How China’s “A4 revolution” happened
Nobody knows what happens next after this weekend’s anti-COVID demonstrations all over China. Here’s how we got here, from an inside source.
When I was asked at a panel on China on November 5th whether or not the lone protester who put up a giant hand-painted banner protesting anti-COVID policies on Sitong bridge will have a wider ripple effect, I replied it was impossible.
“Unfortunately, we are living in the era of big-data authoritarianism,” I said, “there might be very brave individuals who replicate this man’s efforts, but they will not be able to coordinate while all their movements, every digital communication, is so closely monitored by the state and censored. Also, with digital facial recognition, the risk of going against the government is just too high.”
I felt pretty good about my answer at the time. Yet just two weeks later this exact scenario I proclaimed so impossible happened. There were scores of protests all over China. Many of the protestors were chanting the exact same phrases that Peng Zaizhou used in his Sitong Bridge banner. But how?
Through an unlikely coincidence, an old acquaintance of mine happened to be in China on a visit when it all went down and gave me some amazing insights.
“Tap Tap Talk”
“I don’t know how often this happens, but while I was out with some friends, one of our party got a ‘tap tap talk’ (拍拍講),” my friend said, “they literally got a tap on their shoulder by a stranger, who whispered in their ears and then left.”
The “tap tap talk” received was about the banner across the Sitong bridge.
There were other amazing non-internet ways of spreading the news, such as signs put up by the urinals saying “Ping Ping is fucking awesome!” (平平牛逼) and other sarcastic punny messages about President Xi Jinping, now in his norm-smashing third term.
Over the internet, there are other ways to send a message while avoiding the censors.
“When the members of the politburo were elected and they all turned out to be so old, their pictures were posted with comments like ‘What a bright young man! He is sure to have a great future!”
From caution to impunity
Even as recently as 2019, people were exceedingly careful about how they spoke. But all that caution has gone out of the window in his circles.
“I have a secretary. She is very young. She speaks as frankly as we are speaking now. So does the boss at the office.”
He described the increase in openness as happening in three phases. Phase One, before the 20th Party Congress, saw people in China already stressed and anxious from the exceedingly onerous COVID restrictions. There was a 7+ hour line of cars just to pass a police checkpoint to enter Beijing. The atmosphere was heightened, almost boiling over with nationalism, but people were not yet ready to dissent. “I was really afraid at that point that China was going to invade Taiwan within a year,” he said.
Phase Two when people realized that Covid Zero restrictions weren’t going to drop after the 20th Party Congress. “That was when people started complaining.” People no longer had a logical end point for the government to drop the restrictions to look forward to. How long are they going to remain locked up? Taxi drivers will talk about how the Belt and Road initiatives are a waste of money. Security would slump at their little tables and doze off rather than assiduously check the QR code of every passer by. None of those things were that remarkable, except it never happened before.
Phase Three only happened about a week ago. The WeChat circles for his neighborhood (小區) with about 300 people in it started lighting up with people strategizing about how they would counter any attempts to put their building on lockdown again. What they would say, what they would do. Even his father-in-law, an entrepreneur who was always more about making money than politics, started speaking openly in dismay at work. The deadly fire on Thursday night in Urumqi, tragically killing ten people who were trapped inside, was just the spark to explode this tinderbox of resentment and dissent. We know the rest: extraordinary protests all over China this past weekend.
While the protests were clearly born out of Covid control related grievance, they certainly did not stop there. Holding up pieces of blank paper became a symbol for the protests, because the grievances were already written on the protesters’ hearts.
“Freedom of Press!” “We are standing with the people of Xinjiang. We are standing with the women of Iran.” “Give us back our movies back! We want free cinema! We want freedom of expression!” And “Down with the party! Down with Xi Jinping!”
“They cannot even bear a blank sheet of paper”
After a weekend of absolute incredible protests, Monday was relatively quiet in Beijing. “People went back to work. No protest tonight that I know of.” While only time will tell, the brutal crackdown — Tiananmen style — that was widely predicted across twitter with dread, has not materialized yet. My friend doesn’t think it will necessarily. Too many people are involved across too big of a cross-section of society in too many locations all over China. Of course, none of us can know for sure.
“I think they will relax measures bit by bit to release tension.” If this happens this will be the first time civic society had a say in Chinese politics for a long time.
For now, I can cautiously say that seems to be bearing out. Xinjiang’s capital proclaimed itself miraculously free of Covid and started lifting restrictions. Students from Tsinghua University are getting free air and rail tickets home. The detested practice of barricading building gates will be banned in Beijing. The rumor that A4 paper sale will be banned in Shanghai turned out to be Fake News.
The screenshot above was from a cover of Taiwanese singer Wu Bai’s song “White Dove” posted on the Chinese social media site Bilibili. The song features the lyric “at least I still have my freedom” and attracted comments such as “They cannot even bear a sheet of blank paper” and “open the door,” in reference to the deadly locked doors in Urumqi. “Everybody, let’s be united and not be afraid,” was another comment. Incredulously, it’s been up for three days and viewed more than 400k times, liked 37k times and attracted more than 500 comments and it is still up at the time of writing.
Either the censors are taking a nap too, or a decision has been made to…for once…use a lighter touch. Make no mistake. There’s been pushing, shoving and a lot of arrests. But for China, so far, the response has been almost disconcertingly mild.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen next, but SOMETHING has already happened
After whiffing my last prediction about China so badly, I don’t want to make another. But nevertheless, I will say that I think the tweet below by Yasheng Huang is correct. Xi’s Covid zero measures has pushed the people of China, especially the young, beyond the breaking point and thus knocked it out of equilibrium. After so many people — and not just the young and impetuous — put themself on record as dissenters, it’s hard to imagine how the genie goes back into the bottle again.
I guess we’re going to get some more of this “history” thing we’re supposed to be all out of a while back.
How China’s “A4 revolution” happened
just curious - is there still a physical mail system functioning in China? and wouldn't this be another way for people to coordinate across the country?
Seems to me people want a say in their lives and in spite of reduced deaths, they want to make that choice. It would make me totally nuts to be kept in my own home against my will, especially if it was a small space.
An interesting point of view, but adding some actual bottom-line figures would help readers understand the complexity of public health management:
After three years of Covid, US GDP has grown 3.4%, with 1,000,000 Covid deaths and 3,000,000 Long Covid invalids. China's GDP has grown 13.8%, with 7,000 deaths and 38,000 Long Covids.
According to the FT covid tracker yesterday, the 7 day rolling average of NEW CASES per million people was China 20, US 100.
Deaths per million? China 0.0003, USA 0.8, and China's testing regime catches every case.
95% of China deaths are unvaccinated. In other words, the inactivated vaccines used in China seem to be doing what they are designed to do -prevent serious illness and death.
10,000 Americans die every month from Covid, adding another 360,000 Long Covid cases each year. As Professor Naomi Wu observed, "Abandoning Zero-COVID means losing more able-bodied workers per day to death and Long-COVID disability then can be replaced by new workers entering the labor pool. From an engineering standpoint, it is inherently unsustainable. The burn-through rate is easily quantifiable, so MTBF is a question of interventions - rescinding labor protections, prison labor, migrant "guest workers" etc, – to try and push back the date of system failure- but eventually, you just run out of people".