#china protest on covid

[the-juicymango]

Big Blow to China as lockdown protests spread to campuses and cities abroad

Big Blow to China as lockdown protests spread to campuses and cities abroad

Protests against China’s strict zero-COVID policy and restrictions on freedoms have spread to at least a dozen cities worldwide in solidarity with rare displays of defiance in China over the weekend. According to a Reuters tally, expatriate dissidents and students staged small-scale vigils and protests in cities around the world, including London, Paris, Tokyo and Sydney. In most cases, dozens…

[justaboutsnapped]

Begging you guys to look at what's happening in China

If you have a minute to spare, please consider reading and sharing this post.

[image ID: various photos about the #A4 revolution that is happening in China.

1st photo: a piece of white A4 paper with the following text on it: "Protests have been breaking out in many cities and university campuses across China thsi weekend in response to the highrise fire tragedy in Urumqi. Protesters called for end of zero-Covid policy and even an end to the Xi Jinping regime. The sheer number of particiipating cities and universities in this wave of protest have not been seen since 1989, after the June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre where protesting students and citizens were murdered by the Chinese army. Freedom of expression and protest are luxuries in China. Even holding a piece of white paper in public can get you into trouble with the police. We call on Chinese nationals from every corner of the world to join in the #A4revolution and simply post a picture of an A4 blank paper on social media to speak the unspeakable and support the brave fellow Chinese citizens who are taking it to the streets in China." In the bottom right hand corner are the hashtags #白纸革命 and #A4 revolution.

2nd photo: protesters holding up pieces of white, blank A4 paper. The third photo is has protesters holding up paper on the left side, and a row of police standing guard right across from them. The fourth photo is of a piece of blank A4 paper

3rd photo: protesters holding up paper on the left side, and a row of police standing guard right across from them.

4th photo: a blank, white piece of A4 paper

end ID.]

I don't wanna guilt trip people and say things like "if you don't reblog this you don't care". but not a lot of people in the world know about what is happening in China right now so I'd really appreciate it if you'd share it with your family, friends, and peers.

The images above are reposted from the instagram account @citizensdailycn. If you speak Chinese and are not up to date regarding the situation please check them out at https://www.instagram.com/citizensdailycn/. They are also on twitter under the same username: https://twitter.com/CitizensDailyCN. If you speak English, you can check out their English counterpart, @whatsup_beijing: https://www.instagram.com/whatsup_beijing. Actual footage of the protests can be found on the Instagram account @northern_square: https://www.instagram.com/northern_square. If you want to distribute posters, here are some designs protestors have made: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vgjmsp8dgjnav93/AAD04p5ljQZ1hi9YSz4TAfmHa/%E6%9C%89hashtag%E6%B5%B7%E6%8A%A5?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1, https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vgjmsp8dgjnav93/AACsR7d5ICrG7hlYPErJSIuEa/%E6%97%A0hashtag%E6%B5%B7%E6%8A%A5?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ql2CyIZfWy36nFRn0ahu83oCxh5zRXAj

This is the first time I've posted anything like this, and it is 2:49 AM in the morning so my post might not be perfect. If anyone has any resources or additions please feel free to add them in the reblogs! Also if you think the image IDs need improvement, or that I need more trigger/content warning tags please let me know by sending an ask or a message. Thank you.

[o-kurwa]

Due to the backlash from Chinese fans seeing unmasked crowds in Qatar, Chinese TV is now replacing live crowds shots during games and instead cutting to close-ups of players and coaches.

[silverfox66]

[memenewsdotcom]

China covid-19 protests spread

[quotesfrommyreading]

Slogans, jokes, objects and colors 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 in 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 images to build a following and weaken support for the regime. In 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 person to person. These publications also used anekdoty, or quips of wry lament, to joke about post-Stalinist Soviet society. In one example, a man hands out blank leaflets on a pedestrian street. When someone returns to question their meaning, the man says, “What’s there to write? It’s all perfectly clear anyway.”

In the early 20th century, generations of Chinese writers and philosophers led quiet philosophical and cultural revolutions within their country. Zhou Shuren, better known by the pen name Lu Xun, pushed citizens to cast off repressive traditions and join the modern world, writing, “I have always felt hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall; that wall of ancient bricks which is constantly being reinforced. The old and the new conspire to confine us all. When will we stop adding new bricks to the wall?”

In time, Chinese citizens mastered the art of distributed displeasure against mass censorship and government control. That was certainly the case during the movements that bloomed after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. At the 1989 protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, participants used strips of red cloth as blindfolds. Before the tanks turned the weekslong gathering 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 hundreds, if not thousands, 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 refer to the tragedy. Though Chinese censors scrub terms related to the date, such as “six four,” emoji can sometimes circumvent these measures. According to Meng Wu, a specialist in modern Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia, a simple candle emoji posted on the anniversary tells readers that the author is observing the tragedy, even if they can’t do so explicitly. In recent years, the government has removed access to the candle emoji before the anniversary.

As a survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre spoke to the crowd 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 government crackdown, Rick suggested that public protests were largely finished for now. Still, he predicted, the movement will “become something else”—something yet to be written.

  —  The History Behind China's White Paper Protests

[transrevolutions]

the difference between the antivaxx protests and the protests rn in China is that getting vaccinated literally does not hurt you, and is proven not to hurt you. on the other hand, people in China died because the lockdown codes were so strict that firefighters couldn't get into a burning building on time. people (mostly working class folks) are also struggling to access food.

not wanting to do something that minorly inconveniences you and not wanting to do something that could end in your death are two wholly different scenarios and that's why comparing the two different scenarios doesn't add up.

[silverwolf1249]

Raising Awareness: China's White Paper Protests

If possible, please consider reading and sharing this post.

So my tumblr has absolutely nothing to do about politics, but this is something hitting a little close to home and stuff like this is so important to get seen because it sure won't get the attention it needs, so I want to help increase its visibility any way I can.

I can't even begin to tell you my shock when I learned that the top 2 universities in China (Tsinghua University and Beijing University respectively) were both protesting against the CCP. That the protesting started from people all over China, and once some universities began protesting, the networking between the academic institutes made the protests quickly spread to roughly 175 universities all over China and abroad like Harvard and Caltech which have decent amounts of Chinese international students. I've even seen a few signs about the Ürümqi Fire (one of the major tipping points that started the protests) on my own university campus, which was the reason I started researching the situation.

For some background for those who might not know, the origin of using a piece of white paper to protest comes from a joke when Russia was still the Soviet Union. The general gist of the joke is that a man passes out blank fliers out to people, and gets arrested. He shows that he's only handing out white pieces of paper, but gets locked up anyway because "The fliers may be blank, but it shows your true intentions!". This, by the way, was explained to me by my dad, so it may deviate a little from the original joke. In any case, it's used to represent everything they cannot say aloud due to China's censorship.

But back to the coverage on the situation. I've been searching through most of the major english speaking news sources and read what I expected to see. Police intimidation in broad daylight, entering trains and people's own homes, and accosting people to delete any possible pictures they had from the protests and deleting all social media apps and VPNs which could help spread the word. They also recorded people's personal data, facial recognition, retinal scans, fingerprints, etc.

Several people were grabbed and arrested. There were also apparently a few journalists (including one from the BBC) who got caught trying to cover the issue and got beat up and arrested by the police before being let go after a few days. There's some other stuff as well, but overall it was mostly what I expected, but I still felt like there had to be more. I turned to my dad for some help, who's fluent in Mandarin.

With just one small search in YouTube with the phrase "白紙抗議", I got so much more new information. The phrase translates to white paper protests in traditional Chinese. This helped me find a treasure mine of recordings from a Taiwanese news channel that went further in detail and showed more first hand footage and images that was different than what I'd already seen, and so much more terrible to watch. But there were also videos and images that made me want to applaud the protestors.

Remember when I mentioned that an event called the Ürümqi Fire was a major tipping point to all the protesting? For some background information, Ürümqi is the capital city of Xinjiang, a huge region of China's north west area, and is also know as the Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The Ürümqi Fire was an event where an apartment building in the city burned down, killing at least 10 people. This wasn't even the first incident since China's zero-Covid policy, it just happened to be the event that got the ball rolling. In the english speaking media I looked into, I only saw pictures of the fire, or a silent video of it.

In the video I found? The recording also had sound, people screaming desperately for someone to help, unable to escape their locked rooms, and with no firemen coming to save them until much, much too late; all issues stemming from China's zero-Covid policy. It only gets worse from there.

Currently in english speaking media, most people only suspect more violent police suppression than just restraining people. Well, no need for any more speculations when you can watch two first hand accounts of young women being beaten by the police for not complying. The actual violence is, thankfully fully censored. Just seeing the beginning of the videos alone made my heart drop to my stomach.

But it's not all doom and gloom. These videos also held plenty of pictures of slogans graffitied by protestors all over different college campuses, and lemme tell you, people get creative under rigid censorship. I'm still not clear what some of them actually mean because I'm barely able to speak any Mandarin, there's no hope in me deciphering the word play. There was also a clip in one of them on how one student at Tsinghua University started a protest on her own, until she was surrounded by a veritable crowd of people.

I will be adding both of the videos I watched below, they both have english subtitles and can help explain more than I can. They also go into more detail other major reasons people, especially college aged people, began protesting. Most of them are unsurprisingly, covid related.

Other than that, it's just...so incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking to see what these people are up against. The White House released a statement essentially saying they won't touch the topic because of the potential fallout with China. Apple is apparently helping the CCP by limiting AirDrop time to prevent protestors spreading awareness to other people. And, let's not forget what the CCP did with the last large, public, student ran protest; the CCP sure tried their best to make sure it was erased from their history.

The protestors, the majority being people my age, have everything against them. A much like the Hong Kong protests, they don't stand a very high chance at succeeding. But they're still fighting out there for what they believe in, and have definitely left their mark in history. I have so much respect for all of them, I'm worried for all of them, and all I can do is sit here and write this post and hope more people see this and spread the word. At the very least, I want raise awareness over the situation.

*Just a reminder to watch the videos at your own risk as they contain potentially triggering content*

(the first video is the most recent update

the second one only has english subtitles for part of the video, but they have Mandarin subtitles if you're willing to google translate, and also the first hand clips throughout the whole video are still worth to watch even if you can't fully understand what they're saying)

Some Other Sources:

*If these sources or any of my words above end up being from unreliable sources or later found to contain false information/updated information appears, don't hesitate to send asks or comments so I may edit my post/delete the links/add new or better sources.*

White House Weighs How Forcefully to Support Protesters in China

New Symbol of Protest in China Roils Censors: Blank White Papers

China Covid protests explained: why are people demonstrating and what will happen next?

Apple Limits iPhone File-Sharing Tool Used for Protests in China

How blank sheets of paper became a protest symbol in China

Protests erupt across China in unprecedented challenge to Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy

[panicinthestudio]

Protesters in China demand Xi Jinping step down, November 27, 2022

Unrest is growing in China over the country's strict COVID-19 measures. Fresh protests have broken out in major cities, with hundreds rallying at Beijing's elite Tsing-hua University, chanting 'we want freedom.' Many also held up blank sheets of paper in a symbolic protest against state censorship. More demonstrations have also been reported in Shanghai, following clashes with police overnight. Public anger has flared after a deadly apartment block fire, with many blaming an ongoing lockdown for hampering rescue efforts. Chinese officials have defended their zero-covid policy, despite the growing public backlash.

Deutsche Welle

Further reading:

AFP, via HKFP: Protests in Shanghai as anger mounts over China’s zero-Covid policy, November 27, 2022

BBC: China Covid: Protesters openly urge Xi to resign over China Covid curbs, November 27, 2022

The Guardian: Anti-lockdown protests spread in China as anger rises over zero-Covid strategy, November 27, 2022

Reuters: Blank sheets of paper become symbol of defiance in China protests, November 27, 2022

[xieyaohuan]

Hearing people in Shanghai chant "Xi Jinping step down!" wasn't on my 2022 bingo card.

Unlikely to go anywhere, but I cannot stress enough how unusual this is - not protests in China per se, which happen quite often, but protests across multiple big cities with explicit political demands.

[hezigler]

This takes guts!

[post-leffert]

China (Nov 27th 2022)

[milverton]

Two courageous Chinese girls are lecturing (literally) police officers, One said to a young police “how much u make a year? 20K monthly? Then 240k RMB a year. For such little u sold ur soul? That’s how much u sold yourself? Isn’t this funny? You guys are 20 or 30, is it worthy?”

https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/1596595921676079104

[the-usa-fame]

Over 100 Of China’s Biggest Cities Joined Nationwide Protest Against Zero Content Regulations

Over 100 Of China’s Biggest Cities Joined Nationwide Protest Against Zero Content Regulations...READ MORE

[memenewsdotcom]

China signals possible end to zero-covid

China signals possible end to zero-covid