In November 2024, tens of thousands of university students in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, cycled overnight to Kaifeng, with some holding banners calling for "freedom." (Illustration by Qingyu/People News)
[People News] Over the past week, two incidents in China have reminded us that under authoritarian rule, even though "good governance" is often touted as the regime’s source of legitimacy, societal and political deterioration happens more quickly and severely. The hidden societal unrest carries heavier and more immediate costs.
On November 8, social media in China exploded with reports of university students in Zhengzhou cycling overnight to Kaifeng. Just days later, on the evening of November 11, a car-ramming incident in Zhuhai resulted in 35 deaths. The former occurred in central China, involving a collective action of tens of thousands of university students; the latter happened in southern coastal China, a "lone wolf" criminal case of social vengeance. Although these two incidents appear unrelated—crossing generational lines between youth and the elderly—they coincidentally happened almost simultaneously, exposing a pervasive sentiment throughout Chinese society.
A Society Drenched in Despair
A ghost is haunting China—not the ghost of 19th-century European communism, nor the collective apathy of Communist Party officials, but a deep sense of despair permeating civil society. This feeling is particularly pronounced among tens of millions of university students, recent graduates, and middle-aged men on the verge of retirement (50-65 years old). These groups, along with countless others, face nearly identical struggles: they see no way out.
This despair, though currently limited to specific demographics, echoes the social atmosphere of late 1970s and early 1980s China. In May 1980, China Youth magazine published a reader’s letter by Pan Xiao titled Why Is Life Becoming Narrower as We Go On? Co-written by a young worker and a university student, the letter captured the confusion of these two groups after the Cultural Revolution. The newly launched reforms failed to provide them with confidence or vision for the future.
The letter sparked a nationwide debate, resonating deeply with the youth of the time. Unlike the CCP's ideological "debates on truth," this was a grassroots movement of young people discussing life, society, and their aspirations. It helped a generation begin to recover from the scars of the Cultural Revolution.
Today, however, after three years of COVID-19 and the fleeting "Blank Paper Revolution," Chinese society is mired in a strong emotional cocktail of long-repressed dissatisfaction, resentment, confusion, and despair. These feelings resonate with countless individuals, like a hidden dragon searching for an outlet but finding none.
In Zhengzhou, where the "Blank Paper Revolution" sparked by the Foxconn factory riots took place two years ago, despair is palpable. Zhengzhou, a city filled with universities resembling the Foxconn model, has over a million students. The largest, Zhengzhou University, is located far from the city center, with a dull, highly regulated campus life. Many students see in their monotonous lives a glimpse of their future: a path leading either to Foxconn factories or food delivery jobs. This underlying anxiety led to a chain reaction starting with four female students cycling overnight to Kaifeng for steamed buns, ultimately sparking weekend-long mass cycling events.
For these students, constrained by conservative rules and fearful of breaking them, cycling 50 kilometers to Kaifeng on shared bikes became their boldest adventure. This seemingly modest act provided immense joy and relief from their anxiety about the future. It mirrors Germany's early 20th-century "wandering bird movement," which brought temporary happiness to young people. Tragically, many of these "wandering birds" later died in World War I or became involved in extremist movements.
For middle-aged men (50-65 years old), China's so-called "unprecedented changes in a thousand years" create a volatile environment where they can be cast aside overnight. This societal rejection leads to despair, mirroring the fate many Zhengzhou students fear for themselves. The grim reality is reflected in the staggering number of suicides in 2023, totaling 260,000.
In such circumstances, China's characteristic timidity does not translate into courage to challenge the system. Instead, despair often manifests as suicide or, in extreme cases, violent social revenge. Those who feel abandoned by society may view it as a co-conspirator in their tragedy, targeting vulnerable groups like children, women, and defenseless strangers in acts of indiscriminate violence. This explains the rise in revenge killings and mass attacks in 21st-century China, often carried out with knives, cars, or gasoline for self-immolation.
The Root Causes Behind the Rhetorical Question
Strangely, after the Zhuhai car-ramming murder case, in a very short time, Chinese leaders unusually, within 24 hours, issued instructions, demanding an investigation into the societal root causes. In less than a week, from Zhengzhou to Zhuhai, from Zhengzhou and Kaifeng police escorting night cycling to banning it, to Chinese leaders giving the historically fastest response to the revenge-motivated car-ramming case, it shows this might be the first shock to Beijing’s top leadership two months ago during the Shenzhen stabbing of Japanese children case, forcing them to revise their diplomatic policy toward Japan, and now the second shock, meaning Beijing might be forced to face societal issues, review, and adjust related policies.
However, the Chinese leaders’ rhetorical questioning, just like their questioning months ago in Rizhao, Shandong, during a discussion with entrepreneurs asking, “Why are there so few unicorn companies in China?” is simply an ironic joke of significant reflexive meaning. This is a rhetorical question, more of an excuse to shirk responsibility, once again attempting to use the so-called “resolving contradictions at the grassroots level” of the Maple Bridge Model to cover fundamental, top-down systemic problems.
Regarding the livelihood difficulties behind these heinous crimes, the high-up Chinese rulers and the ordinary people behind their phones have always been indifferent, more willing to cover up the truth, just like the “plainclothes officers” obstructing BBC reporters’ broadcasting at the Zhuhai Sports Center scene. They believe China has the world’s most advanced grid management system plus big data systems to prevent incidents beforehand, thinking they might continue using “dynamic zero-COVID” or the “Maple Bridge Model” methods to eliminate similar issues in their early stages.
On the one hand, China’s stability-maintenance system categorizes people into hierarchical levels, with an enormous stability-maintenance classification system and corresponding lists. In the past, these lists mainly included petitioners, pro-democracy dissidents, specific religious and ethnic minority groups, registered mental health patients, drug addicts, veterans, and “two-labor releasees,” etc. Now, this list has expanded dramatically, extending from the so-called “five failed groups” to the “eight failed groups” and the “three low three few” groups. These include:
Failed investments, job unemployment, life setbacks, emotional setbacks, interpersonal conflicts, mental imbalance, psychological breakdowns, and poorly managed youth.
Low economic income, low rights status, low social prestige, few interpersonal interactions, few mobility opportunities, and few relief channels.
Essentially, these socially marginalized and lower-tier groups have all been incorporated into the stability-maintenance system’s monitoring.
On the other hand, apart from punished and corrected individuals and specific religious, ethnic, and occupational groups, the expansion of stability-maintenance classifications primarily targets various victims created by China’s social system. Whether poor and lower-class people, financial “thunderstorm” victims, or victims seeking help from the judicial system, almost without exception, they ultimately enter the administrative system—under “Big Brother’s” supervision. The logic is: victims of societal contradictions themselves are viewed as unstable societal factors. Once an individual falls victim to the Darwinian competition of society, it means being sidelined by the system. Undoubtedly, this constitutes a more severe secondary harm to all victims of societal contradictions, plunging them into social isolation.
More critically, amidst harm and secondary harm, amidst intensifying societal contradictions, amidst worsening economic crises, amidst the rapid expansion of the so-called stability-maintenance classifications, these continuous non-accidental individual cases indicate how severe China’s national crisis truly is—the state apparatus can no longer, and is unwilling to, provide even the most basic level of justice. Theoretically, the nature and basic function of a state is the provision of justice. However, in today’s China, especially in North China, Northeast China, Northwest China, the entire northern region, and the Central Plains, related research shows that nearly “every household has grievances.”
In criminal trials, the rate of second-instance acquittals is nearly zero.
In administrative trials, the results almost invariably favor the government.
Even civil rulings are increasingly difficult to accept, to recognize, and the authority of judgments is increasingly diminished.
The entire judicial system fundamentally fails to meet the justice demands of Chinese society.
Therefore, if we look back a decade or more to when excuses like “good governance” were used to abolish civil society, abolish media oversight, abolish intra-party checks, abolish judicial independence, abolish democratic options, and at the same time stress that “China’s political system is already highly mature… resolutely not to change,” then the societal root causes of the so-called extreme cases frequently occurring in China today become abundantly clear.
In other words, the CCP’s advocacy over the past decade for “the Party above the law” has caused the negative consequences of rule-of-law regression to manifest. The doctrine the CCP adheres to, which claims the superstructure and economic foundation must adapt, is experiencing significant divergence in actual practice. This divergence is dismantling the state system built upon it and will incur extremely painful social costs.
(Adapted from Voice of America)
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