When Was the Last Successful Revolution?

Handicapping the Chinese and Iranian protestors' chances of success

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 that toppled the Bourbon King Charles X

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Watching events in Iran and China, it feels like something is coming to a head.

In Iran, the current protests against the regime are the largest since 1979. They are also much more widespread than the protests against the price of fuel and other essentials three years ago that broke out in poorer areas, or the liberal protests that rocked Iran’s educated urban areas ten years before that. Iran’s soccer team refuses to sing the national anthem (or reluctantly sings it after being threatened with reprisals), the niece of the Supreme Leader has lent her voice to the protestors, the regime is fending off a UN human rights investigation and the regime itself seems to realize that it has lost an entire generation of young people. Most threatening to the regime, however, is the fact that the current protests span all classes and regions, and have even taken root in more conservative areas that were previously the regime’s strongholds. That’s in part because they were sparked by the death of a perfectly ordinary young woman—not someone known for being political—at the hands of the country’s thuggish morality police, an outrage that would naturally spark empathy even in the hearts of conservative parents. But that spark landed on the dry tinder of the regime’s rampant corruption and self-dealing, and its increasingly obvious disconnection from the life of the people.

In China as well, the signs are ominous. Protests against the zero-COVID policies have spread like wildfire, from Shanghai to Beijing to Xinjiang, where, in another easy-to-empathize-with outrage, a fire killed three children when rescue workers couldn’t get to the scene quickly enough because of COVID restrictions. Again, though, the spark landed on dry tinder as it has become ever clearer that the regime has no exit strategy from those restrictions in a world where COVID will remain endemic. The main reason for not changing course, apart from loss of face, is that, if they did drop restrictions, the extremely contagious Omicron-derived strains currently circulating would quickly scythe through China’s poorly-immunized population, resulting in a massive wave of fatalities—one study estimated more than 1.5 million—and an overwhelmed health care system, which would cause additional suffering and death and further undermine the credibility of the regime. But with no off-ramp in sight down the road, it’s entirely rational for China’s young people to conclude that they will be living with zero-COVID restrictions for the rest of their lives. No wonder they have been spearheading the protests, and have even begun calling not just for reform, as the Mao-portrait holding protesters in Tiananmen Square did in 1989, but an end to Xi’s rule.

So, as I say, it feels like something is coming to head. But is it? And if it does, what happens then? Those of us who remember the period from 1989 to 1991 want to believe that when a regime finally loses all credibility, it simply collapses of its own weight. But it’s not clear that that’s what actually happened to the Soviet Union—I’ve debated the question here before, more than once in fact, of whether things might have turned out very differently with different Soviet leadership. Is that era of liberal triumph really a reliable model for China’s or Iran’s near future? I wonder.

The last Iranian revolution finally succeeded when the armed forces abandoned the regime and joined the protestors. Without the ability to crush dissent by force, the Shah had no recourse but to flee. The last Chinese revolution was the culmination of a brutal civil war that played out over years; Mao won first by taking control of Manchuria’s industrial heartland, then by winning over large swathes of the peasantry, and finally by exploiting divisions among the fractious Nationalist warlords and generals. In neither case did the regime fall merely because of popular protest. The Russian Revolution of 1917 also didn’t succeed until the army suffered utter collapse on the battlefield. Have there been any revolutions since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites that clearly followed that relatively benign model?

There are a few. The color revolutions of the early 2000s—Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan—all looked somewhat like the fall of Soviet-backed regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. But only somewhat. In each of these cases, a corrupt leadership tried to steal an election, faced popular protest, and was quickly ousted, often by other elements of the state, in order to put the opposition party in charge. These were not normal and peaceful democratic transitions of power—they were revolutions—but neither were they the overthrow of a deeply entrenched and longstanding power structure.

The Arab Spring presents a somewhat more promising analogy—except that it was largely a failure. Popular uprisings in Syria and Yemen degenerated into brutal civil wars. The Syrian regime ultimately won their civil war, with Russian help, and Yemen’s civil war has been transformed by Saudi intervention. Neither, though, can be called a successful “people power” revolution. Saudi power crushed widespread protests in Bahrain, and it’s doubtful that Libya’s rebels could have toppled Qaddafi on their own, which is why America and its NATO allies intervened. But we didn’t usher in a successful revolution; we ushered in chaos. Only in Tunisia and Egypt were popular protests able to topple an entrenched regime—but in Egypt a brutal military dictatorship was restored two and a half years after the protests began in Tahrir Square. That’s not a great track record of success.

Where else? The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela began with victory at the ballot box; only after that was constitutional change imposed from the top. That’s not a model of how things might plausibly go in China or Iran. Meanwhile, subsequent attempts to foster a counter-revolution through either popular protest or military intrigue have proved notably unsuccessful. Myanmar’s transition to democracy was midwifed by the military so as to preserve its influence, and has since been reversed by a new military coup. The transition to democracy has been more successful in Chile, and in Indonesia, with Turkey presenting a more equivocal case (the military is much less involved in politics, but Turkish politics itself has become more populist and authoritarian and less liberal and democratic)—but all of these transitions were negotiated; none of them were properly revolutionary, and none of them have any obvious relevance to the Iranian or Chinese situation.

The more I think about it, the harder it is for me to see how the Iranian or Chinese people succeed through popular protest alone. They are not challenging regimes that are thin and weak, but ones that are thick and entrenched, and fully supported by military and paramilitary organs. If they are increasingly inward-looking, oppressive and incompetent, that is in part because they have both taken dramatic steps in recent years to purge themselves of liberal or reformist elements in favor of lock-step loyalists, which leaves less room for the kind of factional split that could give a popular revolution crucial leverage inside the regime. Nor is either country on the brink of financial collapse. Iran is already massively sanctioned and yet continues to function, which has arguably increased the regime’s hold on the country rather than weakening it. China is far too large and prosperous to strangle from without. It’s not inappropriate to describe both regimes as somewhat Brezhnevite, but it’s worth remembering that Brezhnev’s Soviet Union did not collapse from its own contradictions, but successfully crushed liberal revolts in Czechoslovakia and Poland and sent troops to Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular communist regime there.

That’s not a happy conclusion for me to come to, nor is it for anyone who loves human freedom. It’s much more pleasant to believe that these oppressive regimes, having made catastrophic errors, are now about to face their just deserts. But politics is not a morality play, and oppressive and unpopular regimes—even ones whose poor decisions are steadily eroding their nations’ power and well-being—can last for a long time if they can keep enough key centers of power on their side. So far, that’s something both countries—certainly China, but Iran as well, at least so far—have managed to do.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that people power can triumph. But from where I sit, the most likely scenario for a successful Iranian or Chinese revolution is for either country to start a major war with an adversary that they then go on to lose, badly. That’s the kind of mistake that can shatter your army or turn it against you, and if that happens the end of a regime can come quickly. It’s also a mistake that both countries have so far been wise enough to avoid making. Given the terrible human costs of any such war, we ought to hope that they continue to avoid it, even though it makes their odious regimes’ survival more likely.