Yesterday, I viewed some footage from the Chinese protests (ongoing, over the CCP’s draconian No Covid Policy, among other things.) In it, I saw something I didn’t think I’d ever see in my lifetime.
A protester is shouting to the gathered crowd. He says “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Understand that to allow such an utterance to escape from one’s lips in China has meant certain imprisonment and possible torture or death, at least 1949, and especially since the Tiananmen Square massacre—which the Chinese people still are not allowed to let on that they remember. To even imply jokingly that the CCP leadership may not have the people’s interests at heart would have resulted in, at the very least, harassment by the government against you and your family.
It’s not as if I was under the impression that no one in China wanted freedom. On the contrary. I have always believed that Chinese compliance was mostly surface-level, driven by pure fear. Though I knew that human beings think these things in the privacy of their own skulls, no matter how brainwashed they might appear or how pliable their behavior, I would never have expected to see a Chinese dissident brazenly shouting such slogans in the public square.
But that wasn’t even the most surprising part. The police arrive to take this man away, and the crowd gathers in around them, freeing the protester and rescuing him from a trip to the gulag. So this is not only a lone dissident, at his wit’s end, shouting into the void. It’s a cooperative venture. This thing has momentum. The Chinese people are finally standing up for themselves, and for each other, despite their very valid fears of punishment and oppression. This is huge.
The video is below, and the segment I’m referring to happens at about 7:30. The entire video—with translations and commentary provided by two westerners who lived for many years in China—is well worth a watch.
I see the events unfolding in China right now as a reason for hope here in America and around the world. The message is that the human spirit—the essential core of each one of us that just wants to live in freedom and truth and love—is inviolable, indestructible. No matter how hard the tyrants hold people down, eventually they will have had enough and will scramble back to their feet in righteous defiance.
Crucially, this is a potent reminder to central planners and techno-feudalist architects around the globe, that there is a limit to the effectiveness of censorship, social credit systems, digital paddocks, and other methods of human cattle ranching. There is a limit to the effectiveness of fear as a social organization tool. And China seems to have found it.
This is startling! I have never seen such a thing coming out of China. We seem to be witnessing a turning point that has happened recently in that country, a critical mass of sorts may have been reached. Tyrants always push too hard and too fast, thank goodness, and 2023 maybe the year that this particular tide turns. I am very encouraged to see this. The moment where the protestors rescue the outspoken man was as big, in its way, as the Canadian Freedom Convoy. Both were clear messages to their dictators: we are many, we are mighty, and we have had enough.
In political science, there's a theory called "revolutionary threshold" It states that each person has a certain number of other people that they need to see stand up against the regime, before they have the courage to do so.
Under oppressive regimes, most people pretend to support a system that they secretly hate. This "preference falsification" keeps the true level of opposition a secret both from the government and from the public. However, if an event temporarily lowers the revolutionary threshold of enough people to spark significant protests, a lot of other people realize that they're not alone in their feelings. Then, even if they have a higher revolutionary threshold, the number of people may be high enough to give them the courage to step up and join the protest.
I wrote about this recently, in the context of Iran, but the situation in China is an even better example.
https://dystopianliving.substack.com/p/why-revolutions-are-always-a-surprise