A week of significance? — Editor’s Note for Friday, December 2 , 2022
A note for Weekly newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
Dear reader,
It’s been a week of momentous news in China:
There were anti-lockdown and anti-government protests all over China after a deadly fire at an apartment complex in Urumqi, Xinjiang, with some protesters even calling for Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 to step down.
Predictably, Beijing has begun cracking down, but it’s also strongly suggested that COVID zero is going to end, or at least that restrictions on people’s daily lives will be lightened.
- For an analysis of the situation, you can watch Lizzi Lee’s video interviews with Professor William Hurst of Cambridge University and with freelance journalist Simon Leplâtre, who is based in Shanghai, where the most overtly anti-government protests took place.
- Protests and memorial services for the people who died in the Xinjiang fire have spread around the world, including to New York — see our gallery of photos. (On the subject of images used by the press, see also this guide by a few Chinese journalists for photographers and photo editors to minimize possible harm to protesters.)
Despite recent signs of Beijing’s discomfort with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Chinese and Russian bombers conducted joint patrols and landed in each other’s territory this week.
China’s former leader Jiāng Zémín 江泽民, who led the country out of isolation following the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989 and guided its economic modernization, died at the age of 96.
Many Chinese internet users remembered him fondly, but as I conclude in this essay on Jiang’s legacy, the past just looks better in contrast to the dourness and growing repression of the Xi Jinping era.
Our phrase of the week is: A single spark can start a prairie fire (星星之火，可以燎原 xīngxīng zhī huǒ, kěyǐ liáoyuán).
