Chinese envoy says Covid-19 protests smacked of ‘colour revolution’

A Chinese diplomat blamed recent widespread protests against the country's “Covid Zero” policy on outsiders seeking to spark “colour revolutions,” an attempt to shift blame away from the harsh rules that dominated urbanites’ lives for nearly three years.

“At first, people took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with how local governments were unable to completely and accurately implement measures introduced by the central government, but the protests were quickly exploited by foreign forces,” said Lu Shaye, the Asian nation’s top envoy in France.

“We can clearly smell the scent of colour revolutions that have frequently happened in developing countries in recent years,” Lu said at a dinner on December 7, according to a statement posted on the Chinese embassy’s website on Wednesday.

“Some Chinese were bought over by foreign forces,” he said, without providing details on how that would work given the nation’s largely closed borders.

The remarks are the first time China has directly blamed foreigners for the demonstrations in dozens of cities late last month — the most widespread unrest in the Asian nation in decades — though the government has a habit of making similar accusations.

Foreign minister Wang Yi said last year that China opposed outside powers using Central Asia to foment “colour revolutions” — a reference to antigovernment protests in former Soviet bloc nations in the early 2000s and later in the Middle East.

Beijing also blamed antigovernment demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019 on “black hands” backed by outsiders.

There are some signs the public is becoming sceptical about the accusations. Footage of a protest in Beijing showed an unidentified man warning the crowd around him of “foreign actors” among them. Demonstrators challenged him, pointing out that the Communist Party’s ideological forebears hailed from places like Germany and Russia. Bloomberg News wasn’t able to verify the video.

Just after the Covid-19 protests that saw a handful of people call for Chinese President Xi Jinping to step down, China’s top law enforcement body pledged to crack down on “hostile forces” and their “sabotage,” though it didn’t mention the civil disobedience.