A single spark can start a huge blaze.
– Chinese proverb
On 24 November 2022, a fire broke out at an apartment building in Urumqi, Xinjiang. Residents were unable to escape as they were locked inside the building, which was part of the zero-COVID policies in China that had increasingly been out of step with the rest of the world. The firefighters came but were unable to go near, hampered by pandemic control barriers. Eventually, the blaze took around three hours to extinguish. While the officials reported that 10 people were killed, most of them Uighurs, the real number was likely to be more than two dozen.
The fuse was lit. In the past few months, there had only been sporadic protests over the draconian zero-COVID policy, which involved highly intrusive measures such as the national tracking app and mass camping and was instrumentalised by the Chinese government as a tool of censorship and surveillance. But this time, fuelled by the authority’s attempt to blame the fire victims for handling electronic equipment carelessly, thousands of mostly young people protested across the country at a scale unseen since the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The following day, Urumqi residents gathered in front of a government administration building to mourn the deaths and protest COVID restrictions that had lasted for over three months. Upon hearing the news, on November 26, 2022, thousands of people in Shanghai began publicly protesting the government’s strict COVID-19 measures and denouncing the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule. They gathered at Middle Urumqi Road in Shanghai, holding blank banners and chanting “Down with the Communist Party!” and “Down with Xi Jinping!”. In Beijing, people gathered under Sitong Bridge, where a lone protester unfurled banners stating “Remove that authoritarian traitor Xi Jinping” on the eve of the 20th Communist Party Congress in October. At least 1,000 people congregated along the Chinese capital’s 3rd Ring Road near the Liangma River in the early hours of 28 November 2022, refusing to disperse. In other major cities such as Wuhan, where COVID-19 originated, Lanzhou and Guangzhou, people overturned COVID testing tents and smashed through metal barricades used for quarantine, demanding an end to lockdowns. University students across the country joined the crowd, and numerous protest banners, posters and graffiti of unknown origin appeared in public places. In addition, people outside China, including many in Hong Kong, staged vigils and protests in support of the demonstrators. While the scale of the protests is not unprecedented in Chinese history, it is indeed rare and rather unexpected in the contemporary era.
It is notable that this time, Chinese protesters borrowed a tactic from Hong Kong protests in 2020, namely holding up pieces of blank paper. The blank paper signifies all the things the protesters wish to express but cannot, as so many words have been declared out of bounds over the years, even Winnie-the-Pooh. Aside from that, creative forms of dissent, such as the Friedmann math equation, sarcastic calls for more lockdown and repurposed quotes from Xi Jinping, were also used.
“Solve” the person who brings up the problem
– Chinese catchphrase
International actors, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and International Service for Human Rights, have praised the extraordinary courage and solidarity of these protesters, although they may only represent a small segment of the 1.4-billion citizenry. This is so because, according to the China Communist Party’s playbook, any such dissent will be met with denial, repression, and surveillance. As expected, Urumqi officials denied that COVID measures had impeded escape and rescue. Peaceful protests were met with mass arrests, beating and pepper spray, which in some cases led to jostling between the protesters and the police. Protesters were dragged into police vehicles, some of whom were pulled back by fellow protesters. For those who returned home, they were tracked, contacted, and arrested by the police, as most people’s facial ID is recorded by the state and traceable through facial recognition technology. At least one woman was arrested for the Xi-era crime of “spreading rumours”. Although some of those arrested were released, some have been detained for more than 9 days, having been denied access to their family and lawyers. In other cases, the protesters went missing and were feared to have been forcibly disappeared. Lawyers were warned by the government not to take up the protesters’ cases, and some others have had incoming calls to their mobile phones suddenly cut. At least one lawyer has been sanctioned for being willing to defend protest cases. As a whole, the government’s reaction towards the protesters is unsurprising but nonetheless a horrendous intrusion into their human rights to privacy, expression and due process. Looking to the future, it is likely the security apparatus will further utilise mass surveillance and facial recognition technologies to identify individual protesters and prosecute them.
In terms of press coverage, the state media simply chose not to report the protests. Numerous independent journalists who sought to cover the protest were harassed, physically assaulted and arrested by the police. For example, Edward Lawrence, a BBC journalist, was dragged to the ground in handcuffs when covering the Shanghai protest and taken to the police station where he was kicked and beaten. On social media, the Chinese authorities brought in emergency level censorship to remove or drown out any online reference on social media to the protests, domestically and on Twitter. These efforts were made so people at home or abroad would be unaware of the protests and their extent. The mother of a detained protester, for example, said she was not aware of any protests until her daughter was taken into custody. This shows how the authorities were more concerned about maintaining reputation and control at the expense of people’s rights than addressing the underlying reasons for the social unrest, namely, the citizens’ unmet need for democratic participation in policy decisions that affect them significantly.
People who do not want to be slaves
– Lyric of March of the Volunteers
It is important to contextualise the recent anti-lockdown protests in order to fully appreciate their significance. As early as the Tibetan Uprising in 1959, the Chinese authorities have punished any perceived challenge to the China Communist Party’s power with brutal repression and harsh prison sentences. In the spring of 1989, thousands of students, workers and other citizens spent weeks peacefully protesting for political and economic reform. On June 4, Chinese troops entered the Tiananmen Square and opened fire, killing hundreds to thousands of protesters and detaining as many as ten thousand people. In April 1999, after the CCP started cracking down on Falun Gong, a spiritual movement involving traditional exercise, more than ten thousand practitioners of it protested peacefully outside the CCP headquarters in Beijing. The CCP went on to arrest, detain and torture numerous Falun Gong members. In March 2008, ethnic Tibetans and monks rioted in Lhasa around the forty-ninth anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, attracting violent response by security forces. In the same year, while the authorities agreed to establish protest zones during the 2008 Olympics, one of the few people who applied for permits was immediately detained. After the 2009 riots in Xinjiang against state-incentivised Han Chinese migration and discrimination, security forces detained hundreds of people, among whom dozens or more were forcibly disappeared. In 2011, after people called for a movement similar to the Arab Spring uprisings, the authorities rounded up over 100 of the most outspoken dissidents and forcibly disappeared them for weeks without any legal procedure. Therefore, the recent COVID-19 protests were far from unprecedented or isolated, but rather one of a series of protests in history that expressed dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regime.
However, these historical incidents also meant the recent protests were rather extraordinary and surprising. Due to the crackdowns that were likely to follow, many Chinese people have chosen to stay out of politics most of the time. Moreover, Chinese people are subject to intensive patriotic education from a young age, reinforcing the idea that the CCP’s authoritarian model is superior to their more democratic counterparts. They are also largely shielded from negative coverage of Chinese government’s human rights abuses; many people remain unaware of the atrocities in Xinjiang in recent years. Such persistent manipulation resulted in the emergence of “little pinks”, the jingoistic section of the younger generation, who bully peers critical of the government. The dissidents, having been deprived of means of democratic participation including peaceful protests, have to resort to cat-and-mouse games with a strong army of online censors. This is why the recent protests would have felt like an extremely unlikely occurrence before they actually happened, which contributes to their significance.
More importantly, the recent anti-lockdown protests reveal the model of relationship between the CCP regime and their citizens. Many Chinese citizens have accepted the authoritarian model of government, with the attendant lack of personal freedoms it may at times entail, on the condition that their basic needs in life are satisfied, such as food, accommodation and education. The zero-COVID lockdowns, however, have resulted in lack of hygienic food, unavailability of medical care, loss of income sources and accommodation, preventable deaths of loved ones, and exacerbation of mental health issues, which made more people realise that the existing model will never work because they do not have a voice in it. This prompts further thinking about whether fundamental rights, like the right to free expression, should be seen as tradable at all as if conducting a loss and benefit analysis, rather than inviolable qualities of humanity and dignity that deserve defending unconditionally.
