> no there was no revolution in progress.
Who said there was?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/foxconns-zhengzhou-plant-...
Fresh off the presses, courtesy of the paper of record:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/xi-loosens-up-it-...
Some tidbits:
"The government’s response, though, does not, of course, address the larger yearning for an end to autocracy."
"Those brave protesters have changed China’s national policy, and their broader yearning for rights can no more be extinguished than a virus; someday the Chinese Communist leadership will have to respond to that very human aspiration."
If the scale of the protests were laughably small and of no concern to the CCP, it could just be a coincidence that China announced their scientists have determined Omicron has ‘reduced pathogenicity’ [1], as a pretext to relaxing restrictions.
https://www.readingthechinadream.com/deng-yuwen-on-xi-jinpin...
This is not your usual "'free press'" fare and it is noteworthy for the both the designation of China under Xi as "totalitarian" and also its optimistic prediction of a new wave of democratization globally.
What excited the press (...and those whom you imply) was probably that anything happened in Xi's China, and that it happened in multiple places, and that CPC was not entirely successful in suppressing it even while having near total control.
So what is extraordinary about these protests -- something apparently very new in China -- is that they are directed at the cult of personality directly. I just did a google search to see if there ever were demonstrations in China against Mao during his reign. Xi's political game is role-playing some sort of Maoist / Stalinist state with him as maximum leader. He even publicly dismisses former grandees in front of foreign press. How did these Chinese dare to directly call for his removal in protests?
> Yes, there were reasonable protests against zero-Covid measures, no there was no revolution in progress.
"Finally, to borrow an image from Liu Cixin's novel The Three Body Problem, we should be psychologically prepared for Xi's totalitarian rule to enter a dark forest. Xi will rule China for at least another five years. But we should not be too pessimistic. No matter how long Xi stays in power, as I argued above, it is unlikely that another Xi Jinping will emerge after Xi steps down. The good news is that the hassle of fighting the pandemic with the zero-tolerance policy has awakened even more people. When social discontent reaches a tipping point and everyone believes in regime change, then change will come soon."