As protests against Xi Jinping’s Zero-COVID policy spread across China, one symbol remained constant: a blank sheet of paper. Here's why:
in years began last week as an expression of dissent against China’s strict zero-COVID policy, which has left the country oscillating through cycles of lockdowns even as much of the rest of the world returns to a semblance of normality. The spark appeared to be a fire in a tower block in the city of Urumqi, in the northwest Xinjiang region, which killed 10 people.
The protests are the most sustained since the student protest movement of 1989 that was brutally suppressed when security forces massacred students at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, leaving hundreds ordead. Under President Xi, protests have become increasingly rare in China. His rule has been marked by an uptick in forms of social control like AI-enhanced surveillance and heavy police crackdowns on dissent.
But already, the protests that began as dissent against Xi’s zero-COVID policy appear to be morphing, at least for some, into a wider protest against authoritarianism. In Shanghai, a man holding a flower at a gathering of protesters was arrested by police after he questioned other arrests and referred to the fire in Urumqi. “We must be brave,” the man could be heard telling the crowd in videos shared on social media, before being bundled into a vehicle.
The blank sheet of paper has become so pervasive that, online, people have begun referring to the protests in China as the “A4 revolution”—a reference to the standard paper size used in printers—or “white paper revolution.” Many observers have described the paper as a representation of everything protesters wish they could say but cannot.
The A4 sheet of paper has a longer history as a symbol of protest globally. Protesters in Hong Kong held up blank sheets of paper in 2020 in protest against the restrictive National Security Law that increased Beijing’s power over the
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