China Leadership Monitor – The A4 Movement: Mapping its Background and Impact

Two years later, with COVID-19 raging rampant across the globe, at a collective study meeting of the Politburo in January 2021 Xi again insisted that the success of the 14th Five-year Plan required that the leadership identify both "Black swan" and "Gray rhino" events that might, as a result of China's efforts to control local coronavirus outbreaks, destabilize economic development. A city-wide lockdown, it was originally argued, would "Impact the entire national economy and the global economy" to an extent that could leave "Many international cargo ships floating in the East China Sea." When such policies failed to stop the virus's spread, Party Secretary Li Qiang came under significant pressure to impose a "Phased" version of the "Hard lockdown" technique that had been imposed in Wuhan. Foxconn's "Closed loop" system - which had been developed to allow China to host the Winter Olympics and the Paralympic Games months before and had earned high praise from the Chairman himself - banned workers from leaving, and, in some cases, since mid-October had confined them to their dormitory rooms. Greatfire. org, an organization that seeks to assist netizens in China wishing to circumvent censorship, issued a warning that Twitter - a platform blocked in China - was nonetheless awash with semi-pornographic spam about "Escort services" that tagged "Urumqi" beginning on November 25. Zuo Ye, a self-described activist who has long experience of working with NGOs and grassroots groups in China, observed in an extended essay that the "A4 protests" of late November that seemed to have been ignited by the tragedy in Urumqi were in fact three distinct movements that arose from the "Systemic humanitarian disaster and political and economic crisis caused by the three years of 'zero-COVID'" in China. Patricia M. Thornton is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Dickson Poon China Centre, and a Fellow of Merton College, at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Chinese Communist Party, party-building, civil society, and popular protest in transnational China.