So often one thing becomes the symbol of an entire protest movement. In China, that object is a humble piece of blank paper.
As dusk fell in Shanghai on Sunday evening, some of those who had gathered at a checkpoint to remember the victims of the fire that sparked the protests held sheets of paper.
Similarly, in the capital Beijing, protesters armed with pieces of paper came to a demonstration at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, once attended by President Xi Jinping.
And in another shocking video, a young woman can be seen walking the streets of Wuzhen – a town in the eastern province of Zhejiang – with chains on her wrists and duct tape over her mouth. In his hand was a sheet of blank paper.
The trend has its roots in the 2020 Hong Kong protests, where locals held up blank pieces of paper to protest the city’s tough new national security laws.
Activists held aloft the paper after authorities banned slogans and phrases associated with a 2019 mass protest movement that saw the city grind to a halt and authorities violently arrest protesters.
Some have argued that the gesture is not only a statement to silence dissent, but also a challenge to the authorities, as if to say ‘Are you going to arrest me for holding a sign that doesn’t say anything?’
“There was definitely nothing on paper, but we know what’s there,” one woman who joined the protests in Shanghai told JEE News.
Johnny, a 26-year-old protester in Beijing, told JEE News had come to represent “everything we want to say but can’t say”.
JEE News analyst, observed that Chinese censorship officials have gone too far on the country’s social media platforms.
“Millions of posts are filtered out of search results,” he said. “‘Blank sheet of paper’ and ‘white paper’ also now only show fewer results.”
Censor scrubbing on social media has sparked outrage online, with one user writing that “if you’re afraid of a blank sheet of paper, you’re weak inside”.
Meanwhile, paper maker Shanghai M&G Stationery was forced to deny rumors that it had taken all A4 paper off the shelves for national security reasons. M&G officials said production and operations were normal and they had informed the police about the fake document circulating online that started the rumour.
But the blank sign has also become a lightning rod for abuse by people loyal to the central government and angered by waves of protests.
A video, filmed at the University of Communication in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing on Saturday, shows an unidentified man angrily grabbing a blank piece of paper from a protester.
In another video later that night, dozens more students were seen standing silently on campus holding pieces of white paper.
Protesters – hampered by Beijing’s censorship machine – have also turned to other forms of anti-government commentary, including mocking expressions of support for China’s strict Covid policies.
In one case, when authorities ordered dozens of white-clad protesters to stop signing anti-lockdown slogans, they responded with derisive chants of “more lockdown” and “I want a Covid test.”
And some students at Tsinghua University were seen holding pieces of paper with Friedman’s equations, which the Russian physicist and mathematician explain how the universe evolves over time.
The use of equality is thought to be a play on the words “free man”.
But it is paper that appears most commonly in Chinese protests, which include items such as umbrellas (Hong Kong), rubber ducks (Thailand) and flowers (Belarus) as symbols of modern protest. Is.
