“Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!” “Need human rights, need freedom!” “Don’t want Covid test, want freedom!”; these are the slogans that protesters have been shouting throughout China for several days in what constitutes an unprecedented display of civil disobedience. Last November – almost three years into the Covid-19 pandemic – parts of the Chinese population began publicly protesting the government’s extremely strict sanitary measures, aimed at drastically reducing the spread of the virus at all costs. The country’s Covid-19 restrictions have notably included repeated and unpredictable lockdowns on hundreds of millions of people while also acting as the paradigmatic illustration of the one-party state’s authoritarian rejection of both individual and collective freedoms.
A protester shouts through a megaphone in Beijing on November 28th, 2022
Credits: Getty Images/Kevin Frayer
The unrest was triggered on November 25th by a fire that killed 10 people in a high-rise block in Urumqi, a city located in the western Xinjiang region. It was widely argued that the victims in the burning building were blocked by locked doors and other anti-infection controls – both of which happen to be in place as part of the “Zero-Covid” policy imposed by the Chinese government upon its population.
A few days later, mass demonstrations had spread to Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Wuhan, where thousands of inhabitants called for the termination of Covid restrictions, but also, more remarkably, for political freedoms, respect for basic human rights and regime change. These nationwide protests across various cities constitute an unprecedented development in the human rights situation in China. In fact, public authorities have not experience such an expression of public dissent since the student-led Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989. The latter were violently halted in a deadly crackdown, known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which up to the present day has been largely erased from China’s collective memory.
Therefore, widespread scenes of publicly displayed anger and frustration directed at the regime as we have seen in the last few weeks are exceptionally rare in China, since the ruling Communist Party ruthlessly silences on all expressions of dissent. Even though China’s Constitution, in its article 35, provides that citizens enjoy freedom of “assembly, association, procession and demonstration”, the country has been seriously limiting such freedoms over the past decades. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, in its General Comment No. 37 on the right of peaceful assembly, stated that failure to protect the right to peaceful assembly “is typically a marker of repression” in a country. In China, authorities often make use of repressive laws, such as the Law on Penalties for Administration of Public Security, to prosecute and imprison activists taking part in peaceful assemblies and exercising their right to freedom of expression. Moreover, the Chinese police still uses Covid-19 as a pretext to arbitrarily ban peaceful assemblies. In the current demonstrations, protesters were most often holding blank sheets of white paper to symbolise their opposition to large-scale state censorship. Though the protests made headlines in international media, Chinese state-controlled media made no mention of them. Reports on the country's Covid outbreak over the last few days have been muted, with newspapers and news websites choosing to focus on upbeat stories like China's latest achievements in space. A list of words that reference the protests has been censored while numerous efforts have also been made by the state to deflect the narrative on both domestic and overseas platforms.
Protestors holding white sheets of paper in protest against state censorship, after a vigil for the victims of a fire in Urumqi
Credits: REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Days after protests erupted, the government seemed to have – at least temporarily – eased its testing requirements and quarantine rules in some cities. For instance, restrictions in the city of Guangzhou were lifted on Wednesday 30th November, hours after the city witnessed violent protests that led to important clashes between police and protesters. In addition, major cities like Beijing, Shanghai or Chongqing also saw some sanitary rules relaxed. It remains unclear, however, whether these changes will really last and to what extent they represent a genuine will on the side of the Chinese authorities to listen to the demands of the population.
Beyond mere frustration and dissent with the country’s Covid policy, these recent developments seem to be the sign of broader demands for fundamental human rights and political reform, with some even calling on Xi Jinping to step down. However, when considering the concrete political impact that these protests could have, one shall not underestimate the silencing power of the Chinese repressive state apparatus, which also enjoys the monopole of the official narrative in China.
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