Something important is happening in China, and it should worry the political leadership. Younger Chinese are increasingly inclined to passive resignation, perfectly described by the new popular saying bai lan (“let it rot”). Born out of economic disillusionment and general frustration with the culture of sacrifice, bai lan rejects the machinery of everyday life and calls for a bare minimum of work. Personal well-being is more important than career advancement.
The same tendency is reflected in another recent idiom: tang ping (“playing dead”) is a slang neologism that denotes surrender in the face of relentless social and professional competition. Both expressions refer to the rejection of pressure to achieve high goals and social engagement, which are seen as a waste of time.
Last July, CNN reported that many Chinese workers are swapping stressful office jobs for flexible manual labor. As one 27-year-old woman from Wuhan explained: “I like cleaning. As living standards improve (across the country), the demand for housekeeping services is also increasing… I feel less mental pressure. And I am full of energy every day.”
Such attitudes are described as apolitical, while young people simultaneously reject both active resistance to the authorities and any dialogue with them. But is that all that is left for the alienated?
The ongoing mass protests in Serbia point to other possibilities. The demonstrators are not only acknowledging that there is something rotten in the Serbian state, but are demanding that this rot be stopped.
The protests began last November in Novi Sad, after a canopy collapsed at a recently renovated train station, killing 15 people and seriously injuring two. The demonstrations have since spread to 200 Serbian cities and towns, drawing hundreds of thousands of people, making them the largest student movement in Europe since 1968.
It is clear that the collapse of the canopy was just the spark that ignited the fuse of accumulated discontent. The protesters' revolt encompasses many issues, from rampant corruption and environmental damage (the government plans to mine lithium) to the general contempt with which Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić treats citizens. What the government presents as a plan to enter global markets, young Serbian citizens see as a deception to cover up corruption, the sale of national resources to foreign investors under dubious conditions, and the gradual elimination of opposition media.
But what makes these demonstrations unique? The demonstrators keep repeating: “We have no political demands and we keep our distance from opposition parties. We simply demand that the institutions of Serbia work in the interests of the citizens.” The students are focused on insisting on transparency in the documentation on the renovation of the Novi Sad train station, on access to all documents about the accident, on the dismissal of the charges against those arrested during the first anti-government protest in November, and on the prosecution of those who attacked students at the protests in Belgrade.
In this way, the protesters are trying to short-circuit the process that has allowed the ruling party to capture the state through control of all institutions. For its part, Vučić's regime has reacted violently, but also with a technique known in boxing as the "clinch": when a fighter wraps his arms around his opponent to prevent him from striking freely.
The more panicked Vučić is, the more desperate he is in his attempts to reach some kind of agreement with the protesters. But they refuse any talks. They have specified their demands and insist on them unquestioningly.
Traditionally, mass protests have relied, at least implicitly, on the threat of violence, combined with an openness to negotiation. But here we have the opposite: the protesters in Serbia are not threatening violence, but they are refusing dialogue. This combination is confusing, as is the absence of obvious protest leaders. In this strict sense, these protests have some similarities to bai lan.
At some point, of course, organized politics will have to come into play. But for now, the “apolitical” stance of the protesters creates the conditions for a new politics, rather than another version of the same old game. To achieve law and order, the playing field must be cleared.
That would be reason enough for the rest of the world to unconditionally support the protests. They prove that a simple, direct call for law and order can be more subversive than anarchic violence. The citizens of Serbia want the rule of law without the unwritten rules that enable corruption and authoritarian rule.
The protesters are a far cry from the old anarchic left that dominated the 1968 demonstrations in Paris and across the West. After blocking the Danube bridge in Novi Sad for 24 hours, the young protesters decided to extend their gathering for another three hours to clean up after themselves. Can you imagine Parisians cleaning up after the police were stoned in 1968?
To some, this politically motivated apoliticality of the protesters in Serbia may seem hypocritical, but in fact it is a sure sign of their radicalism. They refuse to engage in politics according to the existing (mostly unwritten) rules and demand fundamental changes in the way basic institutions work.
The biggest hypocrite in this story is the European Union, which has refrained from putting pressure on Vučić for fear that he will turn to Russia. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has supported the Georgian people in their “struggle for democracy,” but she has not mentioned the uprising in Serbia, a country that has been a formal candidate for EU membership since 2012. The European Union is letting Vučić do whatever he wants because he promised stability and the export of lithium, which is essential for the production of electric vehicles.
The absence of criticism from the EU, even when it was accused of electoral fraud, has repeatedly left civil society in Serbia in the lurch. It is therefore not surprising that Serbian students do not carry the EU flag. The idea of a “color revolution” such as that first launched in Ukraine 20 years ago to “join the democratic West” is no longer adequate. The European Union has hit another political rock bottom.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net, translation: M. Jovanović)
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