“We want freedom!”
People in China are
taking extraordinary risks to demand their rights. Holding blank sheets of white paper, protesters across the country, many of them young people, are signaling that after 10 years of repression, censorship, and detentions under President Xi Jinping, they will
dare to call for freedoms – despite the risks.
The protests began late last week as thousands of people in Shanghai took to the streets to decry the government’s
strict “zero-Covid” measures and to denounce the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule.
The catalyst for the protest in Shanghai was an
apartment fire in China's northwest
Xinjiang region, in which at least 10 people were killed. Many suspected that pandemic control barriers and related restrictions prevented people from escaping and hampered emergency responders.
Within a day, protests spread to university campuses and cities across the country. The fact protesters are using blank banners to help evade arrest speaks volumes about the
climate of fear in China.
Videos circulated online show police officers trying to disperse crowds and dragging protesters into police vehicles. Meanwhile, online censors moved quickly to erase social media posts and accounts providing news about the protests.
While small protests do happen occasionally in China, it is extremely rare for people to publicly call for President Xi Jinping to step down or for the end of Communist Party rule. Such challenges to the party’s power usually result in long, brutal prison sentences or worse, as in the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, when military forces killed an untold number of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing.
More recently, authorities have tightened online censorship, expanded surveillance, dismantled civil society groups, and imprisoned many independent activists, making large-scale protests difficult to carry out.
But
Chinese authorities have underestimated the willingness of people to risk all to have their rights and liberties respected. And they are letting Beijing - and the world - know it.
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