Explainer
China Covid protests explained: why are people
demonstrating and what will happen next?
A protester shouts while holding up a blank piece of
A4 paper
Helen Davidson in Taipei
@heldavidson
Mon 28 Nov 2022 06.10 GMT
What is
happening?
In an
extraordinary wave of civil disobedience, dozens of protests broke out across
Chinese cities over the weekend as frustrations with the government’s stringent
Covid policies boiled over.
Groups of
people numbering from single digits to about 1,000 have gathered for candlelit
vigils and peaceful street protests. In some places, like Wuhan, they have
pushed over pandemic barriers, and in Shanghai, clashed with police. Holding
candles, phone lights, and blank pieces of paper, demonstrators have called for
the end of lockdowns and frequent mass testing.
Others
protests have heard demands for democracy and press freedom, and an end to
online censorship. There have also been reported chants echoing the slogans
displayed by the Beijing bridge protester on the eve of last month’s Communist
party congress political meeting.
How did we
get here?
Frustrations
with the zero-Covid policy have been rumbling for a while. As the rest of the
world returns to something resembling normal life, China’s population is still
being subjected to sudden harsh lockdowns of areas ranging from individual
shops to entire counties, often over just a few cases.
In
September, a bus carrying people to a Guizhou quarantine centre at night
crashed, killing 27 people. The death toll dwarfed the two Covid-related deaths
reported by the province since the pandemic began. Last month in Zhengzhou
thousands of workers in an Apple iPhone factory clashed with riot police and
tore down barricades, in part due to Covid restrictions. Across locked down
cities, residents also shared rumours and reports of suicides and other deaths
they linked to the enforcement of zero-Covid, including a baby and a
three-year-old child.
As the list
of incidents grew, so too did people’s impatience and skepticism, despite
authorities’ attempts to censor information and dissent.
Then last
week at least 10 people were killed in a building fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang,
which had been under lockdown for about 100 days. People blamed the lockdown
for the deaths. Their anger was exacerbated by an official’s response, which
appeared to blame the residents for not rescuing themselves, and on Friday the
first protests of the weekend were held in the city. Videos showed people in a
plaza singing China’s national anthem with its lyric: “Rise up, those who
refuse to be slaves”.
On Saturday
crowds gathered in Shanghai at Middle Urumqi Road – named after the Xinjiang
capital. At extraordinary risk, crowds chanted for the Chinese Communist party
and leader Xi Jinping to step down. By Sunday a wave of demonstrations
expressing both solidarity with Urumqi and local frustrations had spread to
cities including capital Beijing, Shanghai again, Chengdu, Wuhan, Lanzhou,
Nanjing, and dozens of university campuses.
What are
the blank pieces of white A4 paper?
The blank
pieces of paper have become a symbol of the burgeoning protests. Space to
safely express dissent has been effectively eliminated under the authoritarian
rule of Xi and is incredibly risky. The white sheets papers are a nod to the
denial of free speech and rampant censorship. A protest at the elite Tsinghua
university in Beijing began with one student holding a single sheet near the
campus canteen. It was taken away by staff, but she remained in position,
according to reports, and was soon joined by dozens, and then hundreds of
others.
“The white
paper represent everything we want to say but cannot say,” one young protester
at Beijing’s Liangma River told Reuters.
Ina video
purportedly filmed in Liangmaqiao, Beijing, a woman criticised the state media
coverage of the “man-made” tragedy in Urumqi.
“It’s all
lies, it’s all silence”, she said.
“We
launched the blank paper remembrance movement. Do we say anything on the paper?
No. All accusations are in our hearts. All thoughts are in our hearts.”
Police have
detained unknown numbers of protesters, including at least one foreign
journalist. The second night of protests in Shanghai was met with a heavy
police response, and the BBC said its Shanghai-based cameraman, Edward
Lawrence, was detained and beaten before being released. Police said only that
they detained him for his own good, in case he caught Covid from the crowd, the
BBC said.
In Beijing
two groups of protesters, totalling at least 1,000 people, were gathered along
the Chinese capital’s 3rd Ring Road near the Liangma River on Sunday night,
refusing to disperse. Crowds near Tiananmen Square demanded democracy and rule
of law, and decried dictatorships and “personality cults”.
Why are
these protests significant?
Observers
have said these protests are unlike anything they have seen in decades, perhaps
back to the deadly crackdown on student rallies in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square
in 1989.
“Because
they are so synchronised in terms of scope and the size of the crowds across
these cities, it’s truly a remarkable development,” says Prof Dali Yang, a
political scientist at the University of Chicago. Yang says everyone is
relating to incidents like the Urumqi fire and bus crash, because it could
happen to any of them.
“All those
people have been sharing the same situations – lockdowns, anxieties about jobs
and businesses, and various forms of frustrations with medical care, and
deaths.”
A modern
element of these protests is the pushback against online censorship. China’s
internet firewall and armies of information moderators is extraordinarily
effective, but has perhaps reached the limits of people’s patience. Citizens
are playing cat and mouse with censors, finding creative ways to share videos
and posts about the protests, express solidarity, or complain about authorities.
In Beijing
protesters called for a return of free expression. “Give movies back, we want
cinema freedom. We want free expression. Give media back, give us journalism
back.”
As all this
is going on, hundreds of thousands of people have been gathering in Qatari
stadiums to watch the football World Cup. The throngs of tightly packed,
maskless crowds have not gone unnoticed by Chinese fans, despite broadcasters
deliberately avoiding crowd shots. Observers have noted that Chinese
broadcasters traditionally prepare to “pre-censor” international sports
matches, avoiding crowd shots in case someone is holding a politically
sensitive flag or similar, but in the current context this practice is now
receiving a lot more attention and criticism.
Attempt to
control information also spread beyond the firewall, with protest-related
hashtags and search topics on Twitter flooded with irrelevant posts containing
tourism, advertising, and pornography.
Much of the
information sharing has moved away from public networks like Weibo, and into
more private – and harder to censor – personal communications like WeChat.
Protests in
China are not rare, but the scale and spread of these ones certainly are. And
the ask – an end to stringent zero-Covid – is not something the government is
willing to give right now. Eyes now are on whether the protests continue, or
even grow, during the week, and how authorities will respond. There will
probably be heavy consequences for those identified as protesters.
State media
has been silent on the protests but instead has published strongly worded calls
to “unswervingly adhere” to zero-Covid.
Yang notes
a variation in local authorities’ response to protests so far, with
coincidental loosening of restrictions in some areas, and heavy handed police
action in others. He also says there are some changes the central government
could make to appease people, or they could ease pressure by scapegoating local
officials or private companies involved in the pandemic response.
“They could
provide much clearer guidance, for example how and when China could exit zero
Covid. To this point the messaging has been frustrating and confusing, even to
officials,” he says.
“The
challenge is this virus is not going away.”
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