Wu Bangguo followed

up by asserting forcefully in his work report to the 11th Congress that China will never

adopt a multiparty revolving-door system or other Western-style political models, and

warned of what he called an ‘abyss of internal disorder’ if China strayed from the

‘correct’ path. Speaking in the Great Hall of the People, Wu said: ‘We have made a

solemn declaration that we will not employ a system of multiple parties holding office in

rotation; diversify our guiding thought; separate executive, legislative and judicial

powers; use a bicameral or federal system; or carry out privatisation.’ (Sainsbury, 2011)

The firm statement has since become known as the ‘five nos’: no multi-party elections,

no diversified guiding principles, no separation of powers, no federal system, and no

privatization, and it remains the core of the central Party response to calls for political

reform today (Cheng, 2012, pp.598-99).

American commentator Thomas L. Friedman, on the other hand, offered

unsolicited ‘Advice for China’ in his column on 6 June. In an open letter addressed to

then-PRC President Hu Jintao, Friedman adopted the voice of the Chinese Ministry of

State Security to reflect that the ‘Arab Spring’ conveyed ‘important lessons for the rule of

the Chinese Communist Party’ by revealing ‘something very new about of how

revolutions unfold in the 21st century and something very old about why they explode’.

The ‘new’ lesson was that the world’s population has now achieved a ‘very high level of

connectivity, virtually flattening the global economic playing field’. The rise and spread

of the internet, Friedman wrote, has succeeded in making ‘Boston and Beijing or Detroit

and Damascus next-door neighbors. It brought some two billion people into a global

conversation.’ The ‘old’ lesson was that revolutionary upheavals arise from the ‘deep

desire by people to run their own lives and to be treated as “citizens” – with both

obligations and rights that the state cannot just give and take by whim’ (Friedman, 2011).

However, Friedman’s assertions that the internet is ‘flattening the global

economic playing field’ blithely overlooks the fact that local access to the internet around

the world is powerfully shaped by the ‘political economy of authoritarian resilience’: a

nexus of power emerging in the wake of the protracted process related to the

liberalization of state-centred economies, throughout the MENA region, as well as in the

PRC. Economic liberalization in both areas has produced an enlarged ‘private’ sector,

purportedly growing at the expense of the state-run ‘public’ sector, plausibly signalling a

broader dispersion of resources, with presumed democratizing economic effects.

However, whereas this process appears satisfying to the international community,

liberalizing reforms have also meant the wide-scale destruction of the social safety nets

upon which the poor and lower-income classes rely (Haddad, 2012, pp. 117-8).

The nexus of power that sustains the economic and political elites who have

adopted liberalizing reforms and continue to benefit from them conceals the fact that, all

too often, state funds that once supported social welfare are being redirected to support a

larger, more robustly repressive ‘stability maintaining’ public security apparatus. As

Gregory Gause observed (2011, pp.85-6), over the past two decades, non-oil-producing

Arab states have adopted ‘Washington consensus-style economic reforms’, moving to

privatize state-owned enterprises, encouraging higher levels of foreign investment, and

cutting state expenditures and subsidies across the board. All of these liberalizing

measures have served to exacerbate inequalities by increasing the burden on the poor,

while also creating ‘a new class of superwealthy entrepreneurs’. Many who were

surprised by the protests of the Arab Spring ‘underestimated the popular revulsion to the

corruption and crony privatization that accompanied the reforms’.

Similar patterns of politically-driven privatization, marketization and rising levels

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of inequality obtain in China as well. Despite draconian censorship and the heavy-handed

repression described, social unrest has risen in China as well (Strange, 2012): according

to one Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) survey, so-called ‘mass incidents’ of

protest rose from 8,709 in 1993, to a whopping 87,000 in 2005. Although the Chinese

government no longer releases official statistics on social unrest, one university

researcher estimated that the number of mass incidents nationwide rose 25 per cent

between 1997 and 2004; sociologist Sun Liping pegged the number of such incidents at

120,000 in 2010. Martin Whyte (2010, pp.44-5) conducted a national sample survey in

2004 on Chinese attitudes toward inequality, and found that 71 per cent of his

respondents regarded the existing income gap there as ranging from ‘somewhat large’ to

‘too large’, and that 51 per cent ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that the income gap

threatened social stability. In order to maintain social order in light of galloping levels of

economic inequality, as of 2011, the year of the Jasmine protests, the budget for internal

security exceeded the national defence budget (Dickson, 2011, p.212).

Sino-Arab Revolutions in Historical Perspective

In both the Arab and the Chinese case, those who came out to protest under

conditions of economic liberalization or state retreat did so in the wake of earlier

transnational public spheres shaped by the powerful legacies of preceding statist

ideologies and institutions. The media hype and attention devoted to the new role played

F. Gaenssmantel � 6/6/14 5:41 PM

Frank Gaenssmantel� 6/6/14 7:17 PM



Deleted: (Strange, 2012)

Deleted: s

Deleted: in both regions

Deleted: earlier

by social media and the internet – celebrated by some as a ‘cultural revolution’ that swept

the Arabic-speaking world in the years leading up to 2011 (Noueihed and Warren, 2012,

p.46) – have elided the contours of an earlier imagined community that linked the

Chinese and Arab peoples in a rather different vision of collective political and cultural

transformation that revolved not around Western-style neoliberal democracy, but centred

instead on an embrace of revolutionary socialism.

Indeed, although the term ‘cultural revolution’ has since come to be associated

with Mao Zedong, it was Jamal Abd al-Nasser, ardent advocate of Pan-Arabism, and of

Arab socialism, who actually preceded Mao in calling for ‘cultural revolution’ as a policy

at the level of the state precisely because he saw it as a truer and more substantive

political form than Western-style liberal democracy. For Nasser, cultural revolution

aiming at democratic socialism was indispensable to the project of political and socio-

economic revolution in the service of a just and sufficient society: a message that, in its

day, resonated powerfully among both the Chinese and Arab peoples. On 12 December

1963, Nasser praised the visiting Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong and the

‘mighty pioneering Chinese civilization of the first ages of thought which produced the

Chinese revolution now at the forefront of driving forces of contemporary history’:

The July 23rd Revolution … wanted to establish a new democratic life … to build a new

society wherein each individual would perceive equality, fairness, sufficiency and justice …

This is what we mean by a new democratic life; we’re against the dictatorship of feudalism

and the dictatorship of capital, even if they call it ‘democracy’. We’re against that

‘democracy’ because it enabled 5% or less of the people to rule on the necks of the rest and

because it’s an expression of the exploitation of one human being by another … We’d tried

the ‘democracy’ that Western nations and colonialism imposed on us and saw it was allied to

colonialism or was an alliance between colonialism and [the forces of] reaction, … between

reaction and money against the interests of the vast majority of the people. (Nasser, 1963,

cited in Lux, 2012, pp.405-6)

In 1968, two years after Mao initiated his own Chinese Cultural Revolution, Moscow’s

famous Arabic-language Progress Publishers issued a compendium entitled Lenin on

Culture and the Cultural Revolution, contributing to a rising tide of exchanges between

like-minded Chinese and Arab revolutionaries that saw the translation of ‘Mao’s Little

Red Book’ into Arabic, and the wider dissemination of revolutionary socialist texts

translated into both Chinese and Arabic.

Among those inspired was Mu‘ammar al-Qadhafi, an unwavering devotee of

Nasser in his youth, who put his own unique stamp on ‘cultural revolution’ in the Arab

context. On 15 April 1973, Qadhafi announced that Libya would embark on not only a

‘cultural revolution’, but ‘a revolution against the revolution’, inspired by both Nasser

and Mao. Qadhafi’s ‘cultural revolution’ aimed to revive the culture of ancient Islam, as

he understood it, popularized in the form of his Green Book, released in 1976. In his

view, ‘cultural revolution’ involved a revival of an ‘authentic’ and ‘genuine’ ancient

Islamic culture free from the vestiges of ‘imported’ culture and the ‘sick ideas’ of

capitalism and communism (Lux, 2012, pp.411-12).

But by the end of 1970s, the appeal of ‘cultural revolution’ in both the Arab and

Chinese worlds was on the decline: the revolutionary potential of Pan-Arabism, ‘which

had dominated the political consciousness of modern Arabs [was] nearing its end, if it

[was] not already a thing of the past’, and ‘a normal state system [in the Arab world] was

becoming a fact of life’ (Ajami, 1978/79, p.355). The grand revolutionary visions of

Nasser and others had been replaced by Arab nationalism, and a more narrowly statist

political vision fuelled in part by the power of petro-dollars (Dawisha, 2003, p.256).

Likewise, Mao’s death in China in 1976 signalled a decisive end to revolutionary

romanticism and a turn toward more pragmatic and market-oriented policies. Whereas

over the course of the Mao era, Chinese leaders had devoted considerable time and

energy to cultivating a variety of transnational networks, only two high-level state visits

to the Arab world followed Zhou’s 1964 tour: Zhao Ziyang in 1982-83, and Jiang Zemin

in 1996. With both cultural revolution and revolutionary romanticism relegated to the

dustbin of history, contemporary Sino-African relations revolve more tightly around the

opening of markets, the development of bilateral trade and the promotion of Chinese

private enterprise across the continent (Strauss, 2009): in short, precisely the concerns

driven by an agenda defined by economic liberalization.

A Transnational Public Sphere?

In contrast to the manipulated mass opinion and ideological conflicts rife in

contemporary Western nation-states, Jürgen Habermas (1989 [1964], p.27) forwarded an

eighteenth century model of rational communication and rational-critical debate that he

dubbed ‘the public sphere’ in which ‘private people come together as a public’, and

challenge political authorities to engage with them in reasoned argument. Of course,

Habermas’s eighteenth century public sphere has been structurally transformed: civil

society has become global, holding out the promise and potential of democratic

deliberation and dialog across borders.

But in practice, access to transnational public spheres is restricted by social and

political elites, typically in ways that conform to and even exacerbate existing power

imbalances. As Iris Young (2001, p.680) noted, ‘under conditions of structural inequality,

normal processes of deliberation often in practice restrict access to agents with greater

resources, knowledge, or connections to those with greater control over the forum’.

Access in many regions of the world is moreover shaped by the ‘political economy of

authoritarian resilience’, a shadowy a nexus of political and economic power that is

emerging as a result of the liberalization of formerly state-centred economies. As Bassam

Haddad notes, in liberalizing MENA countries, this typically involves the rise of

seemingly ‘vibrant’ civil societies alongside supposedly ‘freer’ economic arrangements

in which the state surrenders its monopoly over some sectors of the economy, and a

burgeoning ‘private’ sector that purportedly grows at the expense of the state-owned

‘public’ sector (Haddad, 2012, p.118). The most common response to the expansion of

cyberspace under non-democratic regimes today is arguably not repression, but

cooptation, generally to the benefit of those powerful elites either formally or informally

in charge of the ‘commanding heights’.

Thus, the post-cultural revolution fates of the 2011 Jasmine activists in both the

MENA region and in China demonstrate both the power and the limitations of

transnational public spheres. New communication technologies facilitate transnational

political action by reducing the cost and increasing the effectiveness of communication

within and across national borders, triggering dramatic shifts in the scale of contention

(Thornton, 2008). At the same time, lacking the support of state and Party elites for

political change, dissidents both on- and off-line still find themselves arrayed against the

better-resourced and robustly organised forces of repression.

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“Looking East: China’s Jasmine Revolution in Comparative and Historical Perspective.”

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