Why the Jasmine Protests in China are an enormous success

After listening to a well-known, local China commentator exhort on RTHK that the “Jasmine Revolutions in China aren’t working,” I feel I have to immediately present an argument to the contrary.

Fortunately for revolutions, they don’t have to rely on out-of-date commentators for ideas on how to frighten an authoritarian government.

According to the commentator, he suggested that the heavy Chinese clamp down in Beijing had achieved its goal of nipping any pro-democracy protests in the bud. This kind of limited thinking is trapped in the mindset that protests are only successful if we see 10,000 unarmed people being ruffed up by over-zealous, masochistic, security-police. As practically no protesters turned up to the Wangfujing yesterday, and the international media was too busy being roughed up itself to get any shots of placard waving democracy protesters, then the CCP won. The protests were stamped out.

However this couldn’t be further from the truth. The Jasmine Protests in Beijing were a stunning success, and here’s why…

Firstly, we have to ask, what is the purpose of an anti-government protest?

Is it to get beaten up and make great news?

Of course not!

Protests are designed to make an unresponsive, unapproachable government sit up and take note. This can happen in many ways. Recently in the Middle East it has taken the form of tens of thousands of people going to the street. For the most part it seems to be working, but this form of protest is not suitable for China at the moment. As we all know, the CCP has already killed unarmed democracy protesters once in the past and there’s no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again to protect their ever growing, selfish interests. If it was good enough for paramount leader Deng Xiao Ping, it certainly would be good enough for this generation of mediocre leaders, who are wrestling to hang on to power in and ever changing China, that sees them being slowly sidelined.

The extreme lengths the authorities went through to crack down shows how frightened the CCP is. A CNN report described seeing hundreds of police cars, an unknown amount of plain and regular security forces, mysterious building sites popping up and water trucks blocking the main shopping through-way in the nation’s capital. Officials may pat themselves on the back for thwarting the protests, but they’re just too foolish to realize that they were the protest. It didn’t need thousands of people on the street to prove how desperate and weak the government is, the security forces happily demonstrated this.

Protest by proxy… it is beyond sublime.

For a protest to work, it doesn't need loads of shouting people. There are many ways to protest, and they're effective if the government takes note, which it clearly did.

China is famous for putting spin on all manner of things and dubbing it, “Chinese characteristics.” Well, I do believe the organizers have created a whole new way of protesting with “Chinese characteristics,” that puts its fragile government on notice. The beauty of this style of proxy-protest is that the protesters don’t even need to show up to make their point heard. If the Jasmine revolution can succeed with applying the pressure on the government to close down significant parts of Beijing on the threat that there may be a protest then they have them on the run.

After all, if we read what the protesters want, they request a government free from corruption that is governed by the people. Now, if the governments only answer to this is to oppress the people further then their argument is vindicated and their protest is highly successful.

Meanwhile, not only are they successful in turning Beijing on its head as leagues of security men try to catch mystery protesters in the shopping districts of Beijing, the Jasmine Revolutions are making the Great Firewall look ridiculous. They have hijack more and more search terms that for the most part are just simple generic terms. Whether by design or accident, this is the greatest attack on internet censorship China has ever had and is a testament to the supple skill of the protest organizers.

Modern China is reinventing the art of protest in the face of the more and more draconian measures by the CCP to cling on to power.

It’s a David and Goliath struggle, and we all know how that ended.