On the northern edge of Xi’an, a 45-year-old man surnamed Jiang tells a typical story of dream-chasing in China’s reform era.
He left his home village at the age of 18 to work in a diamond factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, a manufacturing juggernaut. The pay was decent, he says, but after a decade he was restless. So he returned home, where he started a small construction equipment rental company.
Business was fine, he said, until state-backed competitors began attracting all the contracts. So he moved again, this time to the northwestern city of Xi’an, China’s onetime imperial capital, now home to 13 million people.
“My hopes were big,” he says, sitting in the back of the secondhand kitchen appliance shop that he runs with his family, surrounded by refrigerators, stoves and blenders. “Slowly, though, they have been obliterated.”
A year ago, China lifted draconian COVID restrictions that were an anvil around the neck of the economy and placed unprecedented controls on a society that, for the previous four decades, had grown accustomed to expanding personal freedoms, not shrinking them.
Many expected the country to bounce back quickly, with economic growth reverting to a slower but respectable mean. That hasn’t happened. And as 2024 approaches, there is a crisis of confidence in China that the authorities appear to be doing little to address, instead nibbling at the edges of policy and avoiding bold steps to revive the economy and regain public trust in policymaking.
Jiang is one of several people NPR recently spoke with to try to gauge the mood in post-pandemic China and highlight how things have changed over time.
For Jiang, who did not want his full name used for fear of possible repercussions for speaking candidly to a foreign reporter, economic conditions are actually worse now than during the pandemic, when he started the appliance business, he says. He isn’t selling as much as he used to.
Like many in China who have been conditioned to avoid publicly criticizing the ruling Communist Party, he chooses well-worn rhetoric absolving the leadership when asked if he thinks policy might be to blame.
“Whatever the national policy, it’s meant to do good for the country and the people. You can’t deny that,” he said. “But as they say: The higher-ups have their policies and the lower-downs have their ways of getting around them. … Each policy that comes from the top is discounted on the way down, and then discounted again as it goes down line. The policies are definitely good, but when they get down to the local level, they’ve completely changed.”
In Beijing, Joerg Wuttke has had a front-row seat to China’s spectacular rise. He first came to the country as a businessman from Europe 41 years ago.
“When I was coming in ’82, people took pictures with cars and paid for the picture. And now we have 5 million cars in Beijing. So it’s a completely different country, with upsides but also with it downsides,” he said. (The Beijing government said that at the end of 2022 there were, in fact, more than 7 million motor vehicles registered in the city, and over 12 million drivers.)
I first met Wuttke a little over 20 years ago, when our offices were in the same building near Beijing’s Liangma River. China had just joined the World Trade Organization. The reform-minded Zhu Rongji was premier.
“It was a China which actually was very open and could sort of give us some indications of where we’re heading, you know, to a more open, liberal society. Globalization would be coming into town,” said Wuttke, who has been doing business here for most of the past four decades, and lobbying for European companies as head of the European Chamber of Commerce for part of that time.
Today, he says, the Communist Party has become more dominant across society than he thinks it was when he first came to China — before reform and opening really started to take off.
“For Xi Jinping, it’s clear ideology trumps the economy,” he says of China’s current leader.
He says that’s underpinned an intrusion of politics into business.
“You have party cells coming up into Chinese private enterprises. You have a far more [and] stronger party awareness on TV or radio than it was maybe in ’82. So, yeah, it’s, it’s more ideologically driven these days than it was 40 years ago,” he said.
Combined with geopolitical frictions, Wuttke says it has become “far more complex” to steer any company in China.
In November, quarterly data showed that foreign direct investment in China contracted for the first time on record. Business confidence is down, and the real estate sector is struggling, underpinning weak consumer confidence. The future is less certain than it always seemed to be. The World Bank forecasts that China’s GDP growth will slow sharply in the next two years.
“I think the opening-eye moment for me came in 2022,” Wuttke says. It was a year when the government hewed for too long to an unbending and unforgiving zero-COVID policy that involved heavy travel restrictions, snap lockdowns and forced quarantines. Wuttke is leaving China, though he says his decision has nothing to do with current events.
A high school teacher leaves the country after lockdown
In Shanghai, that policy turned a high school teacher into an exiled dissident.
Huang Yicheng taught Chinese language and literature in a northwestern suburb of the country’s most cosmopolitan city. He says he was always in favor of the idea of more freedom, but as someone who grew up in China, human rights wasn’t something he spent much time thinking about.
Huang says being forcibly confined to his home felt like living on an animal farm. He felt unsafe being locked in his apartment with no control, and no end in sight. “It was really scary,” he said. “It didn’t feel safe.”
And it changed something inside him.
“Before the lockdown, I thought Shanghai would be fine,” he said. “There was a lot of bad news about the pandemic, and I knew things weren’t great, but I thought bad things could happen in other places but Shanghai still had hope.”
When his city was locked down, he lost faith.
“I thought everything was fake. The security and order and freedom, it could all be taken away. So I had no faith in this government, in this political system.”
Later that year, when protests erupted in Shanghai and elsewhere in China against the draconian COVID policies, Huang got involved. The demonstrations became known as the White Paper Revolution, because many participants took to brandishing blank pages of A4–size paper to symbolize all that could not be said publicly in China.
