The protests against the government and its strict Covid policy continued on Monday. More than that, they have now spread to smaller cities as well. And the Xi Jinping government? A few months ago, he allowed himself to be celebrated for his strict zero-Covid policy. Now, however, it seems as if Xi and his men are in a state of shock. The government’s silence and the state media’s ignorance of the unrest make the shouts of the protesters on the streets all the louder.
Apart from a massive police presence and strict censorship, the ruling powers in Beijing seem to have little idea of what to do at the moment. In his analysis, Finn Mayer-Kuckuk explains the reasons and the deep dilemma Xi Jinping has maneuvered himself into: A simple carry-on is not possible, but neither is rapid relaxation of the Covid measures. A few weeks after the 20th CP Party Congress and his inauguration as ruler for life, Xi Jinping faces the biggest political crisis since he took office in 2013.
Fabian Peltsch takes his text to the protesters on the street. They tell him how they try to circumvent censorship. The state’s reaction is not limited to blind deletion. Rather, bots are deliberately activated to flood the digital channels and thus make targeted communication and information impossible. And, of course, the myth of foreign influence is not missing this time either.
Protests continued across China on Monday. In addition to criticism of the Covid policy, other concerns rose to the fore, including a general call for freedom and an end to censorship. The police maintained a massive presence on the streets. For the time being, police are seeking a middle ground between discouraging further gatherings and generally calming the situation. In addition, the first changes to Covid policy are being made to calm protesters.
The magnitude of the protests in recent days disproved the narrative that the party was in complete control of the country. Even sophisticated propaganda, digital surveillance and a sprawling security apparatus have failed to prevent the unrest. The population took note of the global differences in the way the pandemic is being handled and is now rebelling against the strict measures taken by their government. Ruler Xi Jinping faces the biggest political crisis since taking office in 2013 – a crisis largely caused by his own administrative ideas.
On Monday, the police deployed hundreds of units at the hotspots of last weekend’s protests. Especially in Beijing and Shanghai, the high presence of security forces was very noticeable. Nevertheless, citizens again shouted slogans like: “Freedom not PCR tests,” “We want to travel!” or “We want to go to work!” In some cases, they shouted their demands directly in the faces of the officers.
Police forces generally kept a low profile on Day 3 of the protests, but repeatedly singled out individuals, particularly conspicuous protesters, in some cases taking them away by force. Sometimes the police also controlled pictures and videos on protesters’ smartphones. They also recorded extensive film and photo footage themselves, presumably to capture the identities of those present via facial recognition.
On the one hand, China’s government apparatus appeared unimpressed and had various confirmations of its current zero-Covid policy broadcast in the media. On the other hand, the leadership has now banned the use of barricades to block the exits of housing complexes. Local disease control officials have used such barricades to prevent residents from leaving their homes in recent months. Beijing also clarified that neighborhood committees can no longer impose curfews on housing complexes on their own authority. Only the district government is authorized to do so.
The easiest way to relieve political pressure now would be a rapid departure from the country’s lockdown policy. But even in China, the virus does not conform to the demands of politics. The population still has hardly any immunity, and with more than 40,000 new infections, there is plenty of virus on the move in the country. Model calculations show that abandoning all measures at this point could cost the lives of 1.5 million people. ICUs would be overwhelmed 15-fold. So the leadership could not even open at this point without creating a health crisis. Xi is stuck in a quandary with zero-Covid, which he was hailed for as its architect just a few months ago (China.Table reported).
Stock investors and business representatives worldwide see the protests as harbingers of a continued downward trend in China. On the day after the first wave of protests, stock market indexes around the world dropped: Germany’s Dax index lost 1.1 percent, and markets in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Taiwan and Korea also moved into negative territory. Wall Street also opened weak. Analysts agree that the uncertainties in China are spooking investors. Neither high sickness rates nor eternal lockdowns are good for growth.
Shortly before the protest broke out, Joerg Wuttke, President of the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, identified precisely these points as risk factors that are now the main concerns of the protesters. Wuttke laments the widespread feeling of being trapped, the futility of many measures and poor consumer spending. “China has failed to prepare the move away from total control,” Wuttke explains. Precisely for this reason, he says, there is now a risk of losing control.
While images of the protests in China are a huge topic in German media, the Chinese government attempts to suppress them as best it can. So far, no report or commentary in the state media classifies the events according to the party line.
The so-called Wolf Warriors – Chinese diplomats who see protests outside China as evidence of chaos in democracies – are surprisingly quiet on Twitter. Their accounts currently show photos of the marathon in Shanghai, pictures of landscapes, and statistically supported hymns of praise for the party’s achievements. But can large-scale protests that are flaring up all over the country really be kept quiet and sat out so easily?
Being aware of the protests or not is a matter of social status, says a young Chinese woman who follows the protests mostly on social media. “My WeChat Moments feed is still full of the events, but my aunt, for example, only found out about it recently on Weibo, and even then not all that much.” The news about the protests certainly made the rounds among the elderly, but many would rather not talk about it openly, she believes.
Censorship promptly deletes any posts about the protests. “Many people try to take screenshots or record the live streams as soon as possible to gather as much evidence as possible,” says the Chinese woman. User comments are creative but clear. For example, videos of newly constructed quarantine stations are posted with dramatic music in the background. Or songs that refer to the protests without calling them by name, such as “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd, with the lines, “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.”
A young expatriate Chinese woman who is currently visiting her parents in Zhejiang describes how her WeChat account was restricted after she shared videos of the protests. All of a sudden, she received this message from her provider: “According to Internet-related policies and laws, you can no longer use group chats, Moments and other micro features until Dec. 1.” In Shanghai and Beijing, police officers have reportedly even asked people on the street to delete photos and foreign apps like Twitter and Telegram on their phones. “It feels like things are getting out of control,” the young woman says.
Other things, however, are deliberately not deleted. On Monday, for example, an article made the rounds on social media that first appeared on Jinri Toutiao, an AI-based news platform owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance.
In it, the well-known blogger Lang Yangzhi calls the protests a “color revolution“. Based on the accent, “freedom slogans in European and American style” and the use of long characters, foreign forces and “organizers with Hong Kong-Taiwan background” have been exposed as string pullers, the blogger writes. In Chengdu, some allegedly were even offered money to participate in the protests – a claim that was already part of the official narrative during the “umbrella” protests in Hong Kong.
“If the thing is officially declared as a color revolution, the government can take tougher action against the gatherings,” the young Chinese woman believes. By Monday, Lang’s article, which uses a very aggressive and sometimes racist choice of words, already had 10,000 comments. For example, the sentence, “Fight resolutely, punish harshly!” received 1,000 likes. 800 likes were given to the following comment: “Severe punishment for the reactionary foreign forces!”
The Twitter channel @whyyoutouzhele, which has managed to attract thousands of new followers in recent days and, according to its own statement only publishes verifiable videos, documented smaller protest groups in the cities of Hangzhou, Kunming, Nanjing, Wuhan and Guangzhou in addition to the larger demonstrations in Shanghai and Beijing. They were all harassed by security forces. “I was not on the ground, but I think it is understandable and reasonable. People want to live a normal life,” a man from Wuhan told China.Table.
Whether in Hong Kong, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Vancouver, San Francisco, Paris, Dublin, Oxford or London – people around the world gathered in front of Chinese embassies and missions on Monday to express their solidarity with the protests in China. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, too, people lit candles and held up white paper pages – the blank pages are meant to show that even in a highly censored environment, people can voice their disapproval without words.
The protest began last week as the citizens mourned those who died in a fire in Urumqi, a city in Xinjiang. The fire took 10 lives and seriously injured 9 people who were not able to leave the building as their doors had reportedly been locked from the outside by the Chinese authorities for quarantine-related reasons
Mourners began calling for the relaxation of COVID measures, chanting “no more lockdowns, no more PCR tests.” But as more and more people gathered on the streets, they started calling for the removal of Xi Jinping, the leader of the ruling party shouting “we need human rights, need freedom.” Since then the protests have spread like wildfire across the country.
The general perception of the Chinese people in the past was that they lacked political awareness and were unwilling to act on social issues. Although discontent has certainly been brewing for some time, under the sheer weight of three years of China’s harsh zero-COVID policy, nobody expected to see such a widespread manifestation of dissent. Aside from anything else, the authorities have worked very hard to keep information from the public: censoring or deleting online content, and churning out propaganda about China’s COVID success story.
But the people of China have not been deterred. Despite knowing what is to come, they have filled the streets. They know they will be subjected to a brutal crackdown or possibly worse. Yet still, they fill the streets. The force of the protests has been so overwhelming that some local authorities have even been forced to partially relax COVID measures.
There have been small and isolated protests and resistance in China in the past decades. After Li Wenlaing, the COVID whistleblower doctor, was hardly treated by the CCP, protests broke out two years ago. Some may remember the famous Guizhou bus overturning or the more recent hanging of anti-XI slogans from the XiTung Bridge before the recent Party Congress. Small things have accumulated, igniting the fire of resistance all across China.
For a long time, the people of China have accepted the CCP as their ruling party. They have had to be willing to trade away their freedoms. As long as business seemed to be doing OK, they have been content to keep quiet. For us Hong Kongers, it’s strange to see Mainlanders adopting a similar posture to our 2019 resistance. A common refrain from Chinese citizens during the 2019 Hong Kong protests was: “you ungrateful brats, on the payroll of foreign governments”. They could not understand why we would fight if there were no financial incentives, and hurled all kinds of insults towards us. For us, hearing Mainland Chinese calling for democracy and human rights, and demanding the resignation of Xi Jinping has always felt unthinkable.
But now, I am receiving messages from Chinese people on social media, apologizing for sending me harassment messages, and saying now they understand why we participate in activism and want democracy and freedom so desperately. There is a sense of sympathy and mutual understanding for the first time.
Among those of us at the sharp end of the CCP’s oppression, there’s a strong sense of righteous indignation. I have lost count of the number of journalists who doubted our cause, and even laughed at our efforts to stand up to the iron fist of the Communist Party. I have to fight the urge to send them videos of the courageous people of China. The totalitarian government of China will only end when the Chinese people demand it, and the fact they have started to do so fills me with hope and awe.
But admiring their courage isn’t enough. We are about to see a massive effort to suppress these people. We may even see a repeat of Tiananmen. As ever, democratic nations are completely unprepared. What are we going to do when Xi’s army rolls in to crush these brave voices demanding their rights? Are we just going to watch passively as they are interned in their thousands, and disappeared?
Time is short. We need our leaders to come together preemptively to agree on a sanctions package designed to deter a brutal crackdown, and to protect and defend those who are fighting for their fundamental rights.
In 1989 the world watched the Tiananmen Massacre unfold. In 2019 the world watched when China stole Hong Kong, in flagrant violation of international law. Will we watch passively as the hope for a free China is brutally extinguished? We must act before it is too late.
Chung Ching Kwong (previously also known as Glacier Kwong) is a civil rights activist from Hong Kong who has been living in exile in Germany since the democratic parties were eliminated.
Nature must make way for road construction. This is also the case in China. The provincial government of Hubei apparently figured since the river near Yichang is used for shipping anyway, why not put a highway on it? Then nothing has to be removed from the picturesquely beautiful mountains. And this unusual expressway on stilts in the river water will certainly also become an additional tourist attraction.
The protests against the government and its strict Covid policy continued on Monday. More than that, they have now spread to smaller cities as well. And the Xi Jinping government? A few months ago, he allowed himself to be celebrated for his strict zero-Covid policy. Now, however, it seems as if Xi and his men are in a state of shock. The government’s silence and the state media’s ignorance of the unrest make the shouts of the protesters on the streets all the louder.
Apart from a massive police presence and strict censorship, the ruling powers in Beijing seem to have little idea of what to do at the moment. In his analysis, Finn Mayer-Kuckuk explains the reasons and the deep dilemma Xi Jinping has maneuvered himself into: A simple carry-on is not possible, but neither is rapid relaxation of the Covid measures. A few weeks after the 20th CP Party Congress and his inauguration as ruler for life, Xi Jinping faces the biggest political crisis since he took office in 2013.
Fabian Peltsch takes his text to the protesters on the street. They tell him how they try to circumvent censorship. The state’s reaction is not limited to blind deletion. Rather, bots are deliberately activated to flood the digital channels and thus make targeted communication and information impossible. And, of course, the myth of foreign influence is not missing this time either.
Protests continued across China on Monday. In addition to criticism of the Covid policy, other concerns rose to the fore, including a general call for freedom and an end to censorship. The police maintained a massive presence on the streets. For the time being, police are seeking a middle ground between discouraging further gatherings and generally calming the situation. In addition, the first changes to Covid policy are being made to calm protesters.
The magnitude of the protests in recent days disproved the narrative that the party was in complete control of the country. Even sophisticated propaganda, digital surveillance and a sprawling security apparatus have failed to prevent the unrest. The population took note of the global differences in the way the pandemic is being handled and is now rebelling against the strict measures taken by their government. Ruler Xi Jinping faces the biggest political crisis since taking office in 2013 – a crisis largely caused by his own administrative ideas.
On Monday, the police deployed hundreds of units at the hotspots of last weekend’s protests. Especially in Beijing and Shanghai, the high presence of security forces was very noticeable. Nevertheless, citizens again shouted slogans like: “Freedom not PCR tests,” “We want to travel!” or “We want to go to work!” In some cases, they shouted their demands directly in the faces of the officers.
Police forces generally kept a low profile on Day 3 of the protests, but repeatedly singled out individuals, particularly conspicuous protesters, in some cases taking them away by force. Sometimes the police also controlled pictures and videos on protesters’ smartphones. They also recorded extensive film and photo footage themselves, presumably to capture the identities of those present via facial recognition.
On the one hand, China’s government apparatus appeared unimpressed and had various confirmations of its current zero-Covid policy broadcast in the media. On the other hand, the leadership has now banned the use of barricades to block the exits of housing complexes. Local disease control officials have used such barricades to prevent residents from leaving their homes in recent months. Beijing also clarified that neighborhood committees can no longer impose curfews on housing complexes on their own authority. Only the district government is authorized to do so.
The easiest way to relieve political pressure now would be a rapid departure from the country’s lockdown policy. But even in China, the virus does not conform to the demands of politics. The population still has hardly any immunity, and with more than 40,000 new infections, there is plenty of virus on the move in the country. Model calculations show that abandoning all measures at this point could cost the lives of 1.5 million people. ICUs would be overwhelmed 15-fold. So the leadership could not even open at this point without creating a health crisis. Xi is stuck in a quandary with zero-Covid, which he was hailed for as its architect just a few months ago (China.Table reported).
Stock investors and business representatives worldwide see the protests as harbingers of a continued downward trend in China. On the day after the first wave of protests, stock market indexes around the world dropped: Germany’s Dax index lost 1.1 percent, and markets in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Taiwan and Korea also moved into negative territory. Wall Street also opened weak. Analysts agree that the uncertainties in China are spooking investors. Neither high sickness rates nor eternal lockdowns are good for growth.
Shortly before the protest broke out, Joerg Wuttke, President of the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, identified precisely these points as risk factors that are now the main concerns of the protesters. Wuttke laments the widespread feeling of being trapped, the futility of many measures and poor consumer spending. “China has failed to prepare the move away from total control,” Wuttke explains. Precisely for this reason, he says, there is now a risk of losing control.
While images of the protests in China are a huge topic in German media, the Chinese government attempts to suppress them as best it can. So far, no report or commentary in the state media classifies the events according to the party line.
The so-called Wolf Warriors – Chinese diplomats who see protests outside China as evidence of chaos in democracies – are surprisingly quiet on Twitter. Their accounts currently show photos of the marathon in Shanghai, pictures of landscapes, and statistically supported hymns of praise for the party’s achievements. But can large-scale protests that are flaring up all over the country really be kept quiet and sat out so easily?
Being aware of the protests or not is a matter of social status, says a young Chinese woman who follows the protests mostly on social media. “My WeChat Moments feed is still full of the events, but my aunt, for example, only found out about it recently on Weibo, and even then not all that much.” The news about the protests certainly made the rounds among the elderly, but many would rather not talk about it openly, she believes.
Censorship promptly deletes any posts about the protests. “Many people try to take screenshots or record the live streams as soon as possible to gather as much evidence as possible,” says the Chinese woman. User comments are creative but clear. For example, videos of newly constructed quarantine stations are posted with dramatic music in the background. Or songs that refer to the protests without calling them by name, such as “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd, with the lines, “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.”
A young expatriate Chinese woman who is currently visiting her parents in Zhejiang describes how her WeChat account was restricted after she shared videos of the protests. All of a sudden, she received this message from her provider: “According to Internet-related policies and laws, you can no longer use group chats, Moments and other micro features until Dec. 1.” In Shanghai and Beijing, police officers have reportedly even asked people on the street to delete photos and foreign apps like Twitter and Telegram on their phones. “It feels like things are getting out of control,” the young woman says.
Other things, however, are deliberately not deleted. On Monday, for example, an article made the rounds on social media that first appeared on Jinri Toutiao, an AI-based news platform owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance.
In it, the well-known blogger Lang Yangzhi calls the protests a “color revolution“. Based on the accent, “freedom slogans in European and American style” and the use of long characters, foreign forces and “organizers with Hong Kong-Taiwan background” have been exposed as string pullers, the blogger writes. In Chengdu, some allegedly were even offered money to participate in the protests – a claim that was already part of the official narrative during the “umbrella” protests in Hong Kong.
“If the thing is officially declared as a color revolution, the government can take tougher action against the gatherings,” the young Chinese woman believes. By Monday, Lang’s article, which uses a very aggressive and sometimes racist choice of words, already had 10,000 comments. For example, the sentence, “Fight resolutely, punish harshly!” received 1,000 likes. 800 likes were given to the following comment: “Severe punishment for the reactionary foreign forces!”
The Twitter channel @whyyoutouzhele, which has managed to attract thousands of new followers in recent days and, according to its own statement only publishes verifiable videos, documented smaller protest groups in the cities of Hangzhou, Kunming, Nanjing, Wuhan and Guangzhou in addition to the larger demonstrations in Shanghai and Beijing. They were all harassed by security forces. “I was not on the ground, but I think it is understandable and reasonable. People want to live a normal life,” a man from Wuhan told China.Table.
Whether in Hong Kong, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Vancouver, San Francisco, Paris, Dublin, Oxford or London – people around the world gathered in front of Chinese embassies and missions on Monday to express their solidarity with the protests in China. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, too, people lit candles and held up white paper pages – the blank pages are meant to show that even in a highly censored environment, people can voice their disapproval without words.
The protest began last week as the citizens mourned those who died in a fire in Urumqi, a city in Xinjiang. The fire took 10 lives and seriously injured 9 people who were not able to leave the building as their doors had reportedly been locked from the outside by the Chinese authorities for quarantine-related reasons
Mourners began calling for the relaxation of COVID measures, chanting “no more lockdowns, no more PCR tests.” But as more and more people gathered on the streets, they started calling for the removal of Xi Jinping, the leader of the ruling party shouting “we need human rights, need freedom.” Since then the protests have spread like wildfire across the country.
The general perception of the Chinese people in the past was that they lacked political awareness and were unwilling to act on social issues. Although discontent has certainly been brewing for some time, under the sheer weight of three years of China’s harsh zero-COVID policy, nobody expected to see such a widespread manifestation of dissent. Aside from anything else, the authorities have worked very hard to keep information from the public: censoring or deleting online content, and churning out propaganda about China’s COVID success story.
But the people of China have not been deterred. Despite knowing what is to come, they have filled the streets. They know they will be subjected to a brutal crackdown or possibly worse. Yet still, they fill the streets. The force of the protests has been so overwhelming that some local authorities have even been forced to partially relax COVID measures.
There have been small and isolated protests and resistance in China in the past decades. After Li Wenlaing, the COVID whistleblower doctor, was hardly treated by the CCP, protests broke out two years ago. Some may remember the famous Guizhou bus overturning or the more recent hanging of anti-XI slogans from the XiTung Bridge before the recent Party Congress. Small things have accumulated, igniting the fire of resistance all across China.
For a long time, the people of China have accepted the CCP as their ruling party. They have had to be willing to trade away their freedoms. As long as business seemed to be doing OK, they have been content to keep quiet. For us Hong Kongers, it’s strange to see Mainlanders adopting a similar posture to our 2019 resistance. A common refrain from Chinese citizens during the 2019 Hong Kong protests was: “you ungrateful brats, on the payroll of foreign governments”. They could not understand why we would fight if there were no financial incentives, and hurled all kinds of insults towards us. For us, hearing Mainland Chinese calling for democracy and human rights, and demanding the resignation of Xi Jinping has always felt unthinkable.
But now, I am receiving messages from Chinese people on social media, apologizing for sending me harassment messages, and saying now they understand why we participate in activism and want democracy and freedom so desperately. There is a sense of sympathy and mutual understanding for the first time.
Among those of us at the sharp end of the CCP’s oppression, there’s a strong sense of righteous indignation. I have lost count of the number of journalists who doubted our cause, and even laughed at our efforts to stand up to the iron fist of the Communist Party. I have to fight the urge to send them videos of the courageous people of China. The totalitarian government of China will only end when the Chinese people demand it, and the fact they have started to do so fills me with hope and awe.
But admiring their courage isn’t enough. We are about to see a massive effort to suppress these people. We may even see a repeat of Tiananmen. As ever, democratic nations are completely unprepared. What are we going to do when Xi’s army rolls in to crush these brave voices demanding their rights? Are we just going to watch passively as they are interned in their thousands, and disappeared?
Time is short. We need our leaders to come together preemptively to agree on a sanctions package designed to deter a brutal crackdown, and to protect and defend those who are fighting for their fundamental rights.
In 1989 the world watched the Tiananmen Massacre unfold. In 2019 the world watched when China stole Hong Kong, in flagrant violation of international law. Will we watch passively as the hope for a free China is brutally extinguished? We must act before it is too late.
Chung Ching Kwong (previously also known as Glacier Kwong) is a civil rights activist from Hong Kong who has been living in exile in Germany since the democratic parties were eliminated.
Nature must make way for road construction. This is also the case in China. The provincial government of Hubei apparently figured since the river near Yichang is used for shipping anyway, why not put a highway on it? Then nothing has to be removed from the picturesquely beautiful mountains. And this unusual expressway on stilts in the river water will certainly also become an additional tourist attraction.
