November 26 marks the first anniversary of the White Paper Protest, also known as the A4 Revolution, sparked by a protest against the deadly consequences of a fire. On November 24, 2022, a fire broke out in a residential block in Urumqi, Xinjiang. The city had been under strict restrictions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic since early August 2022. Many gates in the community were locked to control access to entry and exit in the residential area, hindering rescue operations and blocking residents from escaping.
State media Xinhuanet.com reported that ten people were killed and nine injured in the fire. However, the actual death toll remains unclear. The victims are reportedly all Uyghurs, the ethnic group facing persecution that persistently attracts global concern regarding its human rights issues. However, the Urumqi government’s claim that the gate was not locked down and that people's lack of awareness of the escape route was the main reason for the casualties only served to arouse public outrage. On November 26, 2022, students from Nanguang College of Communication at the University of China in Nanjing held up pieces of blank paper on campus to mourn the victims of the fire and protest against the pandemic lockdown and zero-Covid policy. The wave of protests then spread to at least 21 provinces in China, overall involving at least 39 cities and over a hundred universities.
The demonstrators held blank pages to symbolise censorship and chanted slogans such as “End zero-Covid,” and “We want human rights”. Many describe the blank paper as a representation of everything protesters wished they could say but were unable to. The ‘White Paper Protest’ was the first large-scale and sustained protest in China since the Tiananmen Square student protests of 1989.
At a protest in Beijing, a demonstrator said, "I didn't expect so many people to come to this protest today. It has truly changed my impression of China because in the current social environment, organising such protests would be almost impossible. Over the past few years, our freedom of speech and the avenues to express our thoughts have been increasingly restricted. I never thought that one day we could take to the streets and voice our demands publicly.”
The authorities targeted and arrested numerous participants in the protests, including students, journalists, and notably, many women. Huang Yicheng, a protester who participated in the protest on Urumqi Road, Shanghai, said that on November 26 and 27, 2022, two busloads of people were arrested by police and “disappeared” into the Shanghai night. “Where did those people go? Everything becomes a mystery. The police would stand there, not moving, most of the time, but then they'd suddenly rush forward, dive into the crowd and drag some people out and put them on a bus, and the majority of detainees appeared to be women,” he said.
Following the protest in Shanghai, Beijing’s top security chief pledged to crack down on “hostile forces” and “foreign forces”. People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, called on the Chinese public to “build a barrier of epidemic prevention and control”. No reports on the White Paper Protest have been found on any Chinese media inside the "great firewall". While there were some images and posts circulating on social media platforms at the outbreak of the protest, none can now be found. All the reporting and documentation of the protest exist only in media outside of the 'great firewall', where access is limited for most people living in China.
After the protests ended, Yicheng moved abroad and collected testimonies from participants of the White Paper Protest. He said that this documentation is important because, in modern China, the system has forced people time and again to forget their own history. “There is no way of knowing whether anyone else has been arrested. China is like a black hole of information. But I have always been confident in the history and the future – these testimonies can make people adopt our narrative.
“I always hope that one day in the future, at dawn, we can walk to the intersection of Urumqi Road again and recognize each other. I wonder how long it will take for that day to arrive,” he said.
The blank sheet of paper has a rich history as a global symbol of protest, particularly against censorship. In 2020, protesters in Hong Kong held up blank pieces of white paper to avoid using slogans banned under the new National Security law in Hong Kong. The law, which was imposed by China after anti-government protests, has made it illegal to shout slogans or hold up banners and flags calling for the city's independence. Jimmy Lai, a prominent Hong Kong media tycoon and a pro-democracy figure regularly labelled as a 'threat to national security' by state-run media outlets, described the law as a "death knell" for Hong Kong.
China employs sophisticated online censorship, particularly on mainstream social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. These platforms utilise a blend of human censors and algorithms to eliminate protest-related and dissident content. Once the workload increases, human censors need to work extra hours to address the gap, removing photos and videos deemed unacceptable. This situation heightens the likelihood of some content evading detection.
In April 2022, a six-minute clip named "Voices of April" documenting the harsh impact of Shanghai's nearly month-long lockdown, began circulating on the Chinese internet. The clip is a collage of audio snippets such as voices of locked-down residents demanding necessities, the cries of babies separated from their parents in quarantine, and the pleas of a son trying to get medical treatment for his dying father. The city-wide lockdown, considered one of the strictest in the country, has turned Shanghai into a ghost town, leading to shortages of food, daily necessities, and medical access for its 25 million residents confined to their homes.
Censors soon stepped in and took down the video as well as any references to it from the Chinese internet. The censorship triggered widespread outcry. In response, an online backlash unfolded, with users creatively sharing the video in various ways to evade censors, such as posting the video upside down, embedding it in cartoons, and circulating it through QR codes and cloud services.
After the protests, COVID management policies across China gradually relaxed and were fully lifted by the end of 2022. It has now been a year since China abandoned its zero-Covid policy - a stringent pandemic control measure that ran from 2019 to 2022. During this period, China’s residents not only faced strict physical restrictions but also encountered intensified scrutiny and censorship in terms of freedom of speech. Any articles or reports related to revealing the truth about the pandemic would be swiftly removed. Journalists and activists who reported on such information faced continuous investigations and imprisonment.
At the onset of the pandemic, freelance journalist Zhang Zhan, who covered the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in early 2020, was convicted on December 28, 2020. The journalist was arrested for the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a broadly defined charge often levelled by the authorities against those who are critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison till May 2024.
In 2022-23, the IFJ documented the jailing of over 70 journalists and activists in China. Under President Xi Jinping's leadership, social movements and public gatherings are often categorised as disturbances to public order, rendering public expression through movements are becoming rare. Feminist journalist and activist Sophia Huang Xueqin has been detained in China after her disappearance in September 2021. Huang was the leader in China’s version of the #MeToo movement in 2018, during which she wrote a survey report on sexual harassment and assault cases faced by Chinese female journalists. On November 17, 2023, freelance journalist Sun Lin, died after national security officers forcibly entered his Nanjing home in unclear circumstances. Previously imprisoned in 2018, Sun Lin was known for human rights reporting and advocacy. The recent raid may be linked to videos of protests he posted on social media against Xi Jinping.
The White Paper Protest, born out of the tragedy in Urumqi and fuelled by discontent over stringent pandemic controls, became a powerful symbol of resistance against China's censorship apparatus. As demonstrators raised blank sheets of paper to signify the stifling censorship and chanted slogans for human rights, they embarked on a rare and daring act in a society where public dissent is met with severe consequences.
Despite the arrests and disappearances, voices like those of Huang Yicheng persist in documenting the truth, preserving a narrative that challenges the state's efforts to erase its own history. The aftermath of the protests serves as a reminder of the sacrifices made in the pursuit of basic freedoms. The White Paper Protest is the act of resistance that contributes to the global conversation on freedom of speech, challenging oppressive regimes and inspiring hope for change.
Irene Wang is a postgraduate media student at the University of Sydney, Australia, and a current Intern with the International Federation of Journalists Asia-Pacific.