China’s infamous web police can’t sustain with the large volume of videos unmasking the unrest within the secretive nation — as fed-up residents protest the federal government’s draconian COVID lockdown rules.
The scary censorship regime can’t take down footage of the heated demonstrations fast enough — while crafty protestors are also using tricks to evade their systems, the Recent York Times reported Wednesday.
“This can be a decisive breach of the large silence,” Xiao Qiang, a researcher on web freedom on the University of California, Berkeley, told the publication.
Videos of demonstrators clashing with police, or holding up black sheets of paper in defiance, have been circulating on social media for days — an atypical and brave display of resistance in authoritarian China.
Footage posted to Twitter on Tuesday show dozens of riot police in Guangzhou moving in formation towards torn-down lockdown barriers as protestors threw objects at them.
Other videos showed police deploying tear gas in the town’s Haizhu district.
The Communist Party’s top law enforcement authority vowed in an announcement Tuesday that China would crack down on “the infiltration and sabotage activities of hostile forces.”
The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission also said it might not tolerate “illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order.”
However the protest videos keep circulating.
Based on Qiang, China’s reliance on automation to censor its residents online has, partly, made it difficult to clamp down on the social media resistance — as incidents were filmed from multiple angles with multiple probabilities to go viral.
“Once the anger spills on to the road it becomes much harder to censor,” Qiang said.
One former Chinese censor told the Recent York Times that Beijing would want to rent many more minders — and develop more sophisticated surveillance algorithms — if it desired to stem the torrent of videos being spread online.
Protestors have also discovered workarounds — adding filters, or making videos of videos playing on other devices — in a cunning and apparently successful bid to outwit state censors.
A growing variety of protesters are also beginning to employ virtual private networks — and similar software — that allow them to access services like Instagram and Twitter, that are banned from China’s web.
Reports over the weekend said police in China were confiscating cell phones, searching for photos or videos from protests, and deleting them — together with any VPN software.
The times of defiance were sparked by a deadly fire last week within the far western city of Urumqi, wherein rescue efforts were reportedly hampered by the country’s strict COVID lockdown restrictions.
Town had been under COVID lockdown for 100 days.
By Sunday, the protests had reached major cities like Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, in addition to the capital, Beijing.
The protests, nominally about Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s so-called zero-COVID policy of intense lockdowns to stop the spread of the pandemic, have turn into a referendum on Xi’s grip on power.
The leader recently broke with China’s Communist Party tradition and appointed himself to a 3rd term on the nation’s helm.
Though the federal government has yet to acknowledge the demands of the protesters, the cities of Guangzhou and Chongqing announced an easing of certain COVID quarantine rules on Wednesday.
The announcement comes after health authorities in Beijing announced a drive Monday to encourage elderly Chinese to receive the COVID 19 vaccine — which some have seen as a harbinger of fixing lockdown policies.
Only two-thirds of Chinese over the age of 80 have received a minimum of one dose of the vaccine, and lower than half are boosted.
Against this, 93% of Americans 65 and over are fully vaccinated, in line with the CDC.
With Post wires
China’s infamous web police can’t sustain with the large volume of videos unmasking the unrest within the secretive nation — as fed-up residents protest the federal government’s draconian COVID lockdown rules.
The scary censorship regime can’t take down footage of the heated demonstrations fast enough — while crafty protestors are also using tricks to evade their systems, the Recent York Times reported Wednesday.
“This can be a decisive breach of the large silence,” Xiao Qiang, a researcher on web freedom on the University of California, Berkeley, told the publication.
Videos of demonstrators clashing with police, or holding up black sheets of paper in defiance, have been circulating on social media for days — an atypical and brave display of resistance in authoritarian China.
Footage posted to Twitter on Tuesday show dozens of riot police in Guangzhou moving in formation towards torn-down lockdown barriers as protestors threw objects at them.
Other videos showed police deploying tear gas in the town’s Haizhu district.
The Communist Party’s top law enforcement authority vowed in an announcement Tuesday that China would crack down on “the infiltration and sabotage activities of hostile forces.”
The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission also said it might not tolerate “illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order.”
However the protest videos keep circulating.
Based on Qiang, China’s reliance on automation to censor its residents online has, partly, made it difficult to clamp down on the social media resistance — as incidents were filmed from multiple angles with multiple probabilities to go viral.
“Once the anger spills on to the road it becomes much harder to censor,” Qiang said.
One former Chinese censor told the Recent York Times that Beijing would want to rent many more minders — and develop more sophisticated surveillance algorithms — if it desired to stem the torrent of videos being spread online.
Protestors have also discovered workarounds — adding filters, or making videos of videos playing on other devices — in a cunning and apparently successful bid to outwit state censors.
A growing variety of protesters are also beginning to employ virtual private networks — and similar software — that allow them to access services like Instagram and Twitter, that are banned from China’s web.
Reports over the weekend said police in China were confiscating cell phones, searching for photos or videos from protests, and deleting them — together with any VPN software.
The times of defiance were sparked by a deadly fire last week within the far western city of Urumqi, wherein rescue efforts were reportedly hampered by the country’s strict COVID lockdown restrictions.
Town had been under COVID lockdown for 100 days.
By Sunday, the protests had reached major cities like Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, in addition to the capital, Beijing.
The protests, nominally about Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s so-called zero-COVID policy of intense lockdowns to stop the spread of the pandemic, have turn into a referendum on Xi’s grip on power.
The leader recently broke with China’s Communist Party tradition and appointed himself to a 3rd term on the nation’s helm.
Though the federal government has yet to acknowledge the demands of the protesters, the cities of Guangzhou and Chongqing announced an easing of certain COVID quarantine rules on Wednesday.
The announcement comes after health authorities in Beijing announced a drive Monday to encourage elderly Chinese to receive the COVID 19 vaccine — which some have seen as a harbinger of fixing lockdown policies.
Only two-thirds of Chinese over the age of 80 have received a minimum of one dose of the vaccine, and lower than half are boosted.
Against this, 93% of Americans 65 and over are fully vaccinated, in line with the CDC.
With Post wires
