Calling China's Covid protests "white paper revolution" risks playing right into the hands of the government

Chinese leadership is expected to stick to the dynamic zero Covid policy but will curtail snap lockdowns, excessive controls, and mass testing.

Thought of the Day on China

Wang Xiangwei

The mass protests against China’s draconian Covid curbs over the weekend have made headlines around the world. But inside the country, the official media responded with deafening silence, pretending what were believed to be the biggest anti-government demonstrations in the recent decades hardly occurred at all.  

But their ridiculous act of playing ignorant was fully laid bare not least because even government’s mighty censorship apparatus was simply overwhelmed as video clips swamped the social media platforms showing protests on the streets and on campuses in major cities from Urumqi of Xinjiang to Shanghai to Beijing.

By Tuesday, the protests appeared to have subsided as heavy police presence were seen in major Chinese cities. But the political and social ramifications look set to rumble on.

Some overseas media have referred to the protests as the “white paper revolution” because some student protestors including those from Tsinghua University, President Xi Jinping’s alma mater, held up blank sheets of A4 papers to symbolize the heavy-handed censorship. This has led to speculation and concerns whether the unprecedented display of public dissent could inflame further and provoke stronger government crackdown as Chinese universities have been the hotbeds of activism including the Tiananmen protests.

Trying to avert the potential danger, Tsinghua and other universities in Beijing and Guangdong have started to send students home early to reduce the likelihood of more demonstrations.

But terming the protests as the “white paper revolution” is premature and could produce the opposite effect.

Student protestors holding the A4 papers may be the focus of the overseas media reports but they are just part of a much larger body of protestors frustrated and angry about China’s excessive zero-Covid suppression measures, which have caused widespread misery around the country. Their demonstrations were peaceful as they sang the national anthem and the Internationale. By China’s standards, the police have showed restraint although a few protestors were arrested and some were subsequently visited at home by police who warned them not to take to the streets again.

As the authorities in major cities including Guangzhou have significantly relaxed the excessive controls in the wake of the protests, the public anger appeared to have eased and more mass protests are unlikely.  

But describing the protests as a “revolution” risked playing right into hands of the Chinese government.

Already some pro-government social media influencers started to blame the so-called “foreign hostile forces” for instigating the protests.

Xinhua reported on Tuesday that China’s top security chief Chen Wenqing called for resolute efforts to crack down on “infiltration and subversive activities of hostile forces” and those crimes aimed at disrupting social order. Chen, head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the country’s highest security body, did not explicitly mention the weekend protests but the timing of his remarks was clearly meant as a warning of a more hardened stance towards future demonstrations.

It has long been the government’s default position to point the finger at foreign hostile forces whenever there is any major display of public dissent at home.

Over the past few years, President Xi and the Chinese media have repeatedly warned about the West-backed “color revolution” aimed at subverting China’s national security and the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party amid the rising tensions with the United States.

That probably explains why the White House has been cautious in response to the protests in China, merely backing “everyone’s right to peacefully protest”.

Still, some Chinese social media influencers including Sima Nan known for his leftist views questioned the motive of the Monday statement by the US embassy in Beijing which urged the American citizens in China to keep a 14-day supply of daily necessities at a time when the weekend protests had forced local authorities to relax Covid controls.

The government’s blame on foreign forces is disingenuous, to say the least. As one social media rightly put it: how could the Chinese people be influenced by foreign forces as many of them had been locked down at their own homes and their internet access to overseas media was severely restricted?

But the term “white paper revolution” may have given the Chinese officials the perfect excuse to shift and misdirect the blame.

Still, the unusual display of public anger will put more pressure on the leadership to execute a shift in its Covid policy.

On Wednesday, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, China’s top official in charge of Covid controls, changed her tune and for the first time acknowledged the current Omicron variants are weaker, calling for more efforts to vaccinate the elderly.

But she indicated that the central government is unlikely to eliminate controls any time soon. In terms of relaxation, Sun repeated a phase of “walking in small steps non-stop”, which seemed to summarize how the government is going to relax controls.

Indeed, President Xi has staked too much political capital on its dynamic zero-Covid policy as its success in suppressing the spread of the virus over the past three years is billed as the proof that China’s authoritarian model of governance is superior to the liberal democracy.

So what is going to happen next?

The leadership is expected to stick to the dynamic zero Covid policy but will order the local authorities to curtail the snap lockdowns and mass testing which caused widespread social discontent.

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