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The recent spate of murderous attacks shows the sickness of Communist China. Repression is only making the situation worse.

[…] The Communist Party’s reaction [to the recent mass killings in China] has been to censor news of incidents and prevent expressions of grief and mourning. These actions, by further bottling up emotions, are making a bad situation even worse.

Chinese society in the Communist period has always been volatile, and the Chinese people, who most of the time accept repression, periodically – and unexpectedly – explode. They did that, for instance, in October 2022 when thousands of workers suddenly fled a Chinese manufacturing complex making iPhones in Zhengzhou, in central China. “Something snapped over the weekend,” Bloomberg News reported at the time.

That incident quickly led to spontaneous protests across the country as workers, homeowners, students, the elderly, and others took to the streets for more than two months to complain about a variety of long-simmering grievances. In Shanghai in November of that year, protesters publicly shouted revolutionary slogans. “Step down, Xi Jinping!” they demanded. “Step down, Communist Party!”

Now, as the regime extends totalitarian controls over society, people are “trying to breathe”. They tried to breathe in June as four female college students in Zhengzhou decided to take an overnight 50-kilometre bike ride to Kaifeng for soup dumplings. The craze caught on, and in November 100,000 young were making the overnight treks. Authorities tried to limit the number of riders, and there were even reports that colleges and universities were restricting students from congregating and participating. For an insecure regime, everything is considered a threat to the ruling group.

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The perception of unfairness has aggravated an already tense situation. “China’s economy is failing fast due to Xi Jinping’s policies of repression to preserve the power and privilege of the corrupt Chinese Communist elite,” Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing, told me after the Zhuhai killing. “More and more people have lost their life savings in the collapse of the housing market. Young people suffer the soul-destroying impact of unemployment.”