The days of Bridge Man

October 25, 2022

The days of Bridge Man

Shanghai residents were confronted with a challenge leveled at the Chinese leader Xi Jingping just days before the Communist Party Congress began recently. The horrendous state of the Chinese government apparatus is regularly challenged by irate citizens. But for decades, the dominant ideology of the opposition has been Tank Man, no? All of the quasi-underground "protest" social movements have been sort of sedentary, and have gotten their legitimacy out of a sort of lethargic mood of "meh." Tank Man certainly had a giant set of balls, that should be noted, and he should be honored for his bravery. And yet, the ways that the actual state of a democratic Chinese underground has changed, deserve to be observed, and the liberation spirit deserves an updated appraisal. 

Bridge Man happened pretty recently, and consisted of a protest, where one man put up a smoke signal of sorts of black smoke, and hung a banner on a bridge overpass in Shanghai. The banner assailed several practices of Xi Jingping's Communist government, and demanded alternatives. It's again likely that he, like Tank Man, will not be seen again… But his identity is known: he is an author of several liberation, pro-democracy essays. He's not well-known exactly as a writer; but his head is at exactly where the zeitgeist is at in the pro-democracy underground - if that still even exists, that is. 

What does Bridge Man symbolize for where we are going? There's a bifurcation of purposes after a major protest, as in this in China, is identified as such by the state. The first obvious path is that people feel the liberty to demand similar liberties. Although the Chinese authorities have begun to make people register to buy paint and banner cloth now, there have still been solidarity protests, using lipstick as paint, and saying only the structure of the original Bridge Man's banner: "We don't want Y; we want Z", etc. The second obvious bifurcated path is about how the state will begin to act on the global stage as a result of this new idea. Observe that China's main tactical approach on the geopolitical stage has been to obstruct, a la Tank Man, since Tank Man. Any country is the same; observe the U.S. use of sanctions since Occupy Wall Street. And so there's going to be a sea change in the way that China is approaching geopolitical strategy if they can get away with it. The world should be prepared for a more literate, probably propaganda-based approach to Chinese strategy on the grand global stage. 

So, the very skeptical will point out that this is also likely to be a pivot the state apparatus has already made, in response to more large-scale events. But this is not truly an either-or decision about the cause. At the very least, the two problematics are mutually imbricated, for example, that people's protests have the concrete effect of giving a stamp of approval to certain government-level strategies…

So, the days of Bridge Man are upon us, and we should prepare accordingly.