Often one object symbolizes an entire protest movement. In China, that object is a humble piece of blank paper.
In Shanghai on Sunday evening, some of those who gathered for a vigil to remember the victims of a fire that broke out Thursday in an apartment block (in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) that sparked protests once morest covid restrictions in China, they did so carrying blank sheets of paper.
Similarly, in the capital Beijing, protesters armed with scraps of paper attended a demonstration at the prestigious Beijing Tsinghua University, where President Xi Jinping once studied.
Meanwhile, in another striking video, a young woman might be seen walking through the streets of Wuzhen, a city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, with chains on her wrists and tape over her mouth, holding a pristine white sheet of paper with her hands.
This trend has its roots in the 2020 Hong Kong demonstrations, in which residents held up blank papers to protest once morest the city’s new draconian national security laws.
In addition to Shanghai and Beijing, there have also been demonstrations in Nanjing, Chengdu, Wuhan and other parts of the country.
Activists held the paper high following authorities banned slogans and phrases associated with the 2019 mass protest movement that saw the city come to a standstill and officials violently crack down on protesters.
Some have argued that the gesture is not just a statement regarding silencing dissent, but also a challenge to the authorities, as if to say: “Are you going to arrest me for holding up a sign that doesn’t say anything?”
“There was definitely nothing on paper, but we know what is there,” a woman who joined the protests in Shanghai told the BBC.
Johnny, a 26-year-old protester in Beijing, told the Archyde.com news agency that paper has become something that is used for “represent everything we want to say but can’t“.
Censorship on social networks
Kerry Allen, a China media analyst at the BBC, noted that Chinese officials tasked with censorship in the country have moved to control the country’s social media platforms following anti-government protests spread. by several of its large cities as a result of the fire that occurred last week.
Part of the population has interpreted that the fatalities of the fire might have been saved if the sanitary measures that kept the area semi-confined and protected with barriers that prevented the firefighters from arriving on time had not been applied.
The images of the building on fire and the calls for help from inside have exploded Chinese social networks, which since Thursday have been demanding that the authorities relax the protocols to fight once morest covid.
“Tens of millions of posts have been filtered out of search results,” he said. “‘Blank sheet of paper’ and ‘white paper’ now also show only poor results.”
Social media censorship has sparked anger on the internet, where one user wrote that “If you fear a blank sheet of paper, you are weak inside.”
Meanwhile, papermaker Shanghai M&G Stationary was forced to deny rumors that it pulled all A4 paper off its shelves for national security reasons.
M&G officials said that production and operation were normal and that they had notified the police of a forged document circulating on the Internet that had given rise to the rumor.
Chinese police have detained several people during anti-government protests.
But the blank slate has also become a measuring stick for those who remain loyal to the central government and are angered by waves of protests presenting an unprecedented challenge to President Xi Jinping.
A video, believed to have been recorded on Saturday at the Communication University of China in the eastern city of Nanjing, showed an unidentified man angrily snatching a blank piece of paper a protester before leaving.
In another video recorded later that night, dozens of other students are seen on campus holding up blank sheets of paper, standing silently.
Ways to bypass censorship
Protesters, trapped by Beijing’s censorship machine, have also resorted to other ways to express their anti-government views, including sarcastic expressions of support for China’s tough Covid policies.
In one case, following officials ordered dozens of protesters with blank sheets of paper to stop signing slogans once morest the lockdowns,they responded with sarcastic chants of “more confinements” and “I want to do a test covid”.
Meanwhile, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, some students were seen holding pieces of paper with their scribbled Friedmann equations in themin which the Russian physicist and mathematician explains how the universe evolves over time.
It is understood that the use of the equation is a pun on “Free man” (free man).
But it is this blank sheet that has been seen the most in the Chinese demonstrations, joining others elements used as an emblem of modern protest like the umbrellas used in protests in Hong Kong, rubber ducks from Thailand and flowers from Belarus.
