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China's Covid Protests #179194
11/28/2022 02:17 PM
11/28/2022 02:17 PM
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They've turned into something beyond Covid. It's becoming more reminiscent of Tiananmen Square. Let's pray it ends differently.

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Chinese revolt against "zero COVID" policies. While the rest of the world moves on from COVID-19 containment measures, many Chinese citizens have still been subjected to lockdowns and other restrictions on movement. They've finally had enough.

Protests broke out Friday in Urumqi, after an apartment fire killed at least 10 people and injured others. COVID restrictions may have impeded people's efforts to escape.

"Protests spread to cities and college campuses around China on Saturday night, reflecting rising public anger at the country's draconian Covid controls, with some in a crowd in Shanghai directing their fury at the Communist Party and its top leader, Xi Jinping," reports The New York Times:

Quote
The tragedy has fanned broader calls to ease China's harsh regimen of Covid tests, urban lockdowns and limits on movement nearly three years into the pandemic. For much of that time, many accepted such controls as a price for avoiding the widespread illness and deaths that the United States, India and other countries endured. But public patience has eroded this year as other nations, bolstered by vaccines, moved back to something like normal, even as infections continued. And after years of enforcing the strict "zero Covid" rules, many local officials appear worn down.


Efforts to ease these rules keep failing in the face of new outbreaks.

"Barely a week after no longer requiring residents to show a negative Covid test to use mass transit, the authorities in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang have locked down much of the city for five days as infections surge," the Times reported last week. "In Shanghai, many neighborhoods have begun requiring frequent Covid tests again only days after telling residents that the tests were seldom needed."

Protesters this past weekend chanted, "We want freedom."

"There is only one disease in the world, that is, being unfree and poor, and now we have both," said a man in Chongqing in a video that began spreading widely last week. "Give me liberty or give me death!"


William Hurst, a Cambridge University professor who studies Chinese politics and protest, wrote this weekend that the protests are "novel in that protesters have appeared on the streets in multiple cities with apparent knowledge of what is happening in other parts of the country," in contrast to past protests, which have generally been localized or confined to a specific group (such as students or workers).

In this case, distinct groups have been airing different complaints, but all with COVID policies as a central theme. Some of these complaints have morphed into more generalized anger at the Communist regime. "Workers in Zhengzhou and elsewhere are engaged in labour protests, but with #ZeroCovid as a kind of frame for their grievances. Students across dozens of campuses, similarly are mounting familiar kinds of protest, but also framed around Covid," noted Hurst.

[Linked Image]

So far, the Chinese authorities' response to the protests has not been "nearly as harsh, repressive, or even coordinated as we might have predicted," Hurst added.

Taisu Zhang, a historian at Yale University, points out the role played by that China's centralized COVID policies. These boosted the state's popularity in the early days of the pandemic, when the efforts appeared to be working to suppress COVID. But after those policies started to malfunction, they gave protesters a centralized, national target.

"Centralization and systemic political coherency is a high-risk, high-reward thing, but the upsides of the rewards are probably not as high as the downsides of the risks are low," commented Zhang. But in China, "decentralization doesn't seem to politically viable anymore, at least not as a matter of central level political discourse. That, more than the protests, and even more than whatever damage zero-Covid will do/has already done, is the main reason to worry about the country's long term socioeconomic prospects."


Onward and upward,
airforce

Re: China's Covid Protests [Re: airforce] #179195
11/28/2022 07:01 PM
11/28/2022 07:01 PM
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airforce Offline OP
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China is spamming social media with porn and ads for escort services to try to drown out videos of protests.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Re: China's Covid Protests [Re: airforce] #179196
11/29/2022 02:46 PM
11/29/2022 02:46 PM
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Chinese protesters are being contacted by police demanding information about their whereabouts.

Quote
People in China who attended weekend protests against Covid restrictions say they have been contacted by police, as authorities begin clamping down.

Several people in Beijing said police had called demanding information about their whereabouts.

It is unclear how police might have discovered their identities....

On Tuesday morning, police could be seen in both Beijing and Shanghai patrolling areas where some groups on the Telegram messaging app had suggested people should gather again.

A small protest in the southern city of Hangzhou on Monday night was also quickly stopped with people swiftly arrested, according to social media footage verified by the BBC.

Reports also say that police were stopping people and searching their phones to check if they had virtual private networks (VPNs) set up, as well as apps such as Telegram and Twitter which are blocked in China.

One woman told news agency AFP that she and five of her friends who attended a protest in Beijing had received phone calls from police.

In one case, a police officer visited her friend's home after they failed to answer their phone and asked whether they had visited the protest site, stressing that it was an "illegal assembly".

Another told Reuters that they were asked to show up at a police station to deliver a written record of their activities on Sunday night.

"We are all desperately deleting our chat history," one Beijing protester told Reuters. "Police came to check the ID of one of my friends and then took her away. A few hours later they released her."

Police have also detained journalists covering the protests in recent days. News agency Reuters said one of its journalists was briefly detained on Sunday before being released.

BBC journalist Ed Lawrence was also held for several hours while covering a protest in Shanghai on the same night. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said his detention was "shocking and unacceptable", adding that Britain would raise concerns with China about its response to the protests....


Read the whole thing at the link.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Re: China's Covid Protests [Re: airforce] #179206
12/02/2022 04:14 PM
12/02/2022 04:14 PM
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"It's the first time I've seen this in China." I don't think many people realize just how momentous this is.

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On Saturday night, the center of Shanghai was teeming with young people in bars drinking and watching the World Cup on wide-screen televisions. They were rooting for Argentina, which was facing off against Mexico. (The Chinese love Lionel Messi, Argentina’s star striker.) 

Then, something happened.

The message started to spread—mostly on Wechat, China’s No. 1 chat app—that a few people were gathering and lighting candles on Urumqi Road, in the French Concession, which is full of high-end bakeries and eateries and Shanghai’s famous, three-story lane houses. 

Urumqi Road takes its name from the capital of Xinjiang, where, two days before, at least 10 people had died in a fire in an apartment building. All of the dead were Uyghurs. 

The central government in Beijing would prefer the Chinese people forget the Uyghurs exist. More than a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been confined to so-called re-education camps; there have been forced sterilizations, forced labor, the forced teaching of Mandarin and the forced pledges of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. The fire seemed like an unintended consequence of the central government’s policy, and it had been blamed, in part, on the regime’s zero Covid policy and its overzealous enforcement in Xinjiang. For 48 hours, an outcry had been building online, and now it was threatening to spring into real life.

In China, real-life demonstrations are okay if they’re not explicitly political. Workers protest against unpaid wages. Residents protest pollution coming from nearby power plants. But people don’t protest or march or get angry about whatever the president or party is doing. 

On Saturday night, they did.

When I reached Urumqi Road, there were maybe 50 police officers trying to block access to the vigil. Sounds were echoing from a small crowd and getting louder as I approached: “Yao ziyou!” they chanted, which means: We want freedom! They held their phones up to record the moment. I realized my heart was pounding. I’m 33, French, and I’ve lived in China for nine years—and I had never witnessed this kind of protest.

Some demonstrators held up blank sheets of paper. A woman in her late twenties explained to me: “Our country does not let us write anything here, but even if we don’t write anything, people know what we would like to say.”
She meant they weren’t allowed to say what they really thought about the important things—the kind of country they wanted to live in—and now they were winking at one another, and it was like they were sharing a secret message that was no longer so secret. She added: “What I feel is that, for a few hours, I am free. Even if it is very short, for once, I can say what I want.” A friend of hers standing nearby suddenly burst into tears. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this in China,” she said.

While the rest of the world has mostly moved on from Covid, China is in year three of an increasingly brutal—and unsuccessful—effort to extinguish the virus. True, the country has seen relatively few Covid deaths, but it has come at a steep price: to keep people inside, the authorities have, in many cases, welded apartment doors shut or locked them with chains. A sophisticated digital-surveillance system keeps close tabs on everyone. Food and medicine have been in short supply. Children have been separated from parents, and people have been forced into quarantine camps. Depression and suicide have been on the rise. 

The Urumqi tragedy was a galvanizing moment. After the fire, the people of Urumqi were the first to lead the way. Thousands defied the lockdown and took to the streets to protest, and with some success: they obtained the end of the restrictions in the least affected districts of the city. 

Since then, protests have taken place at universities in Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and in neighborhoods in Wuhan, Chongqing, and Lanzhou, where crowds have destroyed Covid testing booths.

Sliding through the tight crowd at the vigil on Urumqi Road, I discovered a small memorial: candles lit on the ground and wreaths of flowers laid in tribute to the victims of the fire. Some messages were also written on signs: “We don't forget: Guiyang, Urumqi, Henan, Xi'an.” These were the places where people had died during confinement. They hadn’t been able to get medical care; in one case, there had been a bus accident on the way to a quarantine center. Their deaths, their suffering, was now melding into everyone’s anger. It was becoming a cause.

The people at the vigil were mostly in their twenties or thirties. They felt walled off from the rest of the world, literally and otherwise. They chanted: “Health code, fuck you!” They sang the Chinese national anthem, and a revolutionary song that begins “Arise! Ye who refuse to be slaves!” In April, during the Shanghai lockdown, those words were censored on Weibo, China’s Twitter. The revolutionary was now, apparently, counterrevolutionary, or too revolutionary.

A Uyghur man in his thirties told me: “No freedom here.” He was from Urumqi and has relatives who lived in the building where the tragedy took place. “The building was locked down. They survived,” he said, referring to his extended family, “but they were terrified. I’m a man, I’m not used to crying, but for the last three days I've been crying all day.” He added: “You know, for us Uyghurs, it didn’t just start with the lockdown. We’ve been suffering for years in Xinjiang.” 

Gradually, the crowd became more daring. They demanded freedom of expression, and freedom of the press. They yelled: “We don't forget 6/4,” which was a reference to the last time students challenged the government and demanded democracy, on Tiananmen Square, on June 4, 1989. The party crushed Tiananmen with tanks and machine guns. 

When someone shouted, “Xi Jinping, resign,” the crowd exploded, and soon other people were saying it, and it was as if the shouter had broken a taboo in a country where people usually lowered their voice when mentioning the name of their leader. 

Then someone else in the crowd shouted, “Down with the Communist Party,” which was a big no-no—the Chinese generally broadcast their ideological fervor—and the crowd loved that, too. It was like toppling the statue of a dictator.
I told a colleague we were probably witnessing something important that might become very important.

Thomas, a 27-year-old who would only share his English name, shouted out in the middle of the crowd: “We want democracy!” He had an intellectual flair, with his velvet pants and black cap and round glasses, and he told me that he’d fallen into a deep depression during the Shanghai lockdown and that he’d be unable to recover so long as the threat of a new lockdown was still looming. 

"It gives you a sense of helplessness,” Thomas told me. “I feel like life is not worth living.” He was angry, but for a few hours, on Urumqi Road, he wasn’t—he was on fire. “This is the first time in my life that I have seen a mobilization like this, on the street and not online.”

No one knows what comes next. The party is obsessed with stability, maintaining control. Since Tiananmen—which happened before many, if not most, of the people at the vigil were born—China has perfected its ability to contain unrest. But the movement that is building right now is complex and amorphous, pulling together urban, tech-savvy students and angry, ordinary people around the country sick of being unable to go outside or go to the market or share a cigarette with a friend.

The response so far has been a kind of toggling—the predictable crackdown followed by the teensiest, weensiest of concessions. An editorial published Monday by the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that locking up people’s homes with chains and blocking emergency exits is illegal. It was like the state reminding the state what not to do. 

At the same time, the authorities issued a strong warning, calling for a "crackdown on illegal criminal acts that disrupt social order,” according to minutes from a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which oversees all domestic law enforcement in China.

Also: arrests are increasing. On Sunday, there were tons of police at the site of the vigil in Shanghai—which, since the news of the fire broke, had become a sort of go-to hub for the angry and dispossessed. Police didn’t want people leaving flowers (those were quickly removed). They dispersed the gathering crowd. A BBC cameraman was violently arrested and held for a few hours.


Officers were also seen inspecting people’s phones, looking for mentions of the protests or forbidden foreign apps like Telegram or Signal or Twitter. In some cases, police seized people and scanned their faces before releasing them. Thomas, the enthusiastic protester I ran into Saturday night, was arrested by the police on Sunday at work, one of his coworkers told me.

Since Tiananmen, there’s been a pretty straightforward trade-off in China between the state and the 1.3 billion human beings it presides over: You let us do whatever we want, and in exchange, you get rich (or, at least, richer). But during the pandemic, that trade-off faltered. It went off the rails. Not just that. The pandemic has shown this new generation of Chinese, which never suffered through Tiananmen, to say nothing of the Cultural Revolution, what the regime is capable of. What it is willing to do to its own people. I suspect the young people are rethinking the terms of their agreement with the overlords in Beijing. I suspect they want to renegotiate.


Onward and upward,
airforce

Re: China's Covid Protests [Re: airforce] #179211
12/04/2022 05:46 PM
12/04/2022 05:46 PM
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How Chinese citizens swamped China's internet controls.

Quote
A week ago, demonstrators took to the streets of the northwestern city of Urumqi to protest China’s strict zero-COVID policy. That night, a much bigger wave of protest crested on Chinese social media, most notably on the super app WeChat. Users shared videos of the demonstrators and songs like “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Misérables, Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” and Patti Smith’s “Power to the People.”

In the days that followed, protests spread. A mostly masked crowd in Beijing's Liangmaqiao district held up blank sheets of paper and called for an end to tough COVID policies. Across the city at the elite Tsinghua University, protesters held up printouts of a physics formula known as the Friedmann equation because its namesake sounds like “free man.” Similar scenes played out in cities and college campuses across China in a wave of protest that has been compared to the 1989 student movement that ended in a bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

Unlike those earlier protests, the demonstrations that have roiled China in the past week were entwined with and spread by smartphones and social media. The country’s government has tried to strike a balance between embracing technology and limiting citizens’ power to use it to protest or organize, building up wide-ranging powers of censorship and surveillance. But last weekend, the momentum of China’s digital savvy population and their frustration, bravery, and anger seemed to break free of the government's control. It took days for Chinese censors and police to tamp down dissent on the Internet and in city streets. By then images and videos of the protests had spread around the world, and China’s citizens had proven that they could maneuver around the Great Firewall and other controls.

“The mood on WeChat was like nothing I've ever experienced before,” says one British national who has lived in Beijing for more than a decade, who asked not to be named to avoid scrutiny from Chinese authorities. “There seemed to be a recklessness and excitement in the air as people became bolder and bolder with every post, each new person testing the government’s—and their own—boundaries.” He saw posts unlike those he’d seen before on China’s tightly controlled Internet, like a picture of a Xinjiang official bluntly captioned “Fuck off.”

Chinese netizens have built up a sense of what censors will and won’t allow, and many know how to skirt some Internet controls. But as the protests spread, younger WeChat users seemed to become unconcerned with the consequences of their posts, one tech worker in Guangzhou told Wired, calling on an encrypted app. Like other Chinese nationals quoted, he asked not to be named because of the danger of government attention. More seasoned organizers used encrypted apps like Telegram or shared to Western platforms, like Instagram and Twitter, to get the word out.

The anti-lockdown demonstrations began as unofficial vigils for the victims of a fatal fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. The city had been under COVID lockdown restrictions for more than 100 days, which some observers believe hindered victims trying to escape and slowed emergency responders. Most, if not all, of the victims were members of the Uyghur ethnic minority, which has been subject to a campaign of forced assimilation that sent an estimated 1 million to 2 million people to reeducation camps.

The tragedy came as frustrations with zero-COVID policies were already starting to spike. Violent confrontations had broken out between workers and security at a Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou that manufactures iPhones. Scott Kennedy, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, DC, says that when he visited Beijing and Shanghai in September and October, it was clear that people had “grown weary” of measures like regular PCR testing, scanning QR “health codes” to go anywhere, and the constant specter of a fresh lockdown. “I'm not surprised that things have boiled over,” Kennedy says. The government in early November signaled some restrictions would soon loosen, but the Urumqi fire and news that COVID cases were rising again, he says, “pushed people over the edge.”

Like people around the world, Chinese citizens tired of lockdowns turned to their phones to express their anger. Their familiarity with censorship and how to avoid it helped propel the protests and also helped provide inspiration for what might become their enduring symbol. Protesters held aloft white sheets of paper and posted white squares online, a motif seen by many as at least in part a reference to censorship. White is also the color of mourning in China, and the protests are being called the “A4 Revolution, or “white paper revolution” 白纸革命.

Protesters turned to now-familiar censorship evasion techniques, such as posting screengrabs to avoid text filters or adding filters to videos before sharing to sidestep automated detection systems. Protests were referred to using coded language, such as “going for a walk.”

For Chinese netizens, using puns, memes, and other tricks to evade censorship is old hat, although they are more often used to grumble or vent about the government than to encourage mass defiance. In the past week, they’ve been posting screengrabs of close-captioned music videos, or ironically flooding official posts with comments like “good” or “correct.”

In the past three years, as the domestic Internet has become more heavily regulated, people have become more savvy about using VPNs and US social platforms like Twitter and Instagram to access and spread information, says one Chinese national currently in Hong Kong. Chat app Telegram and Apple’s AirDrop local file-sharing feature provide essential ways to spread information about protests, although Apple recently tweaked AirDrop in China so phones are only visible to others nearby for 10 minutes at a time. Collectively, those digital tools fostered widespread awareness and coordination of the protests taking place across China. The movement showed unusual cross-class and cross-ethnic unity, the person in Hong Kong says, with migrant workers, ethnic minorities, feminist groups, and students all joining demonstrations.

Toward the end of last weekend, government efforts to clamp down on the protests were becoming evident—both on city streets and the Internet. The Guangzhou tech worker says that on Sunday night when he approached an area where protesters with signs were gathering, there were about 200 police officers on the scene, too, dispersed through the crowd to prevent large groups from forming. He left but heard that later in the night protesters scuffled with police. In the following days, he says, some protesters who were in the area were contacted by police, likely using location data gathered from their phones. By early this week, news wires reported that police were out in force in mainland cities where protests had occurred, and in some places they were checking people’s phones for VPNs or apps such as Telegram.

Videos of protests had been disappearing from WeChat within hours of the first demonstrations last Friday, but digital censorship—both AI and manual—ramped up across Chinese platforms early this week. The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered platforms and search engines to monitor content related to the demonstrations and remove information about how to use VPNs, sources told The Wall Street Journal. Wired tested the Chinese term for “white paper revolution” using the blocked keyword search created by Great Fire, an organization that monitors Chinese censorship, and found it was still searchable on the Twitter-like platform Weibo early this week, but by yesterday it was blocked.

By midweek, the streets and social feeds had quieted, and the censorship machine was in high gear when potentially destabilizing news broke: Former President Jiang Zemin had died. He oversaw a time of economic growth and relative openness in the 1990s and early 2000s. Chinese netizens filled WeChat with tributes to the late leader, in an oblique criticism of the current leadership that continued the week’s protests in a subtler form.

Heavy police presence seems to have held off further in-person protests, but activists Wired spoke to say they will regroup. Local governments have begun easing COVID restrictions, and the central government launched a campaign to vaccinate more elderly people, but the more lasting lessons of the week may be how powerfully social media can help people to spread calls for reform beyond China’s borders and bring divided groups of activists together. Within days, a demonstration commemorating members of a marginalized minority spread across China and inspired defiance from wide swathes of society. Their slogans, songs, and gestures were echoed on university campuses and city streets from Tokyo to London.

At a vigil in New York this week for the victims of the Urumqi fire, Wired saw people of all ages, speaking mostly Mandarin and English. Some held blank sheets of paper. There were supporters of Taiwan independence, Uyghur rights, and the Hong Kong democracy movement. One person set up a projector and a laptop across the street from the Chinese consulate, projecting “Urumqi” in English and Chinese in white light on the side of the drab gray building. “We’re counting on these people,” the person in Guangzhou told Wired after viewing photos from New York. The in-person protests may have dried up, but the seeds of a new movement have been planted, he says, and Chinese people have shown that even hamstrung digital tools provide them surprising power.


Onward and upward,
airforce


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