#it was sourced from youtube but I had to use a vpn to grab it because its blocked everywhere except CANADA

[hermajestytak]

EVER WONDERED WHAT RICHARD HORVITZ AS PILOT ZIM SOUNDED LIKE? WONDER NO MORE! BEHOLD THE ENTIRE LESS THAN A MINUTE OF DUBBED LINES HE DID INTERNALLY TO TEST HIS VOICE FOR ZIM!

[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