Shoes are kept in front of the door. About forty spectators found a pair of sneakers to wear at the entrance to this minimalist room, in a discreet building in the center of Tokyo. On Sunday, August 25, Tomoko Ako, professor of sociology at the University of Tokyo, tells of her experience in the Chinese countryside, which she traveled for twenty years. In Mandarin with a thick Japanese accent, this petite, bright-eyed woman describes the development of the early 2000s, villages still without electricity, the anguish of residents forcibly displaced for construction projects, forgotten ethnic minorities and the human rights defenders with whom they often interacted. It is aimed at an informed public: the majority are Chinese, recently settled in the Japanese capital. “This kind of conference couldn’t be held in China today, it’s so refreshing! »comments, with a smile on his face, a thirty-year-old Chinese man who arrived four months earlier with a student visa. “I lived the year 2022 in China”He explains with an air of complicity.
For many Chinese, 2022 has been one year too many. That of the most drastic confinements, when, after having managed to control the Covid-19 pandemic through its zero tolerance strategy, Beijing persisted, despite more contagious and impossible to stop variants. The year in which the majority of urban Chinese experienced the most arbitrary authoritarianism, even in their privacy, fearing that their health QR code would turn red, synonymous with forced departure to an isolation center in terrible living conditions. Also the year that the general secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Xi Jinping, appointed an all-loyal team to lead the country during his third presidential term, eliminating any prospect of a counterweight to his reign.
Since then, the sharp slowdown in the economy has maintained a gloomy atmosphere in a China that will celebrate the 1Ahem October, 75.my anniversary of the PCC coming to power. The economy has never really recovered from these repeated lockdowns and remains weighed down by a serious housing crisis. Trade and geopolitical tensions with the United States have reinforced the feeling of uncertainty among the Chinese, and more and more people are choosing exile. In 2021, the trending term on social media was “ run xue », which could be translated as “philosophy of flight”, although taking the step is still difficult.
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