First-time protesters battle a powerful surveillance apparatus to express dissent.
Little A, a university student in Shanghai, wouldn’t have known about the protest if a friend hadn’t told him to bypass the Great Firewall on Nov 27 to read news outside of China’s censored internet. That’s where he saw that people were planning to protest the country’s strict zero-Covid policy after at least ten people died in a fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, where some of the toughest lockdown measures were in place. To commemorate those who died, the gathering — one of dozens of protests that erupted in major cities across China in the days that followed — took place on Shanghai’s Urumqi Road.
When Little A left a nearby subway station at 8 p.m., the 22-year-old encountered a crowd already hundreds-strong, along with more than a dozen police vehicles. In addition to calling for an end to the zero-Covid policy, the protesters chanted slogans demanding democracy and rule of law, and sang the socialist anthem “The Internationale.” Little A, who spoke to Rest of World under a pseudonym to discuss his first-ever protest freely, said, “It was something I wouldn’t have imagined before. It was the first time I said ‘No’ while standing with everyone else.”
The protests that have taken place over the past week constitute the country’s biggest wave of civil disobedience in decades. But organizing in China isn’t as simple as posting an event announcement to an online forum or a rallying cry on social media. Protesters told Rest of World they worry that sharing information online could lead to having their accounts shut down, or even being detained.
Instead, they’re increasingly turning to workarounds — many completely offline — in order to spread the word: from holding blank pieces of paper in public to scrawling graffiti in bathroom stalls on university campuses. And with older people less likely to use digital tools like VPNs, some protestors say they have simply resorted to spreading their message through word of mouth.
The current wave of dissent started gaining momentum in October, when a lone person on a highway bridge in Beijing hung banners calling for an end to the coronavirus restrictions and for President Xi Jinping to step down. The protestor’s acts emboldened a small group of young Chinese to disseminate his message by writing his slogans on public bathroom walls, among the only public places unlikely to be under surveillance. Protestors also pinned leaflets on campus bulletin boards, and shared images of the protest between Apple devices through AirDrop.
After the Urumqi fire, protesters emerged in multiple cities, alerting each other to gather with a combination of coded WeChat messages, VPNs, and some guesswork. On Sunday evening in Shanghai, Little A only realized he was joining a protest when he found himself in the crowd facing the police. “It was so unexpected,” he said. “Before the night, I had never thought I would dare chant these slogans and disobey the police.”
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