“It’s meant to be a provocation for anybody looking on,” said Chrisotopher Rea, a professor of modern Chinese literature. “The blank piece is deliberately trying to frustrate this surveillance regime.”
But the White Paper protests against sometimes deadly zero-COVID policies that swept through China late in 2022 did not frustrate the Chinese Communist Party regime, at least not to any greater extent than more explicit forms of protest did. As far as the Party is concerned, a coy protest, a mute protest, a protest that onlookers must (albeit with only nominal effort) decode is the same as a protest featuring shouts and signage.
Ürümqi fire
A few weeks after China’s White Paper protests began, Smithsonian Magazine reported (“A Brief History of Silent Protests,” December 12, 2022):
Three years into the Covid-19 pandemic, China still aimed to suppress the virus through monthslong lockdowns, travel restrictions, workplace shutdowns, ubiquitous tracking through cameras and cellphones, and rigorous daily testing. The protocols are sometimes carried out with brute force and what residents describe as an indifference to human suffering. Lockdowns purportedly meant to halt disease have instead caused avoidable deaths; on social media, users speculated that one such shutdown played a role in an apartment fire that killed ten people in Ürümqi on November 24….
Launched on November 28, the grassroots campaign initially asked for an end to lockdowns that have pushed millions into joblessness and poverty, stalling the nation’s economic growth. The crowds that came out to shout down riot police later expanded their demands to call for democracy, an end to censorship and even the removal of Xi, who abolished legal term limits in 2018 to potentially remain in office for life. In a country where dissidents can disappear into black-site prisons for years while awaiting trial, the public outcry stunned even some participants.
The lockdown in the Xinjiang region, of which Ürümqi is the capital, was “the most severe in China, with many residents unable to leave their homes for nearly four months,” reported Gareth Dale, a professor at Brunel University in London. The doors of the apartment block that became a death trap were reportedly bolted from the outside.
If crowds were shouting down riot police, the ironic and symbolic tactic of flourishing a blank sheet of paper was not universal. In any case, the distinction proved to be without a difference as far as the authorities were concerned. The government didn’t arrest many protesters right away. Indeed, the government’s most obvious immediate response was to start unwinding the zero-COVID insanity, just as protesters had urged. (More sweeping demands, for “democracy, an end to censorship and even the removal of Xi” fell on deaf ears.)
But the government didn’t forget. By February 2023, the BBC was reporting on “The protesters who’ve gone missing as China deepens crackdown.”
Even as the country “moved on,” many of the protesters “went missing…. Police made few arrests at the time. Now, months on, scores of those protesters are in police custody, say Chinese activists, with one group estimating there have been more than 100 arrests.”
People who held vigils to mourn the victims of the Ürümqi fire were arrested. One vigil, in Beijing, “turned into a peaceful protest, with people holding blank pieces of paper that became a symbol of their frustration.”
It was serious
According to a friend of one of those detained for attending: “The environment has been so oppressive for so long. They didn’t think they were participating in a movement when they went. They thought it was just a way to vent their emotions. They didn’t clash with police or express radical opinions. So they didn’t think it was serious.”
It’s unclear what led police to this particular group of friends, but they have reportedly tracked down protesters using surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, and searched the phones of those arrested.
One of the detainees created a Telegram group which expanded from several members to more than 60. And many of them used phone numbers registered under their real names. Two days later, some of them were questioned by police.
“We were talking on the phone when she was being taken away,” said the boyfriend of one detainee. “She told me some of her friends were being taken away and lost contact. She was trying to delete stuff from her mobile phone. She was taken away before she finished deleting things.”
The naïveté is a problem. One can only applaud anyone who publicly protests oppressive government. But protesters should understand the nature of the risk they’re taking and act only if they’re willing to accept that risk. Know what you’re up against.
