“Us vs. them” nationalism has become a hallmark of Chinese foreign policy under President Xi Jinping, observers say, and it can be a similarly popular recourse at times of crisis at home. After days of rare political unrest, early signs suggest Beijing may yet turn to this tried-and-tested outlet to stoke paranoia and skepticism about the legitimacy of the public’s grievances.

The spontaneous protests took place in two dozen Chinese cities before largely dispersing in the early hours of Monday. They were sparked by the deaths of 10 residents in an apartment fire in Urumqi, capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, where witnesses said COVID-related limits on movement prevented the victims’ escape and their prompt rescue by the fire department.

For many, it was only the latest in a string of avoidable tragedies linked to Xi’s signature public health strategy, which afforded the country relative normalcy for two years, but which in year three of the pandemic has appeared excessive, with snap lockdowns squeezing the economy and driving up unemployment.

But those who took to the streets last weekend also demonstrated against Beijing’s campaign-style approach to COVID-19, which has necessitated a thorough suppression of viewpoints that contradict official lines about the nature of the virus and the suitability of one-size-fits-all disease control and prevention measures.

The lack of legitimate avenues to voice differences seemed only to drive up the public’s frustrations, and when protest slogans turned from anti-lockdown to anti-government, on occasion even singling out Xi and the Chinese Communist Party by name, the mood in Beijing quickly changed.

“We must resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces, resolutely crack down on illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order, and effectively safeguard overall social stability,” Chen Wenqing, China’s head of policing, legal affairs and intelligence, said at a commission meeting on Monday, in remarks that appeared to endorse the narrative that other outside forces were at play.

On the same day, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the protests came about after “forces with ulterior motives” linked the Urumqi fire to the city’s COVID policy. His response was scrubbed from the ministry’s official transcript in both Chinese and English, a common tactic when foreign reporters probe sensitive subjects.

The protesters themselves, however, didn’t take kindly to being stripped of agency, or the idea that they’d been motivated by anything other than their discontent with the government’s intrusive policies and heavy-handed censorship.

In one widely viewed video on Twitter, now a digital archive for footage scrubbed from the Chinese internet, a crowd on Beijing’s Liangma Bridge pushed back against one young man’s warning about “external forces” by citing the CCP’s philosophical roots in foreign socialist revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin.

“The external forces you talk about, are they Marx and Engels? Is it Stalin? Is it Lenin? Was it external forces who started the fire in Xinjiang?” one person shouted in response. “We only have domestic forces who don’t allow us to gather,” another said.

Hinting at American Interference

Claims of foreign meddling also backfired in unexpected ways online after the wife of Zhao, the foreign ministry spokesperson, suggested the same in two now-deleted posts on Weibo, according to China Digital Times, a U.S.-based archive of censored items.

At the height of the rallies on Sunday, she said “professional groups” were deliberately spreading rumors to incite public anger. After a flood of disgruntled replies, she limited the visibility of some 17,200 reposts and 650 comments before removing the post altogether.

She did the same to a second post an hour later, after saying she was “very worried about youths being led astray by forces with ulterior motives to stir up conflict and hatred.”

“The ’external forces’ claim is important to immediately try and delegitimize the protesters and their messages,” said Matthew Knight, an Australia-based independent researcher on Chinese politics. “By doing so the CCP may be aiming to stem further mobilization, while also sending a threatening message to those who took to the streets or are thinking of doing so.”

“This is likely why we have seen some protesters preemptively react against such potential false claims,” he told Newsweek. “The foreign forces claim is obviously less effective against those who were on the streets shouting slogans, but it is symptomatic of how the CCP uses ideology as well as physical force to divide and isolate perceived threats.”

The idea of subverters among the ranks is a heady brew that at times verges on conspiracy. In a recent Weibo post, nationalist news site Guancha republished an October 2021 report claiming the CIA was recruiting operatives who spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hakka to “discredit China’s good deeds across the world.”

“The reference to foreign interference is a claim that authoritarian governments often use, whether left or right wing,” said Ian Chong, a political scientist from Singapore. “It can be a useful distraction, but it is not foolproof as the responses to such claims indicate.”

He told Newsweek: “For those seeking to appeal to nationalism, assertions of foreign interference seek to stoke fears of outside threat. It is one way to deal with internal dissent, as are claims about ‘counter-revolutionaries’ from a left-wing perspective.”

The United States is often the chief instigator in the Chinese leadership’s eyes, but the Biden administration’s response thus far has been fairly cautious, seemingly wary of offering any rhetorical ammunition. But if the demonstrations grow, Washington is likely to become Beijing’s go-to scapegoat whether it likes it or not.

A Silent Crackdown

Suisheng Zhao, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, describes Chinese nationalism under Xi as targeting “negative others.”

“Xi’s information control and propaganda have portrayed a very dangerous world, a very hostile world, where Western forces try to undermine China’s rise,” Zhao told Newsweek.

“They will use this rhetoric to try to suppress the demonstrations if they become a certain scale,” he said. “They will link them to anti-China external forces who don’t want to see China’s success, who try to use the demonstrations to undermine the party’s leadership and political stability.”

The recent protests may have signified a loss of political trust among the general public, but with collective action nearly impossible to organize in China’s highly securitized offline and online environments, the already leaderless demonstrations may simply peter out, especially if Beijing is able to effectively address practical concerns about excessive enforcement of COVID rules.

“Perhaps the most practicable way forward for the CCP is to let the protest lose momentum and then to crack down. The CCP could, of course, crack down directly if they are confident that the costs are acceptable,” Chong argued. “That said, repression can be costly and risky, too. There is the possibility of unintended escalation that may prove complicated to control,” he said.

Given the option of loosening or tightening pandemic and social controls, the government appears to have opted for reducing the former and increasing the latter. While megacities like Guangzhou have been given room to reverse lockdowns after weeks of riots, a heavy police presence has descended on major popular centers to prevent further gatherings.

In Shanghai and Beijing, authorities have also been privately tracking down protesters to have a word. Some who joined the rallies have received knocks on their doors; others a warning via phone call to stop using illegal apps like Twitter, Telegram or Instagram.

Chinese universities, which have long been a hotbed of political movements, have sent students home early for the Lunar New Year holiday.

China’s president may have “drastically underestimated the public’s growing dissatisfaction with China’s never-ending zero-COVID approach–one inextricably linked to him personally,” said Craig Singleton, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

“I have a hard time seeing Xi backtracking entirely on zero-COVID, but the scale and intensity of these protests are simply too great to ignore,” he told Newsweek. “In other words, the protests may not be big enough to topple Xi’s government, but they may be just powerful enough to topple zero-COVID, at least in its current form.”

“Going forward, I suspect we will see a mix of announcements aimed at partially mollifying some of the protesters’ demands about the lockdowns. At the same time, Chinese security services will do everything in their power to clamp down on future demonstrations,” Singleton said.

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