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Nov 26 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Important to remember protests in China aren't new or unusual. # have gone down under XI after high tide of labor, land, environment protests of the Hu-Wen period, who didn't always repress legitimate grievances. what's different now? 1/4 ft.com/content/2265af…
The CCP has tended to tolerate *large* protests re: "livelihood" issues and to repress system-changing protests of *any* size. That's why protests re: #ZeroCovidChina are dangerous. Previously livelihood protests demand that gov't *do* something: restrain capital and corruption 2
Now at least some people demand that the gov't rollback lockdowns that put people's lives in danger and destroy the economy. They demand *freedom* in order to live. A potential system-changing demand embedded in a livelihood claim! Other danger is that Zero Covid is clearly 3/4
associated with the central government and with XI himself. It's easier for disparate protests across the country to unite behind a central mistake in policy rather than a local mistake in implementation. Already the demands are shifting, away from locals to the center.4/4

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More from @MaryGao

Mary Gallagher Profile picture
Nov 22
Agree with @michaelxpettis comments re this article on China's manufacturing labor shortages. For @ReutersChina it's kinda criminal to discuss these topics without mentioning the problem of 户口, China's household registration system, which plays a large role in 1/5
labor market segmentation, labor (im)mobility, (lack of) access to public goods, and employment (in)security. While hukou policies have been relaxed in many 2-4th tier cities, in the cities covered here, hukou policies have become only more exclusive. Younger migrant workers 2/5
continue to go to those cities because wages are highest there, but increasingly they go to the service sector where the work is more flexible and, probably, far less dangerous. It's a terrible system that creates bad incentives all around. Local governments have no interest 3/5
Read 5 tweets
Mary Gallagher Profile picture
Oct 17
The full text of #20PC report adds some important detail to my earlier thread. More signaling about institutional reforms needed for common prosperity. And, as expected, no detail about how these reforms will be achieved. Many of these reforms have been discussed for decades.1/8
Section 9 on people's welfare and livelihood is still the most important. Starts with some nice words about the party and the people 江山就是人民，人民就是江山。中国共产党领导人民打江. The next para on distribution is more fleshed out than in his speech. Mentions the need 2/8
to increase the household share of national income, the need to increase tax revenue. The para details the 3 kinds of redistribution needed: higher share of income to households (1), tax and social welfare reforms (2), and charitable donations/philantropy (3). Similar to other 3/
Read 8 tweets
Mary Gallagher Profile picture
Oct 16
Here's my hot take on XJP's #20PC Speech as it relates to the economy and social welfare esp. Xi's signature use of Common Prosperity, which scared the bejeezus of capitalists everywhere last year. 1/6
This speech fully displays Xi's approach, which we might call "Bootstrapped Common Prosperity." Or "Neoliberal Common Prosperity." It's about hard work and struggle. Common prosperity itself is mentioned 4 times, the first 3 in mostly vague terms, hand-waving toward utopia 2/6
Things get interesting with the 4th mention, which precedes a long paragraph about distribution. Bootstrapping toward wealth is important here, 多劳多得，鼓励勤劳致富. The harder you work, the more you get, encourage hard work to become rich. Horatio Alger-esque socialism 3/6
Read 6 tweets
Mary Gallagher Profile picture
May 4
Hearing similar comments from other people experiencing the lockdown. A few months ago at a meeting a China-based economist said that the reason the Chinese gov't wasn't distributing pandemic aid directly to individuals and households (esp. migrants) is that they can't easily 1/
track and locate people for subsidies. I replied that if China could control Covid, it could find its population to redistribute income. Since then, the population has become only more legible to the state. So will this new power be used only to control and contain? Will it be 2/
used to deliver better social welfare to rural migrant workers toiling away in many cities to deliver food or keep factories running? Will a social insurance system be built that allows rural citizens to transfer their hard-earned pensions back to their hometowns? Will it be 3
Read 5 tweets
Mary Gallagher Profile picture
May 1
This is a great thread about the political problems facing China’s economy. I agree re: the need to redistribute income from local governments to households rather than the typical (western) need to redistribute from rich to poor households. But, the current system in China is 1/
Configured less around households vs. govt redistribution and more about in-the-system distribution vs. out-of-system distribution (体制内 VS 体制外). In-the-system means people who work in the state, government, or 事业单位 system. Their households benefit overwhelmingly from 2/
The current economic system that is dominated by the party-state. A change to ‘common prosperity’ doesn’t just mean an economic shift from gov’t subsidies to local governments/companies to gov’t subsidies to households. 3/
Read 4 tweets
Mary Gallagher Profile picture
Dec 8, 2021
Here are some hot takes on the White Paper on Democracy released by the State Council Information Office, just in time for Biden’s Summit on Democracy. I highly recommend reading it; a 🧵
not for the truth or for how “democracy works” in China, but to understand how the CCP justifies its rule, with increased confidence and indeed bravado. As with the subtle troll of a title, China: Democracy That Works, a riff on Putnam’s How Democracy Works on the US.
Paying too much attention to the outright falsehoods is not worth anyone’s time unless you’re dealing with a tankie who has never set foot in the PRC and might actually believe some of the drivel. Sadly important these days with borders closed and information more controlled.
Read 15 tweets

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