Michelle and Albert here. Last weekend we were glued to our phones, waiting for updates from Twitter’s “Teacher Li,” who was posting clip after clip of protests in Ürümqi, Zhengzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and across China.
On the night of November 24, an electric fire broke out on the fourteenth floor of a twenty-one-story apartment building in Ürümqi. It soon spread to other floors. Firefighters made it to the scene, but videos show they failed to get close enough to the building, and resorted to shooting jets of water that fell short of the fire. Videos of the fire soon began to circulate. In one of the most horrifying videos, you can hear people screaming to open the doors that had been bolted shut or obstructed with wooden bars.
The official count says ten people died, but other estimates put the deaths in the dozens; a Uighur news source claims it was actually forty-four. Among the dead are four children, siblings aged from four to thirteen, who perished along with their mother. Their eldest brother and father, a prominent Uighur businessman, have been incarcerated in a “re-education” camp since 2017. The grief of these remaining family members is just impossible to imagine. A cousin described the mother as “a wonderful woman, always thinking of her children and how to treat and educate them well.” He continued, “My heart is really broken, I cannot bear it.”
Ürümqi has been under a draconian lockdown for over a hundred days, and many critics pinned the deaths directly on the Chinese Communist Party’s zero-COVID policies. A critical passageway that would have allowed fire engines to access the building was blocked by fences and other structures that the government had set up for COVID measures. One local fire department captain said he had to clear away the obstacles to create a path for the fire truck. While officials refute the claim that the doors were barred from the outside, residents said they also felt psychologically trapped, afraid to leave the building. The zero-COVID policies allowed residents an hour of outside exercise a day. And so, even as they heard fire alarms, they were afraid to leave because of the COVID restrictions.
In a display of outrage, protesters turned to the streets and made a broader critique of the regime’s zero-COVID policies. In a rare move, officials in Ürümchi apologized for the incident. But they also blamed the victims’ “weak self-rescue skills,” and arrested a woman who questioned the death toll online. They refused to even acknowledge the protests.
What’s made this moment incredible is how the tragedy has sparked sympathy protests around the country. It’s not hard to understand why. So many people in China have experienced similar lockdown regulations. Some have explained that they’ve imagined being locked in during a fire: it was their worst nightmare, a distant possibility now unfolding on their cellphone screens.
The connection between a suffocating house and cries of protest has deep roots in China’s modern literary history. In the preface to his famous 1923 story collection Call to Arms (Na Han), Lu Xun invokes the image of an “iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, people fast asleep inside who will soon die.” He asks whether it’s better to let those people suffocate and die without pain, or for them to die a horrible death while aware of their suffering. He concludes that the only moral solution is to cry out: “if a few are awake, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.”
Perhaps more importantly, the Ürümqi fires represent the latest in a series of COVID disasters. In September, in the southwestern province of Guizhou, officials were transporting, in the middle of the night, a busload of people who had tested positive. The bus crashed and twenty-seven people died; another twenty were injured. Disturbing scenes appeared, before they were scrubbed from social media, of officials spraying disinfectant on the dead bodies.
In November, workers at one of Foxconn’s biggest iPhone production plants in Zhengzhou rose up in protest. Sociologist Eli Friedman has dubbed Foxconn’s zero-COVID restrictions a “closed-loop production,” a truly dystopian strategy that “allows capital to circulate while reducing human mobility to an absolute minimum.” Workers are forbidden to leave—they eat, sleep, and work at the plant. Only essential items such as food and medicine are allowed in. Since May, protests have arisen sporadically when COVID restrictions got too severe. The most recent one criticized the severity of the regulations.
A month ago, a lone protester unfurled two white banners at Sitong Bridge, a busy overpass in Beijing. One read Remove the traitor-dictator Xi Jinping! Another read: Food, not PCR tests. Freedom, not lockdowns. Reforms, not the Cultural Revolution. Elections not leaders. Dignity, not lies. Citizens, not slaves. The banners were taken down within hours, the images scrubbed from the internet shortly thereafter. Witnesses near the scene were questioned, and the protester responsible was arrested.
At the time, the banners seemed like a lone cry that would be forgotten. But now the protester’s words live on in chants, slogans, and gatherings. Over a forty-eight-hour period last weekend, protests erupted throughout China, and the demonstrators’ creativity and bravery have been inspiring. Some have openly defied the current regime, calling for Xi Jinping to step down. Others have raised blank sheets of paper—some have dubbed it “the A4 revolution”—to satirize the internet repression. In a regime where control of speech, news, and access is pervasive, these acts reflect incredible courage.
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In short, a lot is happening, very fast. And of course everybody wants to know what it all means. Is this a turning point for the Xi regime? Even the most plugged-in experts have thrown up their hands and decided to forgo the divination game. Most seem to agree that the biggest difference between today and the Tiananmen protests in 1989 are the fault lines in the Chinese Communist Party leadership. In 1989, disagreement within the party leadership gave the protesters time and space to organize. Today, the Xi regime has destroyed rival factions within the party, severely restricting the possibility for more organized resistance. Here in Taiwan we’ve heard a range of comments, most of them pessimistic. Many say the Xi regime is too powerful, that the protesters will be crushed. Others say the protesters are unlikely to care very deeply about Xinjiang or Taiwan.
Meanwhile, as the situation stands today, it does seems that both the central and local governments are moving quickly to take the wind out of the protesters’ sails, loosening certain COVID restrictions while extending their repressive state apparatus. In one way, the protests have already worked—districts in Shanghai and Guangzhou have already decided to lift restrictions. On the other hand, state authorities have already vowed to implement even more stringent censorship in response to the emergency. Furthermore, exiting zero-Covid will present a major challenge to the Chinese health system, as vaccination rates among the elderly remain low, and has very little natural immunity because of the previous success of zero-Covid.
We’re not experts in contemporary Chinese politics, so we leave commentary about the political implications for the regime to the better informed. But we generally suspect there’s a too-strong assumption of the endurance of authoritarian regimes. An article has been circulating on Twitter about the revolution in Eastern Europe: “Four months after the fall of communism in East Germany, the Allensbach Institute asked a broad sample of East Germans: ‘A year ago did you expect such a peaceful revolution?’ Only 5 percent answered in the affirmative, although 18 percent answered ‘yes, but not that fast.’ Fully 76 percent indicated that the revolution had totally surprised them.” Authoritarian legitimacy can dissolve very quickly. And a person who appears to support the state for ideological reasons can switch in quick, surprising ways.
As people who’ve studied and thought a great deal about protest, we do have one strong conviction: no broad-based social movement is ever useless. Whatever else they do or don’t accomplish, protest movements crack open spaces that allow for the most basic possibility: to imagine other ways of living.
We’ve been thinking about Lu Xun and Albert Camus, both writers who understood the relationship between loneliness and rebellion. Why does rebellion matter? Camus asked. His answer is extraordinary: “In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as the ‘cogito’ in the realm of thought: It is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel—therefore we exist.”
Lu Xun took a similar view. In Call to Arms, he writes eloquently of the “loneliness that grew day by day, coiling about my soul like a huge poisonous snake.” At first he imagines succumbing to the loneliness by blotting out hope, using “various means to dull my senses.” But he finds the attempt to deaden himself even more painful, a source of even greater agony. He chooses instead to “call out, to encourage those fighters who are galloping on in loneliness, so that they do not lose heart.” “Whether my cry is brave or sad,” he concludes, “repellent or ridiculous, I do not care.”
For both writers, rebellion is a salve for despair, an outburst that counteracts the wish for self-annihilation. You can hear it in the voices of the young protesters. In a remarkable episode of a popular Chinese podcast, the host Yuan Li interviewed six young Chinese protesters who joined the protests. They all talked about how engaging in protests helped them to overcome their sense of fear and loneliness.
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The weekend before all these protests erupted, we had dinner in Taipei with some dear friends who know China intimately, having lived there for years. One of them saw unspeakable things on June 4 at Tiananmen. To his surprise, he said, he’s found it harder to talk about that day as the years go by. Neither has been back to China in the past five years. Their last experience—the heavy-handed state surveillance, the jingoism—left a bad taste in their mouths. But recently, they told us, they felt an overwhelming urge to return. The media coverage of China in the U.S., where they now live, is so biased—so uninterested in ordinary Chinese lives—that they wanted to go back and see for themselves. The diasporic Chinese people they’d met recently were cool and interesting; they felt the media coverage had overshadowed their memory and diminished their empathy.
Last weekend’s protests are an important reminder to us here in Taiwan, we who’ve had the good fortune to experience a “normal election.” This week we went to several solidarity vigils, two at Liberty Square and another at National Taiwan University. One was organized in part by Chinese students who remained anonymous; at NTU, people were asked not to take pictures of the speakers. The mood was somber; everybody understood the magnitude of the situation—the long, uphill battle they collectively faced. But it was inspiring to hear these young Chinese students find their voice in speaking out, singing songs, painting pictures as small acts of defiance. We sang “We are the Last Generation,” and students passed out sheets of A4 paper to anybody who wanted one.
It’s easy to demonize China, to focus on the evils of the Xi Jinping regime, to denounce its military threats, to see it as a perverted other. In a world where the Chinese government has mobilized its internet presence to attack all dissenting voices, it’s tempting to see all its citizens as brainwashed nationalists. We’ve been guilty of getting swept up in anti-Chinese thinking too. But now, if only just for a moment, we find ourselves thinking back to times in our lives when we felt truly hopeful that China would become a democracy.
It’s common these days, and not incorrect, to say that the naiveté of this hope led to parts of Taiwan being sold out to Chinese interests. Undoubtedly we need savvy and clear-eyed leaders who will continue to protect Taiwan from China’s aggression. But we can guard Taiwan while celebrating the courage of people facing incredibly repressive state regimes—people who even now are putting their bodies on the line. Some protesters have been arrested and disappeared. A video circulated recently of two “Big Whites,” officials in hazmat suits, forcibly grabbing and subduing a young man to transport him to quarantine.
This is a regime intent on clamping down on freedom of speech, circumscribing labor rights, and surveilling you and your loved ones. If China is the dystopian future that awaits us all, then these brave protesters are showing us ways to resist. If nothing else, their actions last weekend reminded us that our fates are tied to theirs.
Some Links
There has been a flood of commentary on the protests in recent days. The following scholars especially helped to guide our thinking:
ChinaFile gathered responses from various experts on the significance of the protests.
Listen to Isabel Hinton and Jeffrey Wasserstrom talk to Cindy Yu on the Chinese Whispers podcasts.
Eli Friedman has an essential article on the connection between labor controls and Covid protests.
David Moser and Jeremiah Jenne have a view of the protests from Beijing.
There’s also been great reporting. It’s impossible to list it all but we’ve been following Lily Kuo (Washington Post), William Yang (DW), and the Wall Street Journal.