The History Behind China’s White Paper Protests | History

The cry in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park rose over the syncopated sounds of a jazz combo and a loudspeaker blasting rap. Clustered near the park’s iconic arch, about 200 protesters joined a chant. “End the lockdown!” they shouted. “Abolish ‘Covid zero’!” A university student threaded past the participants, handing out blank sheets of white paper.

The small crowd that gathered in Latest York on December 4 had joined a unprecedented moment some 7,000 miles away. Days before, in late November, lots of of Chinese residents stood within the cold night air of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, holding aloft fresh sheets of paper in a silent demand for freedom from the country’s zero-Covid policies, which have imposed draconian restrictions in an effort to eliminate the coronavirus entirely throughout the country’s borders. Their strategic shows of defiance continued a protracted global tradition of silent protest, wherein activists register their discontent with wordless marches and long hunger strikes, by kneeling down or taping their mouths shut, or—in certain punitive societies—fighting propaganda and lies with blank pieces of paper.

Hushed protests invite the general public to fill within the blanks and add their very own grievances. “It’s an area for the imagination,” says Christopher Rea, a scholar of recent Chinese literature on the University of British Columbia in Canada. “It’s meant to be a provocation for anybody looking on. The blank piece is deliberately attempting to frustrate this surveillance regime.”

China’s blank paper protests

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 day by day 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 as an alternative caused avoidable deaths; on social media, users speculated that one such shutdown played a task in an apartment fire that killed ten people in Urumqi on November 24.

China’s residents know that despite the presence of infections, the remainder of the world has—for higher or worse, with the protection net of effective vaccines and antiviral drugs—returned to an almost pre-pandemic existence. People elsewhere go to offices, shop at malls, travel abroad and cheer from the stands at World Cup matches. Virtually nowhere except China has a government continued to maintain its residents housebound, as was the norm worldwide within the pre-vaccine era of 2020.

Whether China’s zero-Covid strategy is working is up for debate, particularly given the federal government’s tendency to undercount cases and deaths. President Xi Jinping has staked his claim to power on the policies’ success. But because the virus morphs with ever-new variants, case numbers are spiking (partly as a result of the usage of less-effective local vaccines), and unrest is mounting. Blanket suppression is the federal government’s preferred approach to containing Covid-19, argues the nascent White Paper Movement on its website, “since the epidemic is the most effective option to strengthen social control and maintain domination.”

Launched on November 28, the grassroots campaign initially asked for an end to lockdowns which have pushed thousands and thousands into joblessness and poverty, stalling the nation’s economic growth. The crowds that got here 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 all times. In a rustic where dissidents can disappear into black-site prisons for years while awaiting trial, the general public outcry stunned even some participants.

Days after the show of widespread discontent, the Chinese government eased lots of its most restrictive Covid-19 rules and policies—a move that experts say could spark waves of infections and deaths in a rustic sick equipped to handle mass hospitalizations.

Still, activists say they’re just getting began. The potential for real change within the authoritarian country drew a variety of protesters—amongst them, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and Chinese students studying abroad—to Washington Square Park in early December.

“There’s no option to share real thought in China,” said the paper pusher on the Manhattan protest, who gave his name as “Rick” (a handle the undergraduate admitted was fake, as he was nervous in regards to the government causing trouble for his family back in Guangzhou). Rick had friends who’d joined the rallies at home, where censors stayed busy erasing any mention of the protests from social media, sometimes in seconds. He explained, “The blank paper means we wish to say that each social class has their very own demands. [We] wish to be treated with dignity of the person, to make a living. [We] want democracy.”

Silent protests around the globe

Protests are often regarded as big, noisy, sometimes raucous affairs, where agitated participants clamor for change with catchy chants and splashy banners. But silence could be an equally effective tool for sparking change.

In an authoritarian state with mass censorship, easy words and pictures can turn out to be crimes. Owning silence under such circumstances creates power, says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian specializing in modern Chinese history on the University of California, Irvine. When a protester joins a crowd and says nothing, they deny the state the tools to suppress. A silent citizen’s words can’t be taken away or used against them.

Lately, protesters worldwide have confronted their governments with blank slates. Earlier this 12 months, Russians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine were roughly faraway from the streets after holding up blank pieces of paper in response to a law that banned uttering or publishing the word “war” in reference to the military campaign.

In Hong Kong in 2020, residents stunned by the arrival of a recent security law lodged their fury by holding up fresh sheets of printer paper. Authorities have arrested nearly 200 people under the law; one man was sentenced to nine years in jail for carrying a flag bearing the banned slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

The history of silent protest

The auditory version of the blank sheet is, after all, silence. Protesting wordlessly was a way employed by Black Americans in July 1917, when an estimated 10,000 residents, organized by religious groups and the NAACP, marched down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to protest racial violence and discrimination. Because the Latest York Times reported, “Those within the parade represented every negro organization and church in the town. They marched, nevertheless, not as organizations, but as a people of 1 race, united by ties of blood and color, and dealing for a typical cause.”

In September 1968, tens of 1000’s of scholars staged a silent march calling for greater democracy in Mexico. Contradicting the Mexican government’s accusations that they were resorting to violence, the scholars protested by simply carrying flags. (Around this same time, civil rights activists in america wielded flags with similar goals in mind.) “You’re taking the symbols of the regime and exposing the illegitimacy of the regime at the identical time,” says David Meyer, a sociologist on the University of California, Irvine.

Other protests have employed more obvious symbols of repression, including handcuffs, blindfolds and gags. The last of those became widespread as a political prop following the trial of the Chicago Seven (originally eight), antiwar protesters who were charged with inciting a riot on the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Through the 1969 trial, the judge ordered defendant Bobby Seale to be gagged and chained to his chair.

A long time before football player Colin Kaepernick created a stir by kneeling throughout the national anthem, Black athletes silently used their status to fight oppression. On the awards ceremony for the 200-meter dash on the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a clenched gloved fist in a call for global human rights.

The operating theory behind silent protests is that when the cause is evident and righteous, there’s no reason to yell about it—a principle demonstrated by newer examples of silent protests, too. In 2009, a peaceful rally in Iran against unfair elections led to gunfire and explosions. To vent their fury, lots of of 1000’s of Iranians met at Tehran’s symbolic central roadway, Islamic Revolution Street, and marched quietly to Freedom Square, hoping to avoid a police crackdown. In 2011, protesters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, stood quietly in solidarity with activists detained without trial by the country’s regime. Multiple times in Hong Kong, lawyers have marched in silence to protest Beijing’s incursions into the town’s structure and legal affairs.

Standing in for silence

Slogans, jokes, objects and colours can stand in for complex sentiments. In Hong Kong, protesters carried yellow umbrellas—also useful to defend against pepper spray—as symbols of their demand for democracy. In Thailand, protesters borrowed a gesture from The Hunger Games series, saluting with three fingers aloft within the aftermath of a military coup. Elsewhere, rainbow flags and the name “Solidarity” have signified the successful fights waged by proponents of LGBTQ and Polish labor rights, respectively.

In some authoritarian nations, dissidents craft jokes and pictures to construct a following and weaken support for the regime. Within the Cold War-era Soviet Union, access to typewriters and photocopiers was tightly controlled. But protesters could share news and rile officials with underground samizdat literature (Russian for “self-publishing”), which was hand-typed and passed around from individual to individual. These publications also used anekdoty, or quips of wry lament, to joke about post-Stalinist Soviet society. In a single example, a person hands out blank leaflets on a pedestrian street. When someone returns to query their meaning, the person says, “What’s there to put in writing? It’s all perfectly clear anyway.”

Within the early twentieth century, generations of Chinese writers and philosophers led quiet philosophical and cultural revolutions inside their country. Zhou Shuren, higher known by the pen name Lu Xun, pushed residents to solid off repressive traditions and join the trendy world, writing, “I even have at all times felt hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall; that wall of ancient bricks which is always being reinforced. The old and the brand new conspire to restrict us all. When will we stop adding recent bricks to the wall?”

In time, Chinese residents mastered the art of distributed displeasure against mass censorship and government control. That was actually the case throughout the movements that bloomed after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. On the 1989 protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, participants used strips of red cloth as blindfolds. Before the tanks turned the weekslong gathering right into a tragedy on June 4, musician Cui Jian played the anthem “A Piece of Red Cloth,” claiming a patriotic symbol of communist rule as a banner of hope for a frustrated generation.

After lots of, if not 1000’s, were gunned down by the military, China banned any reference to the events at Tiananmen Square. But Chinese people became adept at filling that void, using proxies and surrogates to consult with the tragedy. Though Chinese censors scrub terms related to the date, similar to “six 4,” emoji can sometimes circumvent these measures. In line with Meng Wu, a specialist in modern Chinese literature on the University of British Columbia, a straightforward candle emoji posted on the anniversary tells readers that the writer is observing the tragedy, even in the event that they can’t achieve this explicitly. Lately, the federal government has removed access to the candle emoji before the anniversary.

As a survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre spoke to the group gathered at Washington Square Park, the undergraduate who called himself Rick expressed concern for a friend who had been taken into custody by police in his home province of Guangdong. Given the federal government crackdown, Rick suggested that public protests were largely finished for now. Still, he predicted, the movement will “turn out to be something else”—something yet to be written.