Xi relaxes. It won’t be enough.

Perhaps Xi Jinping he may be the most powerful autocrat in the world, but this week he has been forced to do some pirouettes to meet the demands of ordinary Chinese, Fed up of its failed “zero-COVID” strategy.

Crowds of ordinary Chinese – “hundred old names” in Chinese parlance – took to the streets to express their frustration with the repressive COVID-19 lockdowns and, by implication, with China’s general crackdown.

Many showed blank sheets of paper, signaling that they could not say what they wanted.

However, Xi read those blank papers.

Police arrested many protesters and blocked off areas where people could gather, but the Chinese government was still forced to bow to public opinion.

He brilliantly declared a “new situationand eased its COVID-19 policy on Wednesday.

Barely acknowledging the protests and pretending it was all their idea, the Chinese leadership declared an end to many of the most burdensome elements of their COVID-19 policy, which has kept the virus, as well as the Chinese people, in check.

The lockdowns will be shorter and more selective, and people who test positive for the coronavirus with mild symptoms will be able to stay at home instead of being quarantined.

Negative tests will no longer be routinely required in most public spaces.

The cold medicineswhose sale was restricted so that people could not hide their COVID-19 symptoms, will be available again.

The government’s response, however, obviously does not address the greater desire to put end of autocracy

The dictatorship continues to exist and presumably those arrested following the street protests are still in prison.

But Wednesday’s announcement is a major breakthrough.

Historically, popular protests in modern China have not translated into more freedom, but less.

In 1956, Mao Zedong he decided to “make 100 flowers bloom” but was horrified when some of those intellectual flowers criticized his rule.

The result was a crackdown that sent some of my Chinese friends to labor camps for two decades.

In April 1976, a popular protest against extremists led to the sacking of one of the reformers, Deng Xiaoping.

In 1978 and 1979 he asks “Wall of Democracy” advocating for greater freedom has led to the imprisonment of activists such as Wei Jingsheng.

In 1986, student protests in favor of further liberalization led to the dismissal of pro-liberalization Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang.

Then the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement was a loud cry for more freedom, and the result was a massacre, long prison sentences, and the rise of extremists who made the nation less free.

The fact that Xi was forced to give way in the face of protests seems like a historic milestone, but relaxation can be costly.

Xi has managed the pandemic deftly for some time, reducing COVID-19 mortality to levels that almost any country would envy.

However, when vaccines became available, Xi didn’t adapt well.

It has failed to import more effective mRNA vaccines from the West and has not sufficiently promoted vaccination and booster shots for the elderly and vulnerable.

He maintained the blockade policy long after it was tenable, in part due to the classic dictator’s difficulty in assessing people’s opinions when imprisoning them for speaking out.

The upshot is that any rapid relaxation of COVID-19 rules today, without first increasing vaccination rates among the elderly, could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chinese from COVID-19.

It’s Xi’s fault. It’s Xi’s fault.

One of China’s great paradoxes is that, in many ways, it is a self-correcting administrative marvel.

He oversaw the development of extraordinary infrastructure and the improvement of education:

The life expectancy of a child born in Beijing is now higher than that of a child born in Washington DC

However, Chinese leaders have often had a hard time correcting themselves in the ideological ground.

The result:

China’s authoritarian rulers have overseen the rise of a well-educated urban middle class that aspires to greater participation, but the “Popular Chinese“He refuses to let people do it.

At the time of the reforms, China took over many of its citizens, increasing their income.

The implicit agreement was that government would allow people to improve their lives, but not completely determine them. Xi broke the deal with his COVID-19 policy, which made people’s lives worse.

Many years ago, when I was a Beijing correspondent for The New York Times and covering the Tiananmen protests, a young man expressed the nation’s aspiration like this:

“We have rice, but we want rights.”

In the latest protests, the slogans were similar:

“We want freedom, not imprisonment. We want votes, not a ruler. We want dignity, not lies. We are citizens, not slaves.”

Those brave protesters changed China’s national politics, and their pervasive desire for rights cannot be extinguished any more than a virus can; one day, the Chinese Communist leadership will have to respond to that very human aspiration.

Xi may remain in charge, but a legacy of this year’s protests may remind us of that desire still flashingjust below the surface, in the most populous nation on Earth.

c.2022 The New York Times Company