A pair of real-life murders bookend this series starring Kumail Nanjiani and Murray Bartlett.
Most people, when they think about striptease, probably view it as a campy, tongue-in-cheek parody of erotic desire. If that’s your main impression, then your expectation of a show about the rise of the Chippendale dancers would probably be pretty similar.
It’s hard to overstate, then, what a wild contrast Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales will be to the unsuspecting viewer: an eight-part series that fixates on the mechanics of power and racial dynamics, the lure of the hustle in ’80s LA, toxic masculinity, and the slow, corrupting influence of greed — all beginning and ending with a pair of shocking murders. Against the twin backdrops of seedy criminal activity and, yes, flashy erotic strip dancing, the show slowly slides from Boogie Nights: The Series into a kind of true crime fantasy. It’s honestly better than any show of its ilk has a right to be — and the wildest thing? Much of it really happened.
The show centers on real-life Chippendales creator Steve Banerjee, an Indian American businessman who transforms his failing backgammon club into the hottest nightclub in LA after realizing that female sexual desire was just waiting to be monetized. Banerjee receives an astonishing performance from a completely transformed Kumail Nanjiani, who plays him as an intense, seething social climber, constantly trying to figure out how to game a system that’s set up to keep him from winning. His struggle to climb the ladder of success leads him into a combative, exploitative, and ultimately deadly relationship with his business partner, Nick De Noia, played in the series by Murray Bartlett, fresh from an Emmy win for The White Lotus and acting his heart out.
Chippendales makes its subjects feel realistic, but the story is a wild one. You won’t be faulted for wondering what really went on in between all the sexy dances. While the show takes some liberties with reality, the Chippendales’ backstory really is as murderous as the series lays out.
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Born Somen Banerjee in 1946 to Bengali parents, Banerjee migrated from Bombay to Canada in his mid-20s and worked there before finding his way to California. As the show’s first episode depicts, in California Banerjee worked his way up from gas station assistant to failed backgammon club owner (no, we don’t know what he was thinking, either). In 1975, he bought a nightclub on the west side of Los Angeles and named it Chippendales, then synonymous with the 16th-century furniture maker. But Banerjee struggled to elevate the joint to the level of arcane elegance suggested by its name; stunts like mud wrestling failed to draw crowds. The bar, according to film producer Bruce Nahin, who worked on the Chippendales creative team in its developmental stages, “wasn’t a high-end nightclub. This was a dive bar in an industrial section of West Los Angeles.”
That all changed when Banerjee made the acquaintance of an LA promoter named Paul Snider (played in a remarkable early-series cameo by Dan Stevens). In 1979, Snider, then married to 19-year-old Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten (Nicola Peltz Beckham), helped Banerjee promote Chippendales’s hottest event: a “Male Exotic Dance Night for Ladies Only.” The show, touting a $20 entrance fee, would soon expand into America’s first all-male strip club targeted at women.
The show depicts Banerjee as having the idea for the all-male dance lineup after watching Stratten enjoy a similar dance at a gay nightclub. But according to historian Natalia Petrzela and her indispensable Chippendales podcast, Welcome to Your Fantasy, the idea was actually Snider’s, and the famous Chippendales tuxedo neckties and cuffs combo actually came from Stratten. What Banerjee brought to the enterprise was, again, his insistence on a veneer of respectability — even if what he was actually selling was, as one former Chippendales dancer describes to Petrzela, a “comedy act for women.”
Banerjee’s version of respectability may have been crude, but it was also effective — in part because it was steeped in whiteness: “I wanted to package an all-American, Ivy-league look,” he said in a 1988 interview with the LA Times, “and sell it to the American women.” He envisioned Chippendales as being a “Disneyland for adults,” and fantasized that perhaps Walt Disney could make him “a silent partner.”
“It’s important to realize how deliberately this was constructed as a white space in a city that is extraordinarily diverse,” Petrzela told LA Mag. “What Chippendales was creating was a new masculine ideal, which was white, really buff, and clean-cut.” But even while reifying that racist social hierarchy, Banerjee would spend his whole life butting up against it — obstacles to which he would respond with increasing violence and a turn toward corruption.
That 1988 interview in which he spoke of his erotic nightclubs as a Disneyland, was, after all, given a year after he had his own partner murdered.
Welcome to Chippendales encapsulates the first of many ironies surrounding this glossy presentation of manhood during its first two episodes when it portrays Snider’s spiraling jealous obsession with Stratten. As she began to make a name for herself in Hollywood, she dallied briefly with famed director Peter Bogdanovich — which, as the show depicts, had a nuclear effect on Snider.
In reality, despite Snider’s possessiveness, the two were estranged by 1980, when Snider murdered Stratten before killing himself. The cultural shock wave of Stratten’s murder made it one of the country’s early reckonings with the realities of domestic violence. (Bogdanovich would later write a book about Stratten called The Killing of the Unicorn.) On the Hulu show, Snider and Stratten seem to wink in and out of Banerjee’s life, but the gruesome crime scene becomes foreshadowing of Banerjee’s escalating possessiveness and territorial jealousy — in his case, not over a woman, but over his life’s work: Chippendales itself.
For Banerjee, Snider and Stratten were mere stepping stones toward something greater. The next phase of Chippendales involved upscaling it from rudimentary strip dances into a full-on choreographed show with trained performers.
Enter Nick De Noia.
Previously the husband and manager to actress Jennifer O’Neill, De Noia was a children’s TV producer and former high school teacher from New Jersey who won two Emmys for a forgotten children’s show called Unicorn Tales. His Emmy win, as depicted on the show, seems to have been a creative pinnacle that De Noia struggled to recapture until he partnered with Banerjee. In convincing Banerjee to let him take Chippendales to the next level, De Noia found a new creative purpose and finally came close to achieving the level of professional respect for which he hungered. It also allowed him, a closeted gay man, to attain a level of self-expression — a rare thing for any queer person in the 1980s.
In 1983, De Noia convinced Banerjee, with whom he’d had perpetual creative disagreements, to open up a New York franchise of the club. It was here his creative ambitions really took off. The big spectacle number De Noia creates in the Hulu series, an erotic Rocky Horror riff in which a mad scientist creates the perfect male specimen from assembled body parts, was a real show conceived and staged by De Noia in 1984: The Perfect Man.
“Banerjee would spend the rest of history devaluing Nicholas’s contribution,” Nahin told Petrzela. “But if there was no Nicholas, there would’ve never been the success we had.” But Banerjee and De Noia’s clashing desire for control became an East Coast-West Coast cold war, and De Noia’s insistence on claiming credit for Banerjee’s life’s work continued to escalate.
The show’s depiction of the people in De Noia’s orbit seems to be fictional composites of real-life people. The pushy but ingenious seamstress turned manager, “Denise,” played by Juliette Lewis, could be Chippendales associate producer Candace Mayeron. Just as Denise does on the show, in real life, Mayeron basically fangirled her way onto the creative team. As the self-described “den mother” of the dancers, Mayeron was a close friend and loyal ally to De Noia, and one of many people who credit De Noia with essentially creating the version of Chippendales that became a sensation: polished, professionally choreographed, and knowingly camp. It’s unclear if De Noia’s “spoiled rich kid” investor boyfriend Bradford Barton (Andrew Rannells) has a real-life counterpart, but one possibility is that he was a talent agent named Will Mott, who, as described in a single pseudonymous internet blog, shared coworking space with De Noia and had a relationship with him that’s very similar to the one depicted on the show.
The show’s early focus on Black dancer Otis (Quentin Plair) also seems to be a fictional composite of several people, including real dancer Hodari Sababu, who like Otis experienced the stigma of being the only Black dancer in the otherwise all-white lineup, “because Banerjee felt that he didn’t want more than one Black guy in the club.” Like Otis, Banerjee deliberately excluded Sababu from the bestselling Chippendales calendar because of his skin color. In a memorable exchange with Petrzela on the Welcome to Your Fantasy podcast, Sababu describes confronting Banerjee about his racism, just as Otis does in the show, and getting a very similar response:
Sababu: I’m like, “Why’s that, man?” And he stuttered, “I got mostly white women, they’d come in here and they’d spend a lot of money, and I don’t want a lot of Black guys in here. It makes it look like some gang stuff or something.” You know, it was like, Chippendale’s this classy thing, we got these classy guys, we want classy girls coming in here.
Petrzela: What do you think classy meant to him?
Sababu: Definitely white, definitely white. Successful financially. It was all superficial.
Banerjee’s explicit discrimination led to expensive real-life lawsuits, which the show accurately depicts as stemming from his refusal to let people of color into the nightclub. The lawsuits, combined with a disastrously expensive printing error on the annual Chippendales calendar at the end of 1986, would have wiped out Banerjee’s finances but for De Noia’s backup revenue stream. Earlier that year, De Noia had maneuvered Banerjee out of creative control over the new Chippendales touring production — which, predictably, became a massive international success. The Hulu show depicts them signing a contract drafted by Di Noia on a diner napkin, which really did happen.
The tour saved Banerjee from financial ruin, but the fact that De Noia had scammed him out of the right to call himself the creator and owner of the wildly popular tour infuriated Banerjee, who by every account was a controlling and ruthless businessman. This ultimately led him to murder: In 1987, Banerjee tasked his underling Ray Colon (depicted in the Hulu series by Tick Tick Boom’s Robin de Jesús) with hiring a hitman to kill De Noia. On April 7, 1987, De Noia was found shot to death in his office in Manhattan.
With the whole franchise finally under Banerjee’s control, things should have been smooth sailing. But with De Noia no longer around to ameliorate Banerjee’s more aggressive and reckless traits, they only worsened — as did his paranoia. Banerjee had previously gotten Colon to burn down two nightclubs, purely because they were hosting their own male stripper nights. By now he was under investigation by federal authorities for De Noia’s murder, which made him hyper-vigilant, constantly looking over his shoulder. Still, the federal authorities had no way of proving Banerjee’s connection to the crime, so his bad habits and murderous tendencies only increased.
In 1990, Banerjee utilized Colon once more in a failed plot to murder three former Chippendales dancers for “defect[ing] to a rival male dance revue.” The Hulu series makes much of how wild this was — though it omits perhaps the wildest part of all, which is that originally the plan was allegedly to stab all three dancers with a syringe full of cyanide. The series also emphasizes that had it not been for Banerjee’s spiraling territorialism and greed, he probably would have gotten away with murder and continued to helm a lucrative small business empire.
Instead, in 1994, while Banerjee was essentially hiding out nursing millions of dollars in cash in a remote Swiss village, authorities finally caught up to him and arrested him, charging him with “violating the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) through a pattern of racketeering activity that included murder, murder for hire, solicitation to commit murder and arson.” Quite a resume. As a bonus, there are the crimes for which he wasn’t prosecuted: He allegedly hired someone to attempt to kill yet another one of his dancers for producing a competing calendar, leading to a horror scene in which men stripping on a beach for a photo shoot wound up fleeing an unknown gunman. Another former dancer/choreographer temporarily fled into the mountains after a rumor surfaced that Banerjee had put out a hit on him as well.
Little is known about Banerjee’s wife, Irene (played by Annaleigh Ashford on the Hulu series) or his two children, but he seems to have been thinking of securing their welfare when he made his final business decision. After pleading guilty to the RICO charges, Banerjee was facing the prospect of having all his assets, including his ownership of the Chippendales business, seized, meaning the entire empire would be auctioned off to the highest bidder, leaving Banerjee’s family with nothing.
Before that could happen, however, Banerjee died by suicide in his jail cell just hours before his sentencing. As Welcome to Chippendales informs audiences, this meant that his family maintained control of the company. Banerjee’s family sold it to investors who revitalized the brand — including infamous boy band promoter Lou Pearlman, who had, to put it mildly, money problems of his own. After 9/11, the New York club shut down and Chippendales became primarily a touring company, with a permanent Las Vegas residency beginning in 2005; the show eventually got its own customized theater.
One thing that remains unclear is how much Banerjee, outside of all the greed and murder, cared about what a cultural touchstone he was creating. Dancers who worked with De Noia tend to acknowledge that he could be arrogant and self-aggrandizing but that he was always building the mythos of Chippendales as a liberating, feminist artistic experience. In reality, at least in its early years, its rowdy nightclub scene subjected its dancers to sexual exploitation and racial discrimination — not exactly a breakthrough for equality.
Still, it’s undeniable that Chippendales’ lasting cultural legacy is one of empowerment, both for women who have a safe space to express their sexual desires and for men who find sexual and creative freedom in erotic dance. The famous dance lineup gave us, among other things, a legendary 1990 SNL skit featuring Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley, and its tradition of titillating women arguably lives on in the Magic Mike franchise. People around the world still flock to see Chippendales dancers every night, while the official Chippendales Instagram gifts strategically lit erotica to its 200,000 followers. The current lineup of dancers boasts a shark wrangler, a BMX biker, and a jazz pianist with an MFA.
In other words, Banerjee did achieve his dream: He gave the world high-class male erotica. And he did it, for better and worse, all in his own way.
The Republican candidate for governor is still refusing to concede the race that made her a MAGA star.
Kari Lake, the defeated Republican nominee for Arizona governor who was the most prominent 2022 candidate running on former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies, still refuses to concede a race the Associated Press called for her opponent weeks ago.
Most other election-denier candidates, who lost up and down the ballot and across the country in 2022, have conceded their races with little fanfare. But Lake is an almost singular voice calling her state’s contests one of the “most dishonest elections in the history of Arizona” in a video posted on Trump’s social media network Truth Social on Monday.
“This botched election should not be certified,” she added.
Monday was the county-level deadline to certify the results. All did, with the exception of Cochise County, where the Republican majority on the Board of Supervisors delayed certification until Friday, citing concerns about voting machines. Current Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democrat who won the gubernatorial race, consequently sued the county, arguing that its decision could “potentially disenfranchise” some 47,000 voters.
The AP called the race on November 14, and the results weren’t within the half a percentage point margin required to trigger a recount. In the now complete vote count, Hobbs won the gubernatorial election by 17,116 votes.
That hasn’t stopped Lake from questioning the results. She has boosted accounts from supporters who claim they had trouble voting, argued that Hobbs cannot certify her own election as governor due to conflicts of interest, and filed a lawsuit asking Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona, to hand over various election records before the statewide canvass of the results, which is scheduled to happen on December 5.
Those documents include ones that could help identify people who may have not been able to cast a ballot, including those who checked in at more than one polling location or who submitted a mail ballot and sought to vote in person. Lake also is seeking details on counted and uncounted ballots that were mistakenly mixed. It’s unlikely that these ballots affected the results — mixing up counted and uncounted ballots is a routine problem in elections that county officials have confirmed happened at a few vote centers this year, but that they can rectify.
Lake is getting help in her quest from Trump, who posted on Truth Social Monday that Lake “should be installed as governor of Arizona” and baselessly claimed that she was the victim of a “criminal voting operation” involving broken voting machines in Republican districts, drawing a parallel to his false claims about his own 2020 loss. Lake became a key Trump ally during her campaign, and she has been floated as a potential 2024 running mate for Trump, who announced his candidacy just weeks ago.
“This is almost as bad as the 2020 Presidential Election, which the Unselect Committee refuses to touch because they know it was Fraudulent!” he wrote.
As to whether she’s planning on abandoning her claims anytime soon, Lake seemed to suggest she won’t. She wrote Monday that “the Fake News ignores our Fake Elections and expects us to just ‘move on.’ We won’t.”
Lake has long suggested she would challenge her loss
It was obvious well before Election Day that Lake intended to challenge the results if she lost.
Ahead of Election Day, Lake repeatedly dodged questions about whether she would concede the governor’s race if she lost, saying, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” and that she’d only accept a “fair, honest and transparent” result. During the primary, she said she would challenge the results if she lost because it would have indicated “there’s some cheating going on.” And before the race was called, she suggested that Arizona election officials were intentionally dragging their feet on releasing the results while still declaring, “I am 100% going to win.”
Her comments were in line with her history of election denialism. Lake has said that, had she been governor at the time, she wouldn’t have certified the 2020 vote for Biden, saying that it was “Corrupt, Rotten & Rigged.” She even filed a lawsuit, which has since been dismissed by a federal judge, that made false claims about issues with vote-counting machines, and sought to require Arizona officials to tabulate 2022 ballots by hand.
Other election-denying candidates, such as the Arizona GOP’s secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem, similarly set up the expectation that they would challenge the election results. Almost all of them ended up losing. Abraham Hamadeh, the GOP nominee for Arizona attorney general, has argued that the election was “afflicted with certain errors and inaccuracies,” but his race is heading to a recount. Finchem has also yet to concede, arguing as recently as Monday that the election should be recalled and that there should be a “new election.”
Lake’s refusal to concede could be strategic
The Arizona governor’s race made Lake a GOP star. It’s possible that her attempts to prolong the certification of the election in Arizona are just a ploy to maintain her national profile and create a launching pad for the next phase of her career, political or otherwise.
She ran an unconventional campaign, eschewing traditional ad buys for viral campaign videos full of controversial statements that grabbed national headlines, including comments that appeared to make light of the violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. All of that won her Trump’s admiration (and endorsement) and praise from other prominent Republicans, though she still proved a divisive figure within the party and might be even more so now that she’s lost what seemed to be a winnable race.
Kenneth L. Khachigian, Ronald Reagan’s former chief speechwriter, waxed poetic in the Wall Street Journal last month: “What makes Ms. Lake’s message different is its simplicity and fearlessness. It’s unapologetic and sincere, not clothed in code words.” Trump reportedly sees something of himself in Lake. Even the current term-limited Gov. Doug Ducey, who accused Lake of “misleading voters” when he was backing Taylor Robson during the primary, eventually warmed to her, though he hasn’t entertained her refusal to concede and called Hobbs to offer his congratulations.
All the adulation from Republicans — and speculation that she might be a potential running mate for Trump, even though she didn’t win the governorship — suggests a future in the GOP. By keeping her supporters, and Trump’s, engaged, she puts herself in a strong position to help Trump mount a tough challenge to Biden come 2024, and to attempt to fulfill any other political aspirations, whatever they may be.
It’s not Tiananmen, but Xi Jinping faces his first China-wide protests.
Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across China in defiance of the country’s strict Covid-19 lockdown policies.
The information coming out of China offers an incomplete picture, but reports suggest that workers, students, rural residents, and middle-class people have joined protesters. It’s that diverse mix of people across so many locales that has some international outlets calling these protests the biggest threat to China’s ruling Communist Party since Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The precipitating event: Last week, a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, killed at least 10 people. And protesters have responded by blaming the deaths on the harsh zero-Covid policy that is closely associated with President Xi Jinping. For the past three years, the Chinese government has used its surveillance state to implement a program that cordons off entire districts and communities at the first sign of an infection.
The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party last month brought an intense focus on the country’s elite politics and how Xi has consolidated power. So much has focused on Chinese leadership, and mass protests present an opportunity to think about China’s people. Why are the protesters resisting the Chinese government’s policies now, and what do they want?
To explore the underlying grievances expressed in China’s public squares, the role of workers in the nascent movement, and how the government might clamp down in response, I reached out to Eli Friedman, a sociologist at Cornell University. Friedman teaches about how China’s rapid rise as a global economic power has affected the country’s workers, who have been drivers of the demonstrations. He is the author of The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City.
The protests have not yet reached 1989 levels, according to Friedman. But the uprising presents something that hasn’t happened since Xi took power in 2013. “For the first time under Xi Jinping, we have a nationwide protest movement,” he told me, “because nearly all Chinese people, at least Chinese people in large cities, have been subjected to similar kinds of surveillance and controls on their mobility over the past three years, and people are clearly fed up with it.”
Though China’s government represses its citizens, protests have endured over the years and with some regularity. But they tend to be very local. As Friedman put it, “What’s really unique about what we’re seeing now is that it is nationwide, that it is responding to a policy not just of some corrupt local officials or some bad boss, but quite specifically to a policy of the central government. Even more specifically, to a policy that Xi Jinping himself has taken responsibility for.”
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why are these protests happening now in China?
Going back to October, there’s been a whole series of protests against lockdowns. They first emerged in October when thousands of workers at a Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, a large provincial capital in central China, were put in what’s called the closed loop management system. They were not allowed to leave the factory. And as the virus began circulating within the factory that has 100,000 [workers], people were concerned for their health. People within the factory were put into quarantine and were not being given adequate medical attention, or in some cases, even adequate food. People were worried about their livelihood and so thousands of workers just escaped, literally just jumped over the fence, because their employer was not letting them out.
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In November, there’s a series of other events, including some big protests in migrant worker communities in Guangzhou in response to a lockdown — again, they were not allowed to leave their houses, so they’re dependent on the government delivering them everything that they need to live on, and were not getting adequate medical attention and were not getting enough food. There were some riots there. Then there were more protests and very intense and violent riots in the third week of November, again at the Zhengzhou Foxconn facility.
That’s the prelude to the really big explosion, which happened following a fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. The official death toll in that fire was that 10 people died, and there are credible suggestions that as many as a couple dozen people perished.
This really struck a chord nationally, because hundreds of millions of people have had some experience over the past three years being subjected to these lockdowns, and in some cases, literally locked in their apartments and unable to leave.
Although the specific information is debated — and the government has not been totally forthcoming — there are reasonable suspicions that some of these people might not have died had they not been under lockdown. After that, we see the whole deluge of protests in every city in the country. So that’s the fuse for these big protests.
The reason that the past three years of “zero Covid” are really important is because we have these seemingly particular events — migrant workers in Guangzhou, factory workers in Zhengzhou, and then this fire in Urumqi. The response from residents resonated nationwide. For the first time under Xi Jinping, we have a nationwide protest movement, because nearly all Chinese people, at least Chinese people in large cities, have been subjected to similar kinds of surveillance and controls on their mobility over the past three years, and people are clearly fed up with it.
Who is in this crowd? You’ve described that it has a lot of the components of a labor protest, but reports show students, people in rural areas, and middle-class people united in response to this country-wide lockdown policy.
It is unbelievably diverse. We do have people who are in factories, who are migrant workers, who are highly exploited workers producing iPhones and other electronic gadgets that Americans and other people consume. We have other kinds of workers, the ones in Guangzhou, where [there are] very small garment workshops in very dense, informal housing arrangements. We have students at super elite universities — Tsinghua University, which is Xi Jinping’s alma mater. Dozens of universities around the country have had protests.
Then if you look at the protests in other big coastal cities, like Shanghai or Beijing, you have a mixture — it’s hard to tell just from looking at the crowd, but certainly some pretty well-off white-collar workers.
The fact that the fire happened in Urumqi is interesting and important. Because Xinjiang is a place where the Uyghur minority, who are Muslims and are a minority nationally, but they represent at least a plurality, if not an absolute majority of the population in Xinjiang. They’ve been subjected to a very intense regime of repression, surveillance, policing, and mass incarceration over the last five years. Most if not all of the people who died in the fire were Uyghurs. If we look at the protests in Urumqi itself, it appears, though it can be hard to tell, that most of the people are Han, from the dominant ethnicity.
The lockdown is a national policy, a blanket policy, around de-mobilizing people. But the effects have been very, very different.
What I think is happening is we have opposition to the lockdown as this kind of umbrella. It’s this category that has affected nearly all Chinese people in one way or another. Within that, people are raising all kinds of other demands. The workers at Foxconn were concerned with pay. The people in Xinjiang, to the extent that Uyghurs are able to openly speak, have big concerns about the broader repression of Muslim minorities. You have the students who are holding up the white pieces of paper, and that’s an expression of opposition to censorship and demands for free speech.
Speaking of this surveillance state, how do these protests travel through the country when information doesn’t really flow freely? What techniques are protesters using to circumvent online censorship? What strategies are working?
First, digital censorship in China is comprehensive, but it is not perfect. So even if you’re using the Chinese internet, China-based apps like WeChat or Weibo, they’re not 100 percent perfect. They have well-developed AI that tries to anticipate certain kinds of things that they will scrub. They have teams of tens of thousands of people who are paid censors who are looking through this stuff. But there are still collective-action events that get through or things that are critical of the government that get through, particularly when there is a large quantity of things happening at the same time.
The second thing is, particularly for people who are highly educated, it is still possible to use VPNs to get over the Great Firewall. People have access to Twitter and are posting photos, or sending videos or photos to international sites, and then people even within China who can still access those sites. It’s a relatively small percentage of the population.
But the third thing — which I think is actually most important for understanding these particular mobilizations — is that they’re just doing it the old-fashioned way, where they know people in the community. If you look at this whole sequence, the first event was Foxconn. Well, Foxconn has 200,000 people living in these incredibly tightly packed dormitories. They just were talking to people face to face. The next event in Guangzhou was these informal housing communities where the whole community was locked down, but you could move about within the community and people within that community were all having the same experience of worrying that they didn’t have enough food. So they talked to each other, and they went out and they tore down the fences and fought with the police.
Even in some of the bigger cities, certainly in Beijing and Shanghai, you have people who are communicating online about going to specific locations, but you’ve had other smaller-scale protests, where it’s just people within a large housing community. If they have lockdowns in these communities with thousands of people on the inside, they can’t leave, but they can talk to their neighbors.
How do these protests look in contrast to other Chinese protests in recent memory?
In the Chinese context, they are very, very different. There are a lot of protests in China, and there has been, for the last generation, protests among workers, among peasants who are having their land taken, some smaller-scale things among students, among feminist activists. Environmental issues have generated some big protests, as well as ethnic minorities. Tibetans have also had some major protest movements. But almost all of these cases have been very localized, in response to some specific local grievance.
What’s really unique about what we’re seeing now is that it is nationwide, that it is responding to a policy not just of some corrupt local officials or some bad boss, but quite specifically to a policy of the central government. Even more specifically, to a policy that Xi Jinping himself has taken responsibility for.
Is this a threat to the CCP after the party congress? Is it potentially the biggest threat since the Tiananmen Square protests?
This is not remotely a 1989 kind of situation yet.
One of the reasons that people jumped to this — something China scholars talk about is collapse-ology, which is like, every time something goes a little bit wrong for the Communist Party, people assume that it’s on the verge of collapse. That gains traction because the state itself sets such a high bar for what social order looks like. In the United States or other democratic societies, if you have a protest of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people in the nation’s capital, that is really just not a big deal for the state.
In the lead-up to the 20th Congress, there was this one guy who hung these banners off of a bridge, expressing opposition to zero-Covid policy and calling for the end of Xi Jinping’s rule. That was huge international news. That guy’s slogans are now being chanted all around the world.
The government sets a very high standard for what social order looks like, and when there’s a deviation from that, people assume that means that things are completely falling apart, that they’ve lost control. And the truth of the matter is, that’s not the case. This is a real challenge, and we’ll see how they respond in the coming days. But, absent some kind of internal split in the party — and there was as yet no evidence that that is the case — this movement itself can be pretty easily repressed. The state has just overwhelming resources at its capacity. Even if we look at what’s happened in the last 24 hours, there are many fewer protests, many people have already gone to jail. The costs of participation will continue to escalate.
How do people in China see the zero-Covid policy?
All these questions that people are asking, which are legitimate questions, like how come in the last three years the Chinese government — which can mobilize vast resources on a scale that no other country in the world can do in a short period of time — how come they haven’t built more ICU beds to increase the capacity for real outbreaks? They can mandate that people don’t leave their apartments for months on end, but how come we can’t get more people vaccinated? And so there’s a real frustration about that; people understand that the virus doesn’t have to be super deadly, but the government has not been doing the things that would allow them to learn to live with the virus.
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The wrong answer would be for the government to say, “Okay, tomorrow, there’s no rules, go for it,” because in fact, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mostly elderly people would die. What they need to do is develop a very clear plan for exiting zero-Covid — timelines for how to vaccinate all these people, to increase health capacity, particularly in underserved communities. And they’re not doing that. And so that leaves many people with a sense that this is just going to be life forever, which leaves people feeling really kind of despondent, especially when they see every other country in the world doing something different.
What else do Americans need to know about China’s protests?
Sometimes Americans are like, “Well, this is interesting that that’s happening over there, but why should we care about this?”
Aside from the fact that American companies are implicated in these closed loop management models, I think there’s a broader issue around the question of surveillance. Because in order for zero-Covid to operate, it has required a huge expansion of state surveillance capacities. Now, the movements of people are very closely monitored. There have been times when they’ve locked down entire districts of the city, thousands of people, because there was one positive case. The only way to enforce that is through these apps that are tracking your movement through the city.
We don’t have that in the United States, obviously, and I don’t think that there’s a likelihood that the federal government will be able to implement something like that. But I think a lot of Americans and people in other countries outside of China do have concerns about surveillance, either by governments or by corporations.
Just in the last few days, you’ve seen videos of police on the streets in Beijing and Shanghai, going around and just asking random people to look at their phones. They go through your phone and see if you have any photos of protests, if you have any banned apps or anything like that, and that can land you in trouble. It is important for us to pay attention and be in solidarity with these protests.