How revolutions begin, and how they can end

Across China, the world’s most populous nation and its second largest economy, scenes unprecedented since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 are unfolding. In city after city crowds of young people are taking to the streets, holding up blank placards in eloquent protest against state censorship, and demanding to be treated ‘as citizens not slaves’.

The trigger for these displays of popular dissent are the Communist regime’s draconian lockdowns designed to snuff out spreading Covid infections in the country where the virus originated. But, as is often the way with such popular protests, the original cause of the protests is widening into demands for freedoms which we in the West take for granted but which those taking part in the demonstrations have never known.

Some of the protesters’ demands – ominously coming from universities training China’s future ruling elite – now seem to go beyond the lifting of stringent lockdowns. Videos of the protests appear to show protestors calling for such strange western concepts as democracy and free elections.