These social, political and economic shocks might have traumatised a lesser nation, but China has managed to maintain relative stability. Indeed, the Communist Party has ruled over the country for three-quarters of a century — a product not merely of its authoritarianism but also, as Kerry Brown has argued, its ability to provide ordinary Chinese with a unifying national narrative around “which the Communist Party relates to their daily lives”.

When Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, this unifying story became known as “The Chinese Dream”, a slogan that was plastered over billboards and hoardings across the country. Through the Chinese Dream rhetoric, Xi confirmed that the country would become “moderately prosperous”, employment opportunities would improve, and individuals would thrive. Xi was laying the foundations, as he put it, for the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

The Chinese Dream was symbolised by social engagement, as opposed to the American Dream, which reflected Western individualism. To demonstrate the seriousness with which he took this notion of communal solidarity, Xi directed the authorities to clamp down on corruption and personal aggrandisement within the ranks of the CCP. For him and the country, social improvement was to be a collective effort, and all would reap the benefits. These included the promise that GDP per person would double within Xi’s original term of office, that citizens would have access to massively improved welfare provisions, and that China would start to develop a military “capable of fighting and winning wars”.

It was all going so well — until Covid-19 hit. Even when China was initially building a consensus for lockdown, the restrictions were sold as a selfless, patriotic duty. While the Covid-related fatality statistics remained low — perhaps implausibly low — people bought the narrative of a paternalistic party protecting its people. But over the last few years, China’s lockdowns have done untold damage to people’s families, their businesses, and their health. As time dragged on and Chinese citizens gradually realised that the government had no Plan B, they slowly began to withdraw their loyalty.

Until recently, demonstrations of frustration with the state and its armed goons have been curiously middle-class affairs, like the tang ping (lying flat) movement of students who refused to get out of bed. That was a form of passive resistance, and therefore fundamentally unthreatening. The real attack on Chinese authority came when striking workers broke out of the Foxconn plant, and then unemployed youth united with ordinary people and began tearing down Covid barriers and demanding freedom.

During the course of the demonstrations in November, many shouted slogans insisting that Xi Jinping step down, called for an end to CCP rule, and demanded greater civil rights — a direct challenge to the Communist Party. China has responded by becoming the only country to have overturned Covid policy in response to popular anger, which is ironic given the caricature of Chinese people as passive subjects of their rulers.

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The problem now facing the CCP is how to rebuild its popular legitimacy — and rewrite its national narrative — as nearly three years of Covid policy end in disastrous failure. What kind of narrative will Xi turn to in order to explain all this away?

For a hint, we can look at the “For a Life of Contentment” report, published last week by the state media’s think tank, New China Research. It sets out a strategy to recapture “harmonious” public order by outlining China’s place in the world. The document has been a long time in production, but its release has clearly been rushed out after the shock of the anti-Party disturbances. It tells a new narrative — one that is more strident, authoritative, and decisive than the Chinese Dream. And, in a bold move for China, it puts human rights centre stage.

China has long held pretensions of challenging America’s hegemonic role in world affairs. The party’s concept of Chinese rejuvenation — dubbed the “New Era” — was always premised on developing sufficiently to rival America. In 2017, for example, China was insisting that it was prepared to “take centre stage in the world”. Five years later, Beijing is sounding a more defensive, pessimistic note. It says: “the Cold War mentality as well as the hegemonic practices of putting one’s own country’s interests above the interests of others and even the international community at large, and pointing fingers at other countries are not welcome.”

This is not to say that China no longer has global pretensions — only that it is a little more circumspect. It seems that the street protests have rocked the confidence of the ruling party, and Xi needs a new narrative. Faced with widespread popular anger, for instance, the idea that the Chinese state “cares for its people” is clearly not going to work as it has over the last seven decades. Xi is going to have to earn some trust.

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And so to “human rights”. China’s conception of human rights is a pragmatic (and self-serving) one. The CCP clearly believes that it can improve its image at home by advancing the lot of Chinese people; when in doubt, the party has long fallen back on giving people more money. It claims that happiness is the ultimate basis for human rights and thus, by providing material benefits to the population (better infrastructure, jobs, pay and conditions), the regime is also promoting human rights. Ironically, China appears to be tapping into the “happiness agenda” beloved of Western environmentalists by turning the “abstract concept of human rights into a set of tangible rights”.

Of course, the CCP is banking on the fact that the West still relies on it. If the party can reinvigorate the Chinese economy and hold onto the reins of power, it will be a lifeline for ailing Western economies. If China can say that their minorities are exploited but happy, that their peasants are over-worked but with cash in hand, that the Uyghurs are denied rights but have decent pay and conditions, will Western leaders really condemn it? Tapping into Western relativism, China says: “There is no fixed model of human rights protection in the world. Different countries have different national conditions, histories, cultures, social systems and economic and social development levels. A proper path of human rights development should be explored to suit national conditions and the needs of the people.”

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China, then, appears to be regrouping, and a weakened West is giving it the time and space that it needs. Beijing says that it wants to bring “novel ideas, measures and practices in terms of how to respect and protect human rights (as) a refreshing addition to the global human rights cause and to the diversity of civilisations”, as well as offering “inspiration for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries”. In other words, Beijing might be in a weaker-than-normal position, but it is still trying to export its social and political model overseas. It knows it cannot afford to be completely defensive. Whether Xi can get away with this in the fragmented international community is one thing — but as the past month has shown, whether the Chinese Communist Party can convince people at home is quite another story altogether.

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The seemingly irrational, self-defeating Zero Covid strategies in recent months have destabilised economic growth, at huge and cruel expense to the Chinese people. Shanghai’s economy has lost around £135 billion due to the latest lockdown, with huge numbers of job losses and business failures. Yet perhaps more importantly, Zero Covid has managed to germinate the seeds of dissent that the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades carefully suppressing.

President Xi Jinping is keen to avoid any association with the grim realities of the Mao era, particularly as he tries to consolidate his position as the Great Helmsman of China for a historic third term. Yet we can’t ignore the obvious parallels between Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the current Zero Covid era.

It is 60 years since the end of the grotesque Great Leap Forward experiment (1958-1962), when Mao attempted to rapidly industrialise China’s economy at huge human cost. Every village set up mini furnaces to reach absurd steel manufacturing targets under the pretext of rivalling the West. Furniture was chopped up to feed the fires and cooking utensils smelted into worthless ingots. Meanwhile, forced land collectivisation — involving the seizure of private farms, the torture and execution of landowners, and nonsensical agricultural techniques — led to catastrophic grain shortages and widespread famine.

Ordinary people were dragooned into this mass lunacy that produced nothing but suffering. Over those terrible four years, up to 45 million Chinese people died of starvation, or were simply beaten and worked to death. It is a sordid period in Chinese history, seldom talked about openly still. Partly as a result of such wanton destruction of its own population, China became a pariah state across the world.

This national tragedy afflicted all corners of the country and, to greater or lesser extent, affected every single Chinese family. Chinese people have learned to live with the shame, horror and sometimes the guilt of what went before. “(Ni) chi le ma?” is an everyday greeting, meaning “have you eaten yet?”, with resonances of the terrible consequences of famine. The common phrase “mei banfa” means “there is no other choice” — a fateful resignation to hardship and an ultimate expression of futility among a citizenry with no meaningful democratic accountability.

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But the state too has been shaped by historical experience. President Xi’s father Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 and demoted to a lowly position at Mao’s command. Xi himself was publicly denounced at the age of nine and sent to live in a cave in a remote region of Shaanxi Province, where he worked the land for many years. Of course, that’s not to excuse Xi’s authoritarian tendencies as the product of a dysfunctional parent or being mistreated as a child, but his instinct is to avoid inflaming memories of the bad old days. It’s odd then that, much like Mao, Xi appears to be sabotaging the Chinese economy in pursuit of ideological Zero Covid goals.

The Mao-era “Four Pests” campaign during the Great Leap Forward was targeted at the extermination of mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. For a country striving to increase its agricultural productivity, these pests were blighting crops, eating the seeds, and destroying the stores. Peasants were compelled to stand in their villages banging pots and pans, blowing whistles, or shaking rattles in order to make so much noise that the sparrows could not rest. The birds had to stay on the wing until they died of exhaustion and fell to the ground. Over the course of the campaign, one billion sparrows were killed.

With hindsight ­— or perhaps a bit more forethought — the Chinese authorities might have realised that destroying the sparrows would leave fewer birds to eat other pests. The destruction of one immediate nuisance — the sparrow population — simply gave insects the opportunity to thrive. With nothing to keep the insect population in check, the number of locusts increased massively, and crop yields collapsed. Famine ensued. This farce was not a conscious act of self-destruction, but merely a set of idiotic targets set by apparatchiks ignorant of, or unconcerned by, the knock-on effects of their instructions.

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Today, China has been equally ruthless in its attempt to eradicate Covid. It is chasing an impossible dream of Zero Covid but cannot back down for fear of shattering public faith in the Party’s infallibility. However, politicians are oblivious to the unintended consequences of their actions. An assault on civil liberties has been the Party’s only consistent tactic for two years, confining what they believe to be a compliant population to barracks — literally in some cases. The noise of stranded families standing at their windows, banging pots and pans to express their anger and disquiet was an ironic flashback to a failed zero-sparrow policy of 60 years ago. As before, pests are not tolerated.

Locking innocent people up certainly looks like Chairman Mao-style totalitarianism. In Shanghai, with a population of 25 million, the authorities confined almost every single person in their apartment for three months. The state’s mouthpiece, China Daily, excused the draconian lockdown measures by pointing out that “China could face 1.55 million COVID-19 deaths if it abandons the current dynamic zero-COVID policy”. As far as the Party is concerned, the revival of the memory of millions of deaths during the Great Leap Forward could not be countenanced today. As a result, China’s Covid response has been driven by an absolute insistence that rising fatality statistics must be avoided at all costs.

Official statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt, but at the moment the authorities claim that there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths in China since January 2020. (India, with a comparable population has recorded 100 times as many, for instance.) Yet how many tragedies lie behind those locked doors of residential compounds? Like starlings, people in high-rise buildings haven’t been allowed to touch the ground for months and many have surely collapsed with exhaustion.

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Watching thousands of residents of Beijing or Shanghai immediately leave the city after being released from lockdown says a lot about their fear that the government can shut down their lives again. Maybe, just maybe, the Party doesn’t work in their interests. Middle-class residents have been shocked by the destruction of livelihoods in some of the most modern cities of the world. A mood of unease has flowered, posing a rare challenge to the Party’s authority. For a country that relies on harmonious social stability, this is a growing problem for the president.

Admittedly, at present, things are positive as lockdowns wind down and people flock to the streets to drink and chat, but also to complain, to criticise and to conspire. The repopulation of the streets shows that life is being restored in Chinese cities as the people start to rebuild, but the sense of resentment and anger is not something that can be dispelled easily. Already we have seen student protests at a number of Beijing universities. Will Xi avoid the temptation to clamp down on dissenting voices, critical opinions, and seething anger in the hope that the population go back to their everyday lives and try to forget what has just happened?

Xi will do whatever it takes to maintain his authority. But rather than emulate Mao’s crackdown on dissent during the Great Leap Forward, it is likely he’ll simply ramp up the state machine of high-tech surveillance. It won’t look as brutal as the vicious state control of the past although it is destined to be even more insidious. Whether people accept it, after what they have been through, is an open question.

Two months ago, Xianzi (real name, Zhou Xiaoxuan) lost her fight against the Chinese media establishment. She had only intended to prosecute Zhu Jun, a prominent TV host, for an alleged sexual assault. But in the court case that followed, she found herself on the receiving end of the full force of the Chinese TV network and the legal establishment. Somewhere in the middle, she also managed to rekindle a feminist movement that the Chinese state is struggling to contain.

The initial incident occurred in 2014, when Xianzi was a 21-year-old intern at the Chinese state broadcaster, CCTV, and was sent to interview Zhu in his dressing room. As one of the most recognisable TV hosts in the country, Zhu regularly presents the annual New Year TV spectacular, the most-watched TV show in the world. He is also a leading member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the Chinese state. He is, suffice it to say, a figure with not inconsiderable political weight.

During that interview, Xianzi alleged that Zhu sexually molested her and that she was only able to escape his clutches when someone came to the door. The next day, she went to the police, who told her that she shouldn’t slander such a prominent personality’s reputation and threatened her parents’ jobs if she persisted. Her case lay dormant until, empowered by the burgeoning #MeToo movement in 2016, she felt that her only course of action was to write a 3,000-word essay about the incident online.

Immediately, the tables were turned when Zhu accused her of libel; of sullying his illustrious 20-year career. He denied all charges and launched a counterclaim for “smearing” his good name. In the ensuing court case — where much of the defence evidence was deemed inadmissible — he was cleared with no case to answer. Immediately afterwards, Xianzi announced that her battle had been “an extremely arduous and glorious journey” and she intends to appeal. The following day, the Chinese state responded in the only way it knows how: by closing down Xianzi’s social media accounts.

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Xianzi had posted her original article on Douban, a social media platform in China that has increasingly become a forum for radical feminist voices. Such chatrooms have been allowed to flourish by a Chinese state happy to platform discussions that highlight the failings of the West and the superiority and stability in China. These forums are acceptable, that is, until Chinese activists begin to turn the conversation inwards.

As a consequence of Xianzi’s case, the state has become increasingly worried about the potential for “extremism and radical political and ideological thoughts” conveyed by feminist discussion groups. In April, for example, Douban closed a number of feminist channels, such the popular magazine forum “Feminist Voices” under the innocuous charge of “violating relevant laws and regulations”.

But even in China, even though it is difficult for them to express themselves or to find representation against the Party machine, activists continue to organise. In order to circumvent the ever-menacing presence of the state monitors and censors, Chinese netizens use codes and abbreviations to disguise their intent, often becoming memes in the process. For example, the phrase “rice bunny” in Chinese (mi-tu) is a homonym for #MeToo.

Similarly, the “6B” movement (the letter stands for “bu” meaning “no”) is a new feminist community that unites around a lifestyle encouraging no marriage, no child-bearing, no boyfriends, no romantic relationships with male partners, no accommodation to married women, and no sexist brands. Adapted from a Korean network of radical feminists, the addition of the “4T” hashtag in online discussion forums represents the refusal to accept mainstream sexual depictions of women, female beauty, religion, and fan culture. (“T” stands for “tal” meaning the removal of corsets.) It is an enigmatic mixture of bra-burning and Mao’s Four Olds campaign (the authoritarian Cultural Revolution slogan demanding the destruction of old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs).

Chinese radical feminism, then, seems to be a mash-up of Seventies US feminism and Chinese statist fundamentalism — something which President Xi is learning to exploit, subverting the conversation to suit his ends. When Chloé Zhao became the first female Chinese woman to win best director at the Academy Awards for Nomadland, her film was blocked in China and all references removed from the internet because she once said nasty things about her country of birth. Within a matter of days, however, the Party machine recognised her popularity, and used her status as a woman to criticise the lack of diversity within the Hollywood cinema industry.

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But this kind of culture war is a dangerous game for China. Ever keen to expose the travails of the West in order to show up America’s decadence and political malaise, such campaigns only bring attention to its own shameful record on women’s rights: while the UK enacted its first legislation on domestic abuse in 1976, China only did so in 2015.

Xi, of course, is well aware of this. And in response, #MeToo cases in recent years have been used by the state media to demonstrate how the Party is rooting out vulgar elements and maintaining order. At the moment, two going through the courts — one of Kris Wu, a Canadian-Chinese singer who has been arrested in Beijing on suspicion of rape; and another of an Alibaba executive accused of sexual assault — are being publicised in order to “rectify” behaviour that the party considers damaging to its vision of a healthy and stable society.

Similar exposures of the excesses of machismo corporate culture have recently been revealed with young women bringing charges of sexual abuse against a series of executives of the taxi-hailing company Didi, and luxury drinks brand, Moutai. Immediately the Chinese Communist Party released a statement: “we must work together to establish rules for celebrities’ words and deeds, keep the influence of capital in check, curb the barbaric growth of pan-entertainment, strengthen industry self-discipline, and urge entertainers to establish correct professional values”.

But in reality, this only happens in select cases, and it is hard to marry the CCP’s recent statement with the rest of its actions. Take the current case of tennis player Péng Shuài, who has accused former Chinese vice premier Zhāng Gāolí of rape. Last week, her identity — even as a former World Tennis Organisation Number 1 doubles player — was wiped from the Chinese internet. She has effectively been erased: China’s censors are clamping down on any show of support. Even the hashtag #tennis has been banned.

Yet even this hasn’t silenced debate. It has just created more imaginative ways of sharing the criticism. One Douban social media post shared the story using proxy tennis and political characters, Serena Williams and former U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence. It too was taken down soon afterwards.

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Will China’s censors win this game of cat and mouse? It’s hard not to imagine that Beijing is increasingly concerned about the possibility of Chinese students returning from abroad and introducing the West’s subversive gender-critical militancy at home. Still, as long as the Party is seen as the arbiter of justice and can portray individual cases as random aberrations, it can be controlled. And if Chinese feminism follows the American model’s shift towards divisive identity politics, this will only become easier.

But whether the Chinese state can maintain supremacy under sustained cultural assault remains to be seen. The Party this year stressed its role in “coordinating protection of women and children with economic and social development”. But in the face of cases such as Gāolí’s, it seems only a matter of time before such claims are called into question.