Biden Treads Lightly in Response to COVID Protests in China

Outside observers and analysts are categorizing the outbreak of protests as an unprecedented rebuke of Xi’s rule, after he secured in October an unprecedented third, five-year term as the country’s leader.

“I think it’s clear that the scale of the protests, and also much of their content, is at a much larger scale than anything we’ve seen since the events leading up to the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989,” said Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow for the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

The Tiananmen Square protests are held up as the most significant opposition movement in the history of the Chinese Communist Party, with an estimated 1 million pro-democracy protesters at the height of the weeks-long protests. The Chinese government responded with live fire on protesters, resulting in deaths estimated to be between hundreds and thousands.

Stokes points out that the new generation of protesters, and many of the demonstrations organized by university students, are far enough removed from the brutal crackdown of Tiananmen that they are emboldened to state public protests.

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