What does Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) know about the world?
When he visited the White House in September, President Trump posed this question to him in a unique way: through the medium of song.
During the state dinner, guests were regaled with music.
Reportedly, this included the song “Do You Hear the People Sing?,” from the musical “Les Miserables.” People immediately pointed out that this piece is associated with protests in Hong Kong.
Or was, when protesting in Hong Kong wasn’t banned.
Whether it was actually sung at the dinner is a bit unclear. A video of a military chorus singing “One Day More,” also from “Les Miserables,” was posted on X by the White House Deputy Chief of Staff at Dan Scavino. That song contains the phrase “Do you hear the people sing?” as a very prominent single lyric. Descriptions of a “medley” of songs from “Les Miserables” could stem from this.
But at the White House Governors Ball last year, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” was sung in a medley with “One Day More,” by at least some of the same individuals. So it’s very possible that Xi did listen to it.
One thing that is clearer from the video: “One Day More” was adapted to remove this verse:
“One day more to revolution
We will nip it in the bud
We’ll be ready for these schoolboys
They will wet themselves with blood.”
Perhaps the Trump administration doesn’t want to give anyone ideas, or flashbacks, of shooting student protestors.
And given the apparently convivial atmosphere at the dinner, it appears that “a whiff of grapeshot” may have been replaced by a whiff of blanc de noir.
But if “Do you hear the people sing?” is the question, and Xi is the student taking the test, how is he going to answer?
Because I’m not sure that he does hear.
People have associated that song with Hong Kong. But for me, I think back to the Urumqi Covid fire in November 2022. Forty-four Uyghurs who weren’t able to evacuate from a locked-down apartment building died. In the days after, the White Paper Protests against China’s zero-Covid policies briefly swept the streets of Chinese cities. Urumqi Road in Shanghai was the epicenter.
From Taiwan, I was scrolling WeChat, and every now and then a video or a still from “Les Miserables” would pop up. It was always “Do You Hear the People Sing?”
Protests are far more common in China than people think. But the authorities are exceptionally good at ending them before they spread. It’s very, very rare for one to break containment and go nationwide and viral to an extent that can’t really be prevented. But when it did, ordinary middle-class citizens, who you never suspected were political, started posting “Do You Hear the People Sing?”
When that happened in November 2022, the Chinese Communist Party first panicked and then blinked, throwing away three years of zero Covid to an unplanned and uncoordinated messy end. They certainly heard the people.
I don’t know about you, but my sense is that Xi isn’t spending that much time on social media. He might not even know how computers work. So just how in the loop is he?
In moving China from “hiding its light under a bushel” to a much more confrontational relationship with the U.S. and many of its neighbors, Xi has made a bet that the U.S. is in decline and China is on the rise.
You sometimes wonder whether he is aware that the U.S. economy is still growing strongly despite political turmoil. Worse, you wonder whether he knows that the Chinese economy is slowing.
If he listened to ordinary Chinese people, or better yet talked to them, he’d know. But they are on WeChat, and he is not. They are in the real world, and he is insulated from it by apparatchiks who must increasingly fear being purged if they don’t tell him what he wants to hear.
One is reminded of the falsified agriculture figures fed to Mao Zedong (毛澤東) during the Great Leap Forward, when locals would densely transplant fields with crops before he visited.
You have to wonder whether Xi doesn’t secretly look forward to his meetings with Trump, one of the only people in the world who isn’t afraid to tell him what he really thinks. And Trump certainly seems to be using Xi as a source.
What Xi does and does not know is, ironically, unknowable to us. And the intent of playing music from “Les Miserables” for him may be hard to determine.
We may not always want to hear the people sing. But in the end, the people will always make it their business to be heard.
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