Thus, Éric Duhaime was “very happy to see the Chinese demonstrating against abusive health measures”.
This is what he wrote on his Twitter account on Wednesday.
So far, so good. The problem is the rest of his tweet, dripping with sarcasm.
“Glad to see also that some media and some politicians here are rejoicing, those who so despised the peaceful protesters of the freedom convoy,” he added.
Uh…. Where to start ?
This is not the first time that we have tried to compare the situation that prevailed in Quebec and Canada, at the height of health measures, with life under a “dictatorship”.
But it’s a parallel that didn’t hold water before… and that’s even more absurd today.
First, because the recent protests in China cannot be detached from their context: since the beginning of the pandemic, the country has been defending tooth and nail an aggressive zero COVID policy.
The Chinese government is not simply looking to flatten the curve and limit the spread of the virus to protect the most vulnerable or prevent its hospitals from overflowing – as was the case here.
Beijing has been putting forward, for almost three years, draconian measures without common measure with what we have known. Its objective – unrealistic – is to eradicate the virus.
And we’re not just talking about the many mandatory PCR tests that Chinese people have to undergo regularly…
Buildings, neighborhoods and sometimes entire cities are subject to confinements as strict as they are endless.
As a result, in recent years, we have heard of cases in particular of Chinese people who could not obtain the medical care they needed or who could not eat enough to eat.
The drama that served as a trigger for the demonstrations of the last few days could also be the result of extreme containment measures. They would be responsible for the slow response of firefighters who had to put out a fire in a building (whose inhabitants were in quarantine) in Xinjiang on November 26. Authorities reported ten deaths.
the New York Times pointed out that there were reports, on the spot, of barricades and locked doors, that is to say usual practices during confinements in China.
Another trigger is a breach in media censorship. It would be funny if it weren’t so distressing: while watching soccer World Cup matches on TV, the Chinese saw that the rest of the planet had learned to live with COVID, now that the vaccine offers respectable protection and that the Omicron variant is less dangerous.
Chinese censors quickly corrected this mistake. We try not to show, from now on, the images of the spectators gathered (without masks) in the stadiums of Qatar. But the damage is done.
On this subject, should we also remind Éric Duhaime that freedom of the press does not exist in China, whereas it is vigorous here?
Ah yes, it’s true, we should also inform the University of Ottawa, which recently complied with the requests of the Chinese ambassador to Canada and prevented journalists from filming his speech. Oh, misery…
Let us return, in conclusion, to the treatment reserved for the demonstrators. Do not imagine that Beijing will allow them to settle in the Forbidden City for weeks as was the case in downtown Ottawa! No, you won’t see protesters toasting in a jacuzzi under the portrait of Mao, as some have insinuated on Twitter in response to Éric Duhaime.
In China, any demonstration must be repressed, at all costs.
And let’s bet that the regime will severely punish the demonstrators in order to nip this rebellion in the bud. It will be all the easier to track them, since he now has a sophisticated surveillance device that ignores all the individual freedoms that are dear to us.
Have the protests shattered the myth of a “harmonious society”, as a student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests argued on Thursday? Maybe. They will also, in all likelihood, push the Xi Jinping regime to modify certain sanitary measures. But they will not change his authoritarianism.
Let us insist: any comparison between the way the demonstrators were treated here and the reaction of the Chinese regime to the anger of its people is inadmissible.