Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has carefully crafted an image of himself as a big-picture visionary, tasked with turning China into the world’s preeminent superpower. While Xi has focused on taking over the world, however, the average Chinese citizen appears increasingly frustrated with his inability to provide competent government functions like adequate education and health care.The result has been a wave of unprecedented public protests against Xi’s party, which has promised to bring all of China into a "new era" as a "moderately prosperous society." From angry parents whose children received faulty vaccinations to Maoists outraged that a communist government would stand in the way of worker unionization, the outrage is coming from communities that Beijing once considered safely tamed, not the typical crowd of political dissidents and human rights activists.
Within the past week, Xi’s regime has had to contend with two major protests ‐ one by parents in Leiyang, Hunan, who hurled bricks at police when they found out they were going to be forced to pay for private schooling because of a lack of government resources ‐ and a protest that wasn’t in Shenzhen, Guangdong, where police arrested and broke up a coalition of Maoist students uniting in defense of laborers’ union rights.