Three dictatorships on the brink?

It appears that in China, Iran, and Russia, we are seeing three dictatorships on the brink.

China's people have finally had enough of three years of draconian Covid policies which have wrecked not only the economy, but their lives overall.

BEIJING — The scenes in China in recent days have been electrifying.

Last weekend, in several cities across the country, from cosmopolitan Shanghai to far-western Xinjiang, ordinary people took to the streets to denounce the government’s stifling Covid-19 suppression policy and in some cases call for democracy and freedom of speech.

After Tiananmen, the Party and the Chinese people entered into a Faustian bargain: politics would be left to the Party, and in return there would be economic liberalization. And, for thirty years, it worked.

The Covid happened. And it happened under the stewardship of Xi Xinping, China's president who saw himself as a man of destiny, not to be handicapped by the collegial nature of Communist leadership. For ten years he has eradicated all open opposition to him, tightening censorship, eliminating rivals, and trying to turn himself into the second coming of Mao Zedong. What he neglected to take into account was the law of unintended consequences:

After the Arab Spring revolts of 2011, preventing pro-democracy protests in China became one of President Xi Jinping’s top priorities. Chinese civil society was wiped out, and he has strengthened his power by purging the party of any potential political rivals and amending China’s Constitution in 2018 to abolish presidential term limits, allowing him to remain in power indefinitely. The uncompromising approach to the pandemic is merely an extension of that, another tool to prevent an open society from developing. After a decade of enormous effort by the party to inoculate China against revolution, it has brought one on itself through its zero-Covid policy.

By suppressing outlets for dissent, all that Xi did was lay the ground for a black swan event like a pandemic—and a botched reaction to it—to build the pressure in the populace until it exploded. It is a commonplace in Chinese historiography that a ruler's Mandate of Heaven can be removed at every time. With his increasingly dictatorial measures, it may be Xi's turn to meet the fate of countless Chinese emperors stretching back three thousand years.

Meanwhile, the protests in Iran show no sign of abating. The flash point was, of course, the murder in police custody of Mahsa Amini for not conforming sufficiently to the Islamic Republic's dress code for women. But it soon became much more than that. Iran has a young population, a population which is tired of Islamic revolution and calls for defiance against the US and the West. These young people want jobs, they want a future, and they want personal freedoms. That the mullahs and their militias haven't been able to crush the uprising out of hand shows that this is the most serious threat to an Iranian regime since the Revolution of 1979 which ousted the Shah. The protests have gripped the gamut of society. At the World Cup in Qatar, the captain of Iran's men's team expressed his and his teammates' solidarity with the protestors, going so far as to not sing the national anthem before matches. Much like in China, old revolutionary fervor no longer applies; it is seen as merely another tool of control to keep corrupt officials in power, who live in luxury while ordinary Iranians suffer under the consequences of embargoes put in place due to the regime's actions. Ideology is no substitute for hopelessness.

And then in Russia I came across this story:

Earlier this November, Kremlin-commissioned pollsters conducted a series of secret public-opinion studies across multiple regions of Russia, including both the Far East and the Central Federal District (which contains Moscow). To the concern of the Putin administration, the focus groups revealed a demoralized population with an overwhelmingly pessimistic view of the future. Two Kremlin insiders spoke to Meduza about the results of these studies and how the search might affect the regime’s plans for a second round of mobilization.

Vladimir Putin's manifest failures in his "special military action" have sapped his subjects' morale. Now, this is an interesting finding:

“This doesn’t amount to joining the opposition or a wholesale rejection of the special military operation,” says one of Meduza’s sources, who describes the respondents’ attitude as “indifference and apathy.” “Nothing inspires them, and nothing propels them forward,” the source explains. In responses to questions, the study’s participants spoke with a tone of voice that implied: “Leave us alone.”

Indifference and apathy were fine when there was no war being fought. But an apathetic population is not one which can be mobilized for greater sacrifices. How many more will flee abroad? How many men will maim themselves to avoid a call-up? And, when will apathy turn to despair and lead to direct action? Russia has had a century's history of this, in 1905, 1917, and 1991. An apathetic, demoralized subject class will remain so for only so long. Putin, like Xi, made a deal with his people, removing democracy and agency, but promising that the chaos of the 1990s would never return, and also promising an improved economic future, funded by booming oil prices. Now Russia is involved in a war it is losing and cannot win as long as the West remains behind Ukraine; and it is a war he dare not expand against NATO, as his forces would be mopped up within two weeks. Silent grumbling eventually becomes a storming of the barricades.

For years many analysts have posited that the 21st century would be the century of autocrats, and of democracy's decline. Instead the opposite is happening. The three major autocracies are in various states of crisis, the inherent contradictions supporting them finally making the whole edifice buckle. This is not to say that these regimes will fall within the next few months; they have the power of violence. But even that violence can do only so much. All it takes is one battalion ordered to fire on unarmed protestors to say "no" and instead point their guns at their commanders. It has happened throughout human history. Regimes betting against it are taking a risk which may rebound to their detriment.