And then, winter: ten years after the Arab Spring

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A sexual harassment case attended by hundreds of protesters is a revealing look into the state of feminism in China. Gender parity is plummeting under Xi Jinping, but there seems at last to be a chance that in the courts at least, women will be heard. And celebrations of Beethoven's 250th birthday this year were muted. We look back on his working life and how it's his more intimate works rather than the big bombastic numbers that have shone in 2020. First up though, today marks exactly 10 years since Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street peddler, set himself ablaze to protest against the corrupt police who had confiscated his wares.

Mr. Bouazizi was marshal.

He was a hero.

He's a symbol.

I thank him because he freed me of my fear.

His self immolation is widely seen as the spark that ignited the Arab Spring, a wave of revolutionary protest that swept across the region.

There's extraordinary anger here mixing with the smell of tear gas. Either this is the first Arab revolution of the 21st century or it will be brutally suppressed.

Dictators who had seemed invulnerable fell one after another in Tunisia, then Egypt and later, Libya and Yemen.

I never feel such happiness now.

But the revolutions didn't lead to the democratic outcomes that were so hoped for.

It's hard to remember now, but The Arab Spring 10 years ago started as this moment of tremendous hope and unfettered optimism for people across the Middle east who were eager to overthrow the dictators who had ruled their countries for decades.

Greg Karlstrom is the Economist's Middle east correspondent.

It was this wave of revolutionary fervor that began in Tunisia and swept to Egypt and then across much of the Middle East. But unfortunately, that initial euphoria soon gave way to a very reactionary period, and the political systems, with one exception across the region, failed to transform for the better.

And what's the one exception?

Fittingly, the exception was Tunisia, where this began in December of 2010. It emerged from the Arab Spring with a democracy, a fragile one, to be sure, and it's a country that is still struggling with a stagnant economy and with some very sharp political divisions. But it has become a genuinely democratic society with fair elections, with political freedom. You've had peaceful transfers of power between groups that are ideologically opposed to each other. Tunisia has genuinely become a democracy, and it's one that citizens there are justifiably quite proud of. The rest of the region, unfortunately, has either gone back into authoritarianism now or has fallen into outright civil war. You have countries like Libya, Syria, Yemen that are almost no longer recognizable as states.

Millions of children in Yemen could be pushed to the brink of starvation unless.

International aid is dramatically stepped up. It comes from UNICEF.

For most of the region, the last 10 years have been a devastating period, a time that left more than half a million people dead in. Fighting across the Middle east caused 16 million people to be displaced. About one in five people on the planet who are either refugees or internally displaced at the moment are from the Arab world and have been displaced in the past 10 years. So again, for much of the region, the human toll and the economic toll of the past 10 years has been devastating.

And as for the places that have gone back to authoritarian rule, what happened there?

The backsliding was in Egypt, which, of course, had a brief experiment with democracy after Hoskin Mubarak stepped down in 2011. He had ruled the country for three decades. There was a lot of hope when he left that it would give way to Egyptian democracy. And it did, for a moment. There were parliamentary elections in late 2011. There was a presidential election the following summer in 2012, which left the Muslim Brotherhood in control of the country. They only served about a year in power. It was a very tumultuous year. On the one hand, you had elements within the state, such as the courts and the police, that were actively trying to obstruct the Brotherhood and prevent it from governing because they were ideologically opposed to it. On the other hand, the Brotherhood itself, its efforts to govern were sort of incompetent at best and intentionally divisive at worst. There was a watershed moment that came in late 2012, when the President, Mohammed Morsi, issued a decree that would have effectively shielded everything he did from judicial review. All of this, of course, building up to the summer of 2013, when there was a popularly backed military coup. Which overthrew the Brotherhood, went on to shatter the organization completely, the army took power and has not relinquished it since.

And all told, how did this all go so wrong? Starting from all that optimism, there's not.

One reason why it went wrong. As tempting as it might be to look for a unified theory of why the Arab Spring was not a success, certainly some of the blame can be ascribed to foreign powers, whether it's Russia and Iran, which intervened militarily to support the Assad regime in Syria and to crush the uprising there. You can blame Western countries both for, say, not intervening more forcefully in Syria, or for saying nothing as the Egyptian military seized power in Cairo and smashed democracy there. A lot of this criticism of foreign powers, it lapses into counterfactuals that are really impossible to prove or to analyze. And so perhaps if the west had acted early on to destroy the Syrian air force, for example, there would have been fewer casualties in the Syrian civil war. But it's a stretch from that to say that the outcome in Syria might have been stable or prosperous or democratic. You can blame plenty of local actors as well, whether it's the activists who led these protests in 2011, but didn't really have a plan for how to organize politically or for what was going to come next. You can blame Islamists across the region, who in the beginning often sat on the sidelines of these uprisings, but then sort of cynically saw an opportunity to seize power, and were often very divisive in how they tried to do do it. But most of all, if anyone is to blame for the failure of these uprisings over the past 10 years, it is the autocrats who have ruled Arab states for the better part of the past century.

Why? Why are they the focus of blame here?

None of them were democrats, none of them wanted democracies, but they understood something about democracy, which is that democracy is not only a system of elections, it's not only going to the ballot box every few years. You need certain other qualities or elements in a society to really make a democracy work. You need civic, you need citizens who are engaged and informed. You need a common set of rules, in a sense that the rule of law is applied equally to everyone. And you need people to accept the idea that political disagreements are healthy, they can be resolved peaceably, and they don't pose an existential threat to anyone. And the problem is, in autocratic societies and authoritarian regimes, by design, they don't have these qualities and they prevent them from emerging. So if you look across the region, when it comes to citizens being engaged and informed, you have countries where the media and civil society are very tightly controlled by the state, where education systems teach people to memorize, not to think critically, but to learn by rotes, which makes it very hard to have a say in how you're governed. Living in a system that tries to prevent that from happening.

I mean, given that the commonalities across the region, it sounds as if the Arab Spring could never have succeeded fully. Another Arab Spring wouldn't succeed.

Not that it could never have succeeded. I think, again, Tunisia is a very powerful counterexample to this idea that it simply cannot work in the Middle. It would be very difficult for it to succeed. And you certainly have people in the Middle east who look at the past 10 years, who feel this profound sense of sadness and loss at what has happened over the past decade, who wonder if it's even worth trying again. Even people who were activists who were involved in the protests in 2010, 2011, even some of them at this point who have walked away from that wonder if it was worth it and if it's worth doing again. I think there certainly will be another round of unrest in the Middle East. With very few exceptions, populations are miserable. Young people in particular have very limited opportunities for the future. There's a lot of anger, there's a lot of frustration. It will lend itself to more unrest and more protests. But whether the outcome will be any more positive, I think it's hard to say. And certainly the lesson of the past decade is that it's a fool's errand to try and predict the future in the Middle East.

Greg, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@exterator.com intelligenceoffer lawsuits relating to sexual assault and harassment rarely make it to court in China. But one case has recently broken through.

Earlier this month, we saw more than 100 people turn up to court to support a woman who. Who is bringing a sexual assault case against a very powerful Chinese man.

Su Lin Wong is a China correspondent for the Economist.

It's really very rare to see hundreds of people gather in front of a court. And they came with signs that had the MeToo slogan written on them, as well as pictures of bowls of rice and rabbits, which in Chinese sounds like MeToo in English. And what was really interesting was that after Sienza, the woman who's bringing the sexual assault allegation, entered the courthouse, a lot of her supporters remained outside for more than 10 hours. This was as temperatures dropped below zero.

And what exactly is Sienza's complaint?

So in 2014, when Sienza was an intern at the Chinese state broadcaster cctv, she went to interview this very famous television host called Zhu Jun, for a university assignment. And while they were alone, she alleges that Mr. Zhu groped her and tried to kiss her. Mr. Zhu is so far the most high profile Chinese man to have MeToo allegations levelled at him. So he's a party member and he really is a household name in China. Mr. Zhu has denied the allegations and actually suddenly sued Cienza for defamation, but he subsequently lost that case. In 2018, Cienza filed a civil suit asking for a public apology from Mr. Jule, as well as nearly US$8,000 or 50,000 renminbi in damages.

And why has it taken so long for her to get her day in court?

So the day after Mr. Zhu allegedly groped and tried to kiss Cianzi, she filed a police complaint. And she told me that at the time, the police were quite open, friendly towards her. But subsequently, other police visited her parents in another Chinese city and told them to encourage Sienza to not sue Mr. Zhu, because that would make the Chinese Communist Party look very bad. And so for a couple of years, Sienza kept the allegations to herself. In early 2018, an academic wrote online that she had been sexually harassed by one of her professors 12 years previously. And that really sparked China's own MeToo movement. And so Xianza's case came after that as many, many Chinese women came forth with allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment. But often these cases haven't made it to court. It's very financially costly. The police will often say there, there isn't adequate evidence. And there are actually very few lawyers and NGOs in China who are adequately equipped to handle these types of cases. But I think in some ways, what is most off putting to victims of sexual assault is the online hostility and backlash from mostly men who don't support the MeToo movement and don't support feminism.

And so how does the nascent MeToo movement in China fit into feminism in the country more generally?

So Chinese feminists have played an important and varied role in Chinese history. And there were a number of very prominent Chinese women who were feminists even in the early 1900s. But right now, we're seeing a low point for feminism. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China's ranking in the World Economic Forum's global index of gender parity has fallen from 69th place to 106th place. And we've seen the pay gap widen as well as the labor participation gap between men and women widen. After China's economic reforms that kicked off in the late 1970s, the Chinese state gave Chinese companies more autonomy to determine how they wanted to discriminate against women, basically in terms of employing them and paying them. At the same time, we saw less childcare support from the state and fewer young couples with children today live with their parents, even though the situation appears very bleak. One thing that many Chinese feminists have said to me that makes this generation different is that many of the Chinese feminists today are only daughters. As a result of China's one child policy. There are so many women who are now in their 20s and 30s and 40s who grew up as only children. They had a lot more opportunities afforded to them. They're much better educated, and they're more empowered. And they're the ones who are very much driving China's current MeToo movement.

And how has the state responded to that movement?

So over the past few years, we've seen the Chinese Communist Party grow increasingly hostile towards any type of civil society movement. Also, they really clamped on hard on any types of activism or advocacy that seems to be coordinated across provinces. So in 2015, we saw a number of Chinese feminists plan to hand out stickers about sexual harassment on public transport. But they were arrested before they were able to do this. They were eventually released. But this really marked a turning point in China's feminism movement. So increasingly, the Chinese feminism movement is turning to the legal system and trying to use existing laws to push for more gender equality and to push against domestic violence and against sexual assault in China.

But there does seem to be a contradiction there in that the state broadly wants to quash all of these efforts, and yet these Cases are still being heard in the courts.

Yes, I think a lot of Chinese feminists see that tension as well. And so on the one hand, we do see this authoritarian clampdown on civil society in China and feminist activism in China. But on the other hand, we are seeing slow legal reforms. But it's important to remember the Chinese Communist Party has a very firm grip on China's laws and courts, but they also realize they need to respond to the concerns of Chinese people. June this year, China's rubber stamp parliament approved a new civil code which explicitly requires employers to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. We also saw at the end of 2018, China's highest court explicitly say that the legal action of sexual harassment could be brought before a court. The fact that Xianzi's case is going through the courts right now really does make it quite significant. But on the other hand, Cienza's lawsuit was not covered in Chinese state media. And even though there was quite a bit of discussion on it on Chinese social media, most of those posts were eventually censored.

Sue Lin, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Jason.

Beethoven created his great achievements in music against the backdrop of illness, of insecurity, of war, of financial crisis. So in a way, it's fitting that his birthday celebrations, 250 years after he was born should have had to take place in a year of profound challenges.

Boyd Tonkin writes about culture for the Economist.

He never quite managed to settle down in his early years. He shifted between patrons. His working relationships often seemed to kind of fall off a cliff. Stability eluded him. And then in the late 1790s, the real disaster happened. He began to lose his hearing. This wasn't some sort of peaceful drift into silence. It was accompanied by terrible, consistent noises in the ears. So you have to imagine the young composer knowing that his hearing was not only bad, but almost certain to get much worse. Most of Beethoven's working career was actually undertaken in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. Even when he left Bonn in 1792, the city was being occupied by the revolutionary French forces. And then, when he became a Viennese, Napoleon's armies occupied the city not once but twice, first in 1805 and then in 1809. Beethoven was living virtually within the cannon range of the French artillery, and he moved into his brother's basement flat in order to protect himself from the bombardment. So it wasn't just economic uncertainty and insecurity he had to face, but the threat of war, which would disrupt the entire life of the city. And had the other effect which was very important for Beethoven. It played havoc with the Austrian currency. So living in a time of war put his life in danger, and it also deeply threatened his livelihood. The interesting thing about looking at Beethoven's legacy in 2020 is that it now looks a bit different. Until this year, you might have said that his inheritance for music has been one of grand and monumental works. The Ninth Symphony, the Fifth Symphony, these major statements of a rather passionate and heroic kind of musical endeavor coming out of the Romantic era. But the funny thing about the lockdown experience is that it's a much smaller scale and more intimate Beethoven that has appeared to be more relevant for us this year. The composer of the 32 Piano Sonatas of lovely chamber works for small groups of instruments, the private Beethoven, if you like. These have been the works that seem to have been speaking most profoundly to people in the time of the pandemic. And it's really, I think, a testimony to his endurance, his resilience, that this completely convulsive experience of having our world turned upside down has still meant that Beethoven can speak to us. It's interesting that when I asked the director of the Beethoven 250 Birthday Project in Bonn to recommend one work for this year, what he advised everyone to listen to was not one of the great symphonies. It was a little piece known as the Heilige Danke Sang, which is a movement of one of his late string quartets. And Beethoven wrote it after recovering from illness. He was often ill. He had a really miserable and punitive medical history. But this was written in a time of remission, and it's a gloriously tender and intimate song of thanksgiving for survival and new life. And if you like, it really should count as the theme tune for 2020.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.

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