The Dangerous Wisdom of Chinese Crowds
Never underestimate the power of the revolutionary crowd. It has swept through Paris time and again — in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1968 — unseating kings, emperors and presidents.
In Petrograd and Moscow in 1917 the crowd toppled the tsar and then brought Lenin to power. Those who took to the streets in Leipzig and Berlin in 1989 know what the revolutionary crowd can achieve — as do those who were in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011 (and again in 2013) or Kyiv’s Maidan in 2014.
Not even at the height of the June 1989 democracy movement did protesters explicitly call for the overthrow of the Party and its general secretary.
Though I am far less expert than my friend Bill Kirby, William Kirby, T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard, I spent five years as a visiting professor at Tsinghua, one of the two big universities in Beijing.
In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), the French social theorist Gustave Le Bon argued that a crowd was more than the sum of its individual members.
Because of three characteristic features of crowds — the anonymity of the individual, the propensity for contagion between individuals, and the crowd’s suggestibility — he suggested the existence of a collective crowd mind.
“The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals,” wrote Le Bon, “is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.”
A somewhat different argument, colored by the experience of growing up as a Jew in interwar Austria, can be found in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1960).
Perhaps forgetful of the crowd’s somewhat mixed historical record, the Western media tend to side with young people when they take to the streets. I well recall the gushing enthusiasm of the New York Times for the protests of the misnamed “Arab Spring".
That crowds are not always benign had already been made abundantly clear by the emergence of online mobs enabled and empowered by the Internet and the smartphone.
It seems to me that President Xi and the CCP leadership confront a classic trilemma. They would like three things, but they can have at most two.
(In economics, the best-known trilemma or “impossible trinity” involves a choice among a fixed exchange rate, free capital movements, and an independent monetary policy.)
In China today, the choice is between: 1. Zero Covid; 2. Economic growth around 5%; 3. Social stability.
Yet if any Chinese city experiences a big wave of infections before the high-risk population is vaccinated or boosted, hospitals are likely to be overwhelmed, with shortages of beds, healthcare workers, and equipment, not to mention challenges distributing antiviral medications.
In my book Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), I argued that six “killer apps” had set western civilization apart from other civilizations so that, beginning in around 1600, growth and living standards in western Europe and its settler colonies surged ahead.
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” Xi asked in a speech in December 2012. “An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken.
We shall find out much sooner than most people think how tyranny ends in China. As the crowd steers the Party — and the people — toward their fateful rendezvous with Covid-19, the final act in this vast human tragedy begins.
Niall Ferguson Bloomberg 4 december 2022
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