Rising prosperity did not liberalize China’s politics

Evidence

At the beginning of the century, there had been a lingering belief that economic growth would lead China toward democratization—just as blue jeans and Michael Jackson helped bring down the Berlin Wall. But under General Secretary Xi Jinping’s long rule, domestic freedoms tightened. Minority Uyghur Muslims were detained in camps. The pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong was crushed, with student leaders facing imprisonment. Dissident artist Ai Weiwei was arrested and sent into exile. By 2020, Beijing had revoked visas for journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Even whimsical internet comparisons of Xi to Winnie-the-Pooh resulted in the widespread censorship of Pooh-related memes. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 745

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reverses the jeans-and-rock democratization thesis of the Cold War era, which connects to prior chapters on how cultural exports signaled freedom. — connects to: China’s social credit system is a political rather than market instrument — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1256