Blank pages and satire against China’s virus policy

A blank A4 sheet of paper has become a symbol of protests against China’s policy of not spreading the virus, a strict set of regulations that still greatly affect the daily lives of the population and the country’s economy.

The newspapers are all white, as a silent commentary on state censorship that purges keywords associated with the protests from Internet search engines.

Instead, “positive” posts began to circulate on messaging service Wechat and social network Weibo, such as the words “right right right right” and “good good good”. But even these expressions are beginning to be removed, just like the wording about “A4 paper”.

In several places, protesters sang national and international anthems at their rallies, and in Beijing at the weekend, a group of people shouted “I want to get tested for coronavirus! I want to scan my health code!” – Satirical slogans also found their way to Weibo.

Criticize the system

There have also been protests against the zero-hunger policy in the past, but in recent days they have escalated and expanded to include criticism of the system itself in some places.

At the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, students at the weekend held up banners with Friedmann’s equations, a reference to the Russian mathematician’s name, which sounds like the word for “free man” or “freedom,” the AFP news agency writes. In 1922, Alexander Friedman was the first to discover that the universe did not have to be static as Albert Einstein assumed, but could expand, which is seen as a reference to closed China.

There are also examples of protesters chanting that they want freedom, and in Shanghai, for example, slogans such as “Down with the Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping” have been heard, a type of protest that is rare in China.

Old statements by President Xi Jinping are being used to support the demonstrations, including a video of him saying “Now the Chinese people are organized and should not be trifled with.”

sarcastic tone online

But even if some protests target the central government, the main thing the protests revolve around is the policy of not spreading the virus, especially on the internet where it is not unusual to criticize it, often in a sarcastic tone.

– One of the advantages of sarcasm and irony in China is that you can bypass censorship through sarcasm. This tactic has been around for 10 to 20 years, but the protests have a very different intensity now than before, says Gustav Sundqvist, a lecturer at Mallardalen University and an analyst at the National Knowledge Center for China at the Foreign Policy Institute (UI).

– I think a lot of people feel more protected if they express themselves sarcastically rather than talking to the point. But what is considered to be overreaching in criticism of the system is always a bit malleable, so we’ll see how that will be answered.

Shi’s loss of prestige

It remains to be seen if the protests, which continue to grow, will lead to any real change in anti-coronavirus policy. So far, the authorities have been relatively cautious, though some people have been arrested.

According to Gustav Sundqvist, it is not impossible that there will eventually be a change in Covid policy, but it is certainly not obvious to the country’s top management.

– I think it will be a great loss of prestige, especially for Xi Jinping, who is closely associated with the zero covid policy, he says and continues:

– But the Party Congress has already ended and he has his third term as General Secretary of the Communist Party, so he must be safer than if this had happened before the Party Congress. Somewhere, you have to weigh the loss of prestige against the fact that there could be more protests affecting China’s economy more negatively.