Two months after the mass protests in China, a silent surveillance and arrest campaign is unfolding. By the end of January, over a hundred protesters who participated in the “white paper revolution” had been detained, with some of them released on bail under police surveillance. Meanwhile, a state of normalcy has returned. After the sudden removal of zero-COVID measures and a deadly COVID wave that took over one million lives, the virus subsided at the start of February. People are going back to their hometown for Chinese New Year, spending winter break traveling abroad, and going to movie theaters and shopping malls at weekends, just like before COVID.
It is hard to imagine that only two months ago, Chinese people were marching on the streets, protesting under a zero-COVID regime sustained by constant lockdowns, quarantines, and mass testing. From Nov. 24 to Nov. 30, thousands of people in China protested by holding pieces of white paper, symbolizing their resistance to censorship and demand for freedom. The “white paper revolution” spread to most provincial capital cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangzhou and Urumqi. Chinese people in the diaspora also joined anti-government protests, organizing large scale demonstrations in New York, Paris, London, Tokyo and universities around the world, including at Emory University.
However, protests in mainland China died down after the Chinese government announced a drastic change in COVID regulations on Dec. 7, lifting lockdowns in most cities and effectively ending the zero-COVID policy. This unexpected policy shift quelled the protests, as ending lockdowns and zero-COVID was the major demand of the movement.
But zero-COVID was not the only reason why people protested. As the government lifts COVID lockdown, it continues to tighten its grip on people’s political freedom. Citizens who participated in the protests before Nov. 30 are being arrested by the police and charged for “disrupting public order.” Days after the protests, police in Shanghai randomly checked people’s phones in the subway for VPNs and banned foreign apps, such as Twitter and Telegram.Videos have shown police breaking into people’s rooms and beating dissidents in front of their children. Since freedom of expression is another demand of the “white paper revolution,” the protests are likely to be reignited as long as political oppression continues.
Additionally, our understanding of the “white paper revolution” should not be confined to the nationwide protests before Nov. 30. Instead, the protests in November are a starting point, and they can have significant effects on later rounds of civil disobedience. As the largest civil unrest in China since 1989, these protests contributed a myriad of new anti-government symbols that can be readily invoked in later protests: “Urumqi Road” street signs, white paper, hazmat suits symbolizing zero-COVID workers and “404 not found” web pages that indicate Internet censorship. These politically charged symbols will live on after the protests before Nov. 30.
The protests in November are also a drill for larger civil disobedience that may lie ahead. When people gathered timidly during protests in Wuhan, when workers in Foxconn weakly hit the glass window of a PCR test station and when protestors in Shanghai gradually raised their voice while chanting anti-government slogans, they were getting used to bodily gestures of open resistance, gestures that were entirely new to a people who has lived under authoritarianism for so long. When the time comes for larger protests, the government will face a people that is braver and more experienced.
For a new round of civil unrest to happen, it only needs a trigger, and they will not be hard to find in post-COVID China. Chaos of “living with the virus,” ongoing oppression of ethnic minorities, worsening socioeconomic inequality, entrenched gender-based violence and suffocating control on freedom of speech all have the potential of causing a second round of “white paper revolution.” As the state becomes more and more powerful, it also becomes increasingly vulnerable: any injustice not directly perpetuated by the state can now be attributed to it. The “white paper revolution” has just begun.
Eric Li (25C) is from Nanjing, China.
