Chinese living in China here. I don't see any western involvement.

There were protests in almost every tier-1 and tier-2 cities in China during the last few days. This is totally unheard of since the Tiananmen Square incident back in 1989. Police were ordered to randomly stop people to search their phones, they want to see whether you are part of wechat groups discussing the ongoing protests. Here in Shanghai, they even had the street nameplate removed because it contains the word Urumqi, which is the name of the city where 10 people who were locked up at home for zero-covid crap were burned to death due to a fire accident.

3 full years after the outbreak of the COVID, enough is enough, you just can't treat people like crap forever just because there are COVID.

The zero-covid policy precipitated the unrest - guess where covid policy and freedom of expression intersect? That's right, self-determination / democracy.

Most of these protests are not directly about democracy yet, but they are definitely hinting toward it.

There are both types of protest right now in China. Many are anti-local government, asking for the central government to help rein in the provincial and city-level officials who are the ones actually responsible for enforcing zero-Covid.

But there are also many pro-democracy/human rights type people coming out as well, especially in Shanghai and on university campuses. There are tons of videos of them calling for democracy, for Xi Jinping to step down, that kind of thing. You can find them on Twitter, but you’ll have to sort through all of the spam that the Chinese government is flooding relevant hashtags with.

Launch systems work virtually autonomously. Tolerance to loss of life isn't as meaningful as it was in the Apollo era.