First of all, we really ought to appreciate the remarkable punctuality of this new wave of anti-China agitation; near exactly two months to the day from the "Xi coup" back in September. Color revolutionists really got their calendaring down to a tee. The only takeaway from this affair is how much of a quality of life improvement this forum would receive from an “recent post frequency” tracker for members so that some forum regulars can finally resist being riled up by bait from concern trolls who only ever come out of the woodworks when it’s time to drop the latest anti-China agitprop. Scroll back through the past dozen pages and you’ll see the same few names speedrunning how many times their posts can get quoted by baited respondents.
The idea that just because some malcontents in the country went from whining on Zhihu to whining on the streets should affect national policy decisions as some insinuate really is wild.
Here’s a number: 1,400,000,000.
That’s around the amount of people who live in China, which is something almost everyone (its supporters and its detractors) consistently fail to appreciate in every discussion of China. Chinese people count for nearly 20% of the entire human population. One in every five person on Earth is Chinese. Not counting ethnic Chinese, just Chinese citizens.
China has no flashy electoral mechanisms to gauge public sentiment and give Chinese policymakers an egotistical pat on the back. This doesn’t validate the notion that the appearance of some protests mean whatever messages they spout are somehow indicative of the general majoritarian mood of one fifth of humankind.
In relative terms, if there are 1 million protestors in China, that's 0.07% of the People’s Republic. If there are 100 million protestors, that's still just 7% of the nation.
This was the fundamental anti-democratic contradiction of the Tiananmen protests, 0.1% of the populace asymmetrically attempting to hijack the direction of (then) 1.1 billion people via the amplifying spectacle of public agitation and that contradiction still applies to the illegitimacy of every incident in the country since. It’s something to keep in mind as the foreign propaganda siege on China continues to escalate, underpinned by Western aspirations that they can induce China to succumb to color revolution and Gorbachev itself in the same way that the former USSR did.
