Popular protests are seemingly the flavour of the season with China and Iran—governments not particularly known to rescind state policies—suddenly having opted for a conciliatory step backwards in the face of massive spontaneous protests led by common people.
China’s relaxing of Zero Covid rules
Faced with sudden flaring of mass protests against Beijing’s strict ‘Zero Covid’ rules from distant parts of the country, the Chinese government, beginning Wednesday, announced lifting of the strict curbs that characterized the government’s authoritarian policy.
On Sunday, news agencies quoted vice-premier Sun Chunlan, one of China's most senior pandemic officials, as having said that the coronavirus virus was weakening in its potency.
“The country is facing a new situation and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control as the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens, more people are vaccinated and experience in containing the virus is accumulated,” Sun said, according to a Reuters report.
This is a distinct climb-down from Beijing’s earlier inflexible posture that had promised to yield no quarter when it came to countering Covid. Persistent lockdowns had resulted in massive psychological problems for the people.
The protests began after a fire in a residential high-rise in Xinjiang’s Urumqi on November 24 that killed 10 people who couldn’t come out from their locked apartments due the ensuing Covid lockdown.
The cities rocked by the protests included geographically distant cities like Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, Beijing, Hotan, Lhasa, Nanjing, Xi’an and Lanzhou.
Iran 'abolishes' morality police
On late Saturday, Iranian news agency IRNA quoted prosecutor general, Mohamed Jafar Montazeri, as saying that the morality police units may have been scrapped although official comments were still awaited.
The morality police, operating since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in some form or the other but established formally as the ‘Gasht-e-Ershad’ (Guidance Patrol) in 2007, was also mandated with the enforcement of the dress code, especially on women.
It is the ‘Gasht-e-Ershad’ that is being blamed for the custodial death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16, three days following her arrest for protesting against the Islamic dress code.
The death of Amini, of Sunni-Kurdish ethnicity, had resulted in a women-led protest in Shia-dominant Iran cutting across ethnic lines.
What may explain the conciliatory move
In both China and Iran, there was the fast-growing danger of the protests spreading into broad-based movements that would demand political changes that would be expressive of popular discontent over issues like poverty and corruption.
Amid a global churn, both countries do not want national and local issues to blow into something more divisive.
But what could also be more plausible is the fact that ongoing US sanctions against both nations may be biting. And also the unwillingness of the two Asian nations to open up another front while the sanctions are playing a telling tale.
