China’s Optimized COVID Response Proves That The Recent Protests Weren’t A Color Revolution

Had a Color Revolution actually been attempted, then major Chinese cities’ subsequent decisions to optimize their response to the pandemic would have signaled that the CPC capitulated to foreign pressure to change one of its most sensitive policies against the advice of its leadership and their scientific experts. That would have in turn represented a major blow to this multipolar leader’s sovereignty and showed that the US could easily manipulate China into other unilateral policy concessions by weaponizing more protests to that end.

China’s Global Times reported on 30 November that “Flexible measures implemented across China to ensure people's livelihoods amid cold front”. The article described the ways in which cities like Beijing, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shijiazhuang, Taiyuan, and Zhengzhou were optimizing their response to the pandemic by lifting temporary restrictions and reforming those that remain in order to help people resume normal life and work.

These decisions follow the National Health Commission decreeing the day prior that COVID control measures should be lifted in an orderly way and vowing to deal with excessive management measures shortly after protests erupted across the country in response to local officials’ policy implementations. At the time, many among the leftist-friendly segment of the Alt-Media Community (AMC) speculated that these protests represented a Color Revolution regime change plot, yet that’s now been discredited.

While the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission did indeed issue a statement on Tuesday declaring that the authorities will “resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces”, the policy changes that came after add credence to the claim that the prior protests were actually a grassroots manifestation inspired by the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) own self-reform philosophy aimed at holding local authorities to account for their excessive policy implementations.  

After all, if the authorities had any credible reason to suspect that foreign forces were weaponizing protests against the People’s Republic in order to coerce it into changing its zero-COVID policy, then major cities would never have optimized their response to the pandemic at the time that they did. The National Health Commission also wouldn’t have vowed to deal with excessive management measures by local officials either in what was clearly their flexible response to the Chinese people’s will.

Had a Color Revolution actually been attempted, then those moves would have signaled that the CPC capitulated to foreign pressure to change one of its most sensitive policies against the advice of its leadership and their scientific experts. That would have in turn represented a major blow to this multipolar leader’s sovereignty and showed that the US could easily manipulate China into other unilateral policy concessions by weaponizing more protests to that end.

Instead, what ended up happening is that the CPC listened to the Chinese people upon its elite echelons becoming aware via the latest protests that lower-level figures were excessively implementing pandemic measures in ways that seriously inconvenienced the citizenry. The social contract between them is that the ruling party will always ensure the country’s greater good in exchange for the people’s loyalty, yet this trust was being challenged by local incompetence and corruption.

It therefore naturally followed that they’d immediately investigate the concerns that were raised by those grassroots demonstrators who were inspired by the CPC’s own self-reform philosophy and promptly act as required in order to optimize their pandemic response and restore the public’s trust. Those radical opportunists who sought to exploit the protests for their own self-interested ends in collusion with foreign forces were presumably dealt with behind the scenes per the law.

They were always nothing but a miniscule minority whose provocative anti-state slogans were over-amplified by the US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) in order to artificially manufacture the false perception of supposedly widespread anti-government sentiment when none existed in reality. Nevertheless, many leftist-friendly folks in the AMC were deceived by this information warfare operation into wrongly thinking that the entire protest movement was just a Color Revolution.

They not only jumped the gun with their premature conclusion, but also inadvertently discredited both themselves and the same country whose national model of democracy they sought to defend. China would never capitulate to foreign intelligence agencies’ efforts to weaponize protests for the purpose of coercing unilateral concessions on sensitive policies like zero-COVID, yet those leftist-friendly folks’ speculation suggests that this is indeed what supposedly happened.

Their assessment was thus inaccurate no matter how “well-intended” it was and must therefore be amended in light of subsequent events lest these same folks who supposedly intended to defend China’s national model of democracy from foreign meddling end up becoming Hybrid War weapons against it themselves. Failing to acknowledge their mistake and remaining reluctant to practice the CPC’s own self-reform philosophy would lead to them suggesting that China capitulated to a Color Revolution.

That obviously didn’t happen, yet those who were misled by leftist-friendly folks in the AMC into thinking that foreign forces were behind the latest protests would logically arrive at that false conclusion. This explains why it’s so important for those same folks to publicly account for their analytical shortcomings in order to correct that twisted perception before it spirals out of control. Refusing to do so discredits themselves, the CPC, and thus results in them becoming propagandists.