Silo, Seasons 1 & 2: Tiananmen Square

The death of a famous, reformist Chinese politician, in early 1989, led to a series of regime-approved student rallies in his honor. The most important of these rallies took place in Tiananmen Square, the huge, symbolical center of Beijing just outside of the old imperial palace (by then a museum for decades), also fairly close to Zhongnanhai, the Chinese White House.

Various chants in favor of reform broke out during these rallies, and many students stayed in Tiananmen for long discussions about Chinese social and political issues, mingling and smoking and general carousing. As the regime watched warily, a student encampment was slowly set up in the square where, by April, a handmade Statue of Liberty had been erected. Thousands of students were permanently in place in Tiananmen, on a rotating basis, while hundreds of thousands of people regularly marched in their support around the square.

My mother-in-law, then a young mother in her early forties, took part in some of these marches, together with fellow schoolteachers who carried banners in support of political reforms. My now-wife, at the age of thirteen, marched with her schoolmates under the direction of their own teachers. Policemen, welders, laborers, accountants, actors: all marched expressing their approval of the student movement.

The Chinese Communist Party was horrified. Communist regimes were collapsing across Europe and were almost gone already in places like Poland. The Soviet fringes, places like the Baltic states, Armenia and Azerbaijan, were in open rebellion over various issues including ethnic score-settling.

Like every other anti-Communist movement, the one in Beijing had started with concrete, moderate requests that the Party had looked into. High party officials had met with the students, even been berated by them publicly. But the students refused to leave the square, and the scale of their demands kept growing: by May, they were openly calling for free and fair elections, and some were vowing to stay in the square until the Communist Party accepted to relinquish the control of the Chinese state it had kept – through thick and thin, through massacres and famines and vendettas and purges and endless own goals – since 1949.

It was at that point, in the night between June 3 and June 4, 1989, that the Chinese regime sent the army to Tiananmen, and blocked the masses’ way out of the Silo.

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Silo was originally a series of novels about a huge, multi-generational underground bunker where 10,000 people remain holed up for centuries after some sort of catastrophe, evidently a nuclear war, made the Earth’s surface uninhabitable, allegedly. I haven’t read the novels so I can follow the story on TV with my wife and my younger son, a huge sci-fi fan who loves the series.

Netflix released Season 1 in 2023. In that first season, we saw how an increasingly large number of people were growing sick of the social control imposed on their lives by the Silo leadership and tired with their impoverished lives in stinky narrow corridors and rooms filled with 1970s technology much like that in the Beijing apartment where my wife grew up.

By the time the first season starts, a lot of people are disenchanted with The Pact, a book where the rules for life and social organization in the Silo are written, a sort of constitution for the refuge and one that resembles nothing like Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, Communist China’s most famous document.

It’s clear that the Silo’s leadership is venal, corrupt and murderous, and that trickery and manipulation are everywhere: from the way in which couples are selected to have how many kids under a one-child policy like the one that almost forced my parents in law to abort my wife before she was born (the Silo can’t hold over 10,000 people without seriously straining its limited resources) to the allocation of jobs to how the ramshackle justice system operates.

In the series’ very first episode (I’m sorry but this has to be filled with spoilers) the wife of the Silo’s sheriff manages to get herself expelled. This is easy: according to The Pact, all you need to get that is to state your willingness to leave the Silo.

When she does, she’s given a suit that – allegedly – will help her survive the radiation outside, and cleaning material: once she’s out of the airlock, watched by hundreds of anxious people through their only window to the outside, one at the cafeteria at the Silo’s upper level, she does clean the window to improve the outside view. Everybody claps in the polite Chinese style, as this is one of the Silo’s hallowed traditions. The outcast then walks a few steps away from the airlock, up a scrubby hill in an apocalyptic landscape, and then collapses in full view of everybody – like everybody else who dared to get out ever did.

The rest of the season is dominated by a character named Juliette Nichols: a can-do lady with mechanical aptitudes in the Alien’s Ripley tradition, she’s the daughter of the Silo’s corrupted head doctor, but she prefers life with the lowest class in the Silo, those surviving at the bottom levels while working on the machinery that keeps the Silo’s critical systems, including air purification and water distribution, going.

Eventually, Juliette gets her hands on various “relics” from the pre-nukes past, including a hard drive that few even suspect the function of, and becomes convinced that the Silo leadership is lying to everybody, that the cafeteria display is manipulated, and that the surface is again habitable: all they have to do is force their way out of their subterranean dystopia. Her plot is foiled, and she’s pushed outside in a suit, alone: as she walks out, she can see the greenery through the visor of her helmet. End of Season 1.

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I’ve lived in China for several years, worked for the government (it’s a funny story, not a dark one) and visit the country on a regular basis. For years now, I’ve been telling people that nobody believes in Communism in China, least of all the regime itself; having been a correspondent who is married to the daughter of a diplomat, I’ve talked to top officials and important persons, and to upper-middle-class people, all of whom strike me as extremely Communism-agnostic, to say the least.

China still remains Communist in the sense that the Communist Party rules over what can be described as a fairly wild capitalist society, at least up to the very top of the income distribution, where tech bros, real estate tycoons and other billionaires are very closely watched by the nomenklatura.

This weird, profoundly hypocritical and corrupt regime has governed over what is the longest sustained period of prosperity in modern Chinese history. Literally hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from abject poverty and moved into the middle classes during my lifetime, particularly after the dreaded psychopathic founder of the Chinese regime, the Little Red Book’s guy Mao Zedong, died in 1976.

This has been no picnic: hundreds of thousands of dissidents and rebels have been tortured, murdered, purged or otherwise suppressed, all over the country, for multiple things from political agitation to ethno-separatism to membership in millenarian Buddhist cults that disapprove of the Party.

The huge Silo that Mao Zedong built in 1949 was one of the most dysfunctional societies ever created in history. And it was a deliberate creation: Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book” is still widely sold in libraries if no longer a mandatory guide for life. Every oppressive institution and destructive policy was personally designed or at least approved for Mao. When he died in 1976, his successors were fully aware that they lived in such a shit palace that they spent the next decade-plus changing everything they could.

The Chinese Silo was much nicer by 1989, but still plenty oppressive. People in big cities had TVs, and some of luckiest ones had cars instead of bicycles. An uncle-in-law I remember fondly once told me of how, during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, he listened to BBC International at night, even at the risk of his life, because he couldn’t take the BS anymore. In the 1970s, most Chinese working for the regime knew their beloved regime was an international laughingstock known for ugly people dressed in shabby blue clothes, and in the 1980s they understood perfectly well that they still were dismally poor compared with the West and prosperous Asian societies.

Like Juliette Nichols, most students who rioted in Tiananmen and refused to keep following The Pact were sons and daughters of this nomenklatura, youngsters from Beijing’s best colleges who were lining up for the next big thing, because they perceived the smell of rot coming out of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese White House. That’s a big reason why the regime was so extremely patient with the movement, and why they waited until the very last minute, when all other avenues to avoid catastrophe had been exhausted, to violently block the airlock.

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In Season 2 of Silo, Juliette quickly discovers that her visor is giving her a fictitious signal: there’s no greenery outside the airlock, but the wasteland everybody could see from the cafeteria. The Earth’s surface remains uninhabitable. As she wanders around waiting to die, she finds out that there are many other Silos around her and, in fact, the airlock for one of those is partly opened, and surrounded by thousands of bodies: those of the rebels who escaped their Silo, thinking they could survive on the surface, and found out that the Lie of The Pact was the horrible Truth.

In effect, Juliette has come across the ruins of the former Soviet Union, and the piles of corpses left behind by the triumph of the “democratization” process that did away with that state: here lie those killed in Armenia and Azerbaijan because of ethnic conflicts, here those killed in Central Asia as militant Islam made its way back to the likes of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, here the ever-growing heap of victims of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.

Juliette eventually forces her way into that other Silo, where she comes across a few survivors living the life of misery, degradation and false hope that characterized democratic Russia in the 1990s. Back in her own Silo, a much more interesting story develops: as in 1989 China, the situation has been untenable for many, because many in the regime no longer believe the propaganda they keep spouting. Weakened from the inside, the regime is about to crumble when Juliette makes it back in the very last second before the airlock is opened and catastrophe ensues. She writes down her message in a piece of paper that she displays in front of the cafeteria window:

“The Party is shit, yes. It’s still better than the alternative.”