So often, a single item comes to represent an entire protest movement. That item is a simple sheet of blank paper in China.
As twilight set on Shanghai on Sunday evening, several of those gathering at a memorial to remember the victims of the fire that sparked the protests arrived clutching sheets of paper.
Similarly, demonstrators arrived equipped with bits of paper to a demonstration at Beijing’s famous Tsinghua University, where President Xi Jinping formerly attended
Another stunning video showed a young woman going through the streets of Wuzhen, a town in the eastern province of Zhejiang, with cuffs around her wrists and masking tape over her lips. She held a blank sheet of paper in her hands.
The trend roots from the 2020 Hong Kong demonstrations in which residents held blank pieces of paper to protest the city’s severe new national security legislation.
Activists held the paper aloft after authorities banned slogans and phrases associated with the mass protest movement of 2019 that saw the city grind to a halt and officials violently clamp down on demonstrators.
Some think that the gesture is a challenge to authorities, as if to ask, “Are you going to arrest me for holding a sign saying nothing?”
“There was definitely nothing on the paper, but we know what’s on there,” a woman who joined protests in Shanghai told the BBC.
Johnny, a 26-year-old Beijing demonstrator, told Reuters that the paper had come to “represent everything we want to say but cannot speak.”
Kerry Allen, the BBC’s China media analyst, observed that Chinese censorship officials have gone into overdrive on the country’s social media platforms.
“Tens of millions of posts have been filtered from search results,” she said. “‘Blank sheet of paper’ and ‘white paper’ now also only show sparing results.”
The censorship of social media has sparked outrage online, with one user stating, “If you fear a blank sheet of paper, you are weak on the inside.”
Meanwhile, Shanghai M&G Stationery had to debunk rumors that the company had pulled all A4 paper from shelves for national security grounds. M&G officials stated that manufacturing and operations were regular, and that they had contacted authorities about a fraudulent document that was circulating online, which had sparked the rumor.
However, the blank sign has become a lightning rod for criticism from those who remain loyal to the central government and are outraged by the waves of protest.
One video, believed to be shot on Saturday at the Communication University of China in Nanjing, China’s easternmost city, showed an unidentified guy furiously seizing a blank piece of paper from a protester before storming away.
Later that night, dozens more students were observed on campus holding pieces of white paper and standing silently.
Demonstrators – hamstrung by Beijing’s censorship machine – have also turned to other forms of anti-government comment, including sarcastic expressions of support for China’s harsh Covid policies.
In one case, after officials ordered dozens of white sheet-sporting protesters to stop signing anti-lockdown slogans they responded with sarcastic chants of “more lockdowns” and “I want to do a Covid test”.
And at Tsinghua University some students were seen holding pieces of paper with Friedmann equations scrawled on them, in which the Russian physicist and mathematician explains how the universe evolves over time.
The equation’s use is thought to be a play on the words “Free man.”
However, paper has become the most prevalent sight at Chinese protests, joining umbrellas (Hong Kong), rubber ducks (Thailand), and flowers (Belarus) as an icon of modern protest.
BBC
