How the Great Firewall struggled to keep up with anti-COVID protests
Anger over pandemic restrictions have created exactly what the censors seek to prevent: solidarity across class and geography
I wrote in The Globe about how Chinese censors found themselves wrong-footed by recent protests in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities:
As growing frustration over COVID-19 restrictions and other issues spilled over into protests in more than a dozen Chinese cities this weekend, videos and photos of the unrest spread widely online as the country’s internet censors struggled to keep up – a rare show of weakness.
Protests are not unheard of in China. Despite the Communist Party’s reputation for absolute control, workers still go on strike, farmers demonstrate over land use and local officials are called out for corruption. There have been almost 700 incidents of labour unrest this year alone, according to a database kept by China Labour Bulletin, which does not track other types of protest.
But the common elements of such incidents are that they are almost always geographically isolated, swiftly put down and tightly censored. One of the primary goals of the Great Firewall – China’s vast online censorship and surveillance apparatus – is to prevent protests by stamping out calls for demonstrations and suppressing news of any unrest that does bubble up.
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Under President Xi Jinping, the space for political freedom in China has shrunk dramatically, and authorities have cracked down ever harder on signs of unrest. In Xinjiang and other ethnic-minority areas, the repression has often been particularly brutal, but Han Chinese dissidents have not been spared, with many jailed for decades or kept under indefinite house arrest.
This has been effective, and even as Mr. Xi has consolidated more and more power, securing an unprecedented third term as Communist Party leader, little dissent has been on display, despite reports of purported anger within the party and small protests by Chinese nationals overseas.
But the tranquillity on the surface has hidden growing frustration, and with the pandemic testing the limits of government control, this has begun to bubble up.
Unlike anger over the treatment of workers or land rights, COVID-19 is something that affects everyone in China more or less equally. When Li Wenliang, a doctor in Wuhan who had been arrested for trying to warn people of the virus as it spread in the first weeks of 2020, died of the disease, the anger online overwhelmed the censors.