Editor’s note for Tuesday, November 29, 2022

My thoughts today:

Beijing is treading carefully after a few days of protests around China that were sparked by anger at COVID curbs.

There are a few attention seekers and low-level propagandists claiming that the demonstrations were orchestrated by hostile foreign “color revolution” forces. Politburo member Chēn Wénqīng 陈文清 — who oversees police, legal affairs, and intelligence — today was quoted by official media as vowing to “resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities” in a speech about national security and social stability. But he did not specifically mention the protests.

In fact, today most central government and Party organizations have responded with a mild tone in their oblique references to the protests, as you can read in our top story. The police, however, have started collecting names and questioning people they suspect of being involved, but there have not been any mass arrests or state violence. Yet.

And maybe there won’t be.

Maybe the Communist Party will just try to change the subject. It has a record of success using that strategy: Popular anger at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 was efficiently dispelled within a few months, for example.

In a signal that the authorities may be preparing the population for changes to the COVID-zero policy, the Beijing News — a commercial newspaper that is controlled by the city’s Commmnist Party branch — today published a story (in Chinese) titled “After getting infected by COVID.” The piece extensively quotes five people who had the disease and then recovered.

The piece seems designed to reassure the anxious that COVID-19 is not a big deal. Here’s a sample:

Half a year after recovering from COVID-19, Rachel’s grandparents did not feel any significant physical changes. The two elderly people are 87 years old this year, and they have underlying conditions in the heart, lungs, and with their blood pressure.

The illness is “like a bad cold.” They had a fever, cough, and body aches, but after the illness passed, they continue to often walk around outside their apartment holding hands, and their lives are the same as before.

It should be noted that the Beijing News is a relatively liberal organization, or at least it was when it launched in 2003. The newspaper was, however, taken over by Beijing’s municipal Party propaganda department in 2011.

So the article appearing in the Beijing News is not nearly as significant as if it were published by the Party’s national newspaper, the People’s Daily, or even by the Party’s main Beijing newspaper, the Beijing Daily. Nonetheless, it’s a sign of some softening within the system, or at least, an experiment in softening up the masses.

Our word of the day is: After getting infected by COVID (感染新冠肺炎之后 gǎnrǎn xīnguān fèiyán zhīhòu).