Point blank

Why empty pieces of paper are a problem for Chinese leader

It is a blank piece of paper that is worth the unspoken words of thousands of Chinese protesters.

Taking to the streets in defiance of China’s drastic anti-COVID lockdown policies, the peaceful protesters hold aloft sheets of blank, white A4-sized paper as riot police stand at attention nearby.

“There’s no message on the blank paper, but everybody knows what the message is, because everybody is fed up with the COVID restrictions, everybody is fed up with no free speech, no rights, with the Communist Party’s rule,” said Yaqiu Wang, a senior China researcher with Human Rights Watch.

The message is this: no more lockdowns; no more deaths in barricaded buildings; no more lost incomes; no more electronic tracking; no more stifled speech.

China’s zero-COVID policy has imposed lockdowns on residents of buildings, neighbourhoods or entire cities until the last infection has run its course; it has shut schools and businesses, or forced workers to live where they work for fear of cross-contamination; it has led to food and supply shortages; and there are fears of restrictions ramping up again with the forceful seasonal return of the virus.

And in a sign of just how desperate Chinese citizens have grown due to the restrictions, which have been imposed and even celebrated by the country’s leadership, some protesters this weekend were heard calling for the end of the ruling Communist Party and its powerful leader, Xi Jinping — the kind of call that is normally answered with a prison term.

Xi, who has personally championed the pandemic response in his country, who has spoken glowingly of “the people’s war against COVID” — and who is now facing a public uprising against his own leadership that could be difficult to contain.

The public anger that led to the recent protests was sparked by a fire last Thursday on the 15th floor of a building in Urumqi, a city in the western province of Xinjiang. The highrise housed Muslim Uyghur families, whose persecution at the hands of the Chinese authorities has been recognized as a genocide by Canada’s House of Commons.

The building, which was close to both a police and fire station, had been under government-imposed lockdown for months — since July 5, said Abduweli Ayup, a linguist in Bergen, Norway, who runs Uyghur Hjelp, an organization that documents human rights abuses.

But China’s long-running persecution against Uyghurs, in addition to the lengthy pandemic lockdown, may have resulted in a higher death toll, he suggested, noting that many of the victims were women and children.

A mother and her four children were members of a Uyghur family whose father was detained in 2017 and whose elder brother had been in prison for at least a decade.

And there were videos on Chinese social media networks that appeared to show the building’s doors barred from the outside, to prevent residents from leaving.

“If there was a man (present) maybe they could have been strong and helpful and at least lead the way and do something, maybe break something,” he speculated.

The deaths resulted in protests that spread in the days that followed across the vast country, despite Beijing’s strict control on the information that passes across official news channels.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute gathered information on what it said were at least 58 mass protests in 18 Chinese cities over the weekend. But in the official Chinese media publications, there no indication of any out-of-the-ordinary activity.

Among the most striking images was video of protesters in Shanghai chanting “Step down, Xi Jinping” — a phrase that can be dangerous just to think in China, let alone to shout out loud within earshot of authorities.

But it is the logical result of Xi’s governing style as he begins his third presidential term, said Gordon Houlden, a former Canadian diplomat and director emeritus of the University of Alberta’s China Institute.

Xi leads on every matter, delegating neither the responsibility nor the risk to subordinates.

“In the past, you could fire the prime minister. You could fire a minister,” Houlden said. “But he’s the Mr. Everything, which means that he gets the credit for everything and he gets the stick for everything.”

Jia Wang, interim director of the China Institute, said Beijing will be desperate to figure out a resolution that involves both a slight easing of the public health restrictions while also protecting the population, which includes 176 million people age 65 and over, who are considered to be at a higher risk of suffering serious COVID symptoms and could lead to the collapse of the country’s health networks.

“I think, at this stage, it is still manageable for the government to quickly implement some measures to introduce more effective vaccines, for example … and to answer people’s calls for some easing,” she said. “They just have to balance it well.” Others suspect — or hope — that the Chinese government has painted itself into a corner.

Jiang Jiaji, whose dissident father is in prison and who took part in a Toronto solidarity protest this weekend, said that if the government eases restrictions on movement it will only encourage more people to protest. But taking a lockdown hard line could push public anger to a boiling point, he said.

This weekend, he said, he noticed that even the diaspora members in Toronto who support the Chinese government and are pressured and enticed into showing up to counter those anti-government protesters were notably absent.

“Those people who get bought by the Communist regime, they also know that this is the turning point for China right now,” Jiang said. “Today maybe they’re taking money, but that money doesn’t buy freedom. It doesn’t buy democracy for their future.”

But the burden is not just the Chinese government’s to bear. The democratic West is also watching China’s protests, watching demonstrators’ defiant A4-paper protests and projecting onto the blank sheets both hope and anxiety.

“Our message to peaceful protesters around the world is the same and it has been consistent: People should be allowed the right to assemble and to peacefully protest policies or laws or dictates that they take issue with,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said Monday in understated solidarity.

Some pro-China commentators have already planted seeds of suspicion, suggesting that the protests are being organized, encouraged and supported by foreigners.

The reality, said Houlden, the former Canadian diplomat, is that it is “exceptionally difficult” for outsiders to penetrate the protective shield China has erected around its population and its power.

“With smaller countries there are western interventions, but we’re very far from that,” he said, adding that China has “a huge reserve of capacity” — from water cannons to armoured vehicles to chemical sprays — “to intervene in public demonstrations.”

So far, there have been reports of local police officers randomly checking people’s telephones in search of communications apps and signs of sympathy for the protesters.

But Houlden noted that China spends more on ensuring domestic security than on foreign threats.

There is one important thing that the world can do to support those who are challenging the Chinese government, said Ayup, the Uyghur activist, who himself fled China in August 2015.

“We should stand with the protesters,” he said. “It’s morally important and it’s ethically important for those people.

“We couldn’t save those people who died in the fire, but we should protect those people who are standing up to get their rights from the government.”