X-ray of Chinese discontent

The little heart of the French Concession in Shanghai, a charming neighborhood that retains a certain European aroma among the skyscrapers, has become a swarm of policemen.

It is Thursday and up to nine agents can be counted just in one of the four corners of the intersection that saw the spontaneous birth of the revolt of the blank pages five days ago.

From this crossroads, blue barriers placed by the security forces are deployed towards the four cardinal points.

As shopkeepers try to get back on track behind the fences, and grumble about a new impediment to commerce in this business-oriented city, police vehicles patrol the area with their lights on.

There is no trace left of the demonstrations that began last Saturday against the strict anti-pandemic measures that Beijing has imposed for almost three years, but the social unrest was born more or less here, when hundreds of young people shouted unprecedented slogans that have gone around the globe. : “Down with the Communist Party!

Down with Xi Jinping!"

“There was an accumulated anger”, explains down the street, in a trendy cafe in the area, a filmmaker in his early thirties.

He goes by the name Li to protect his identity.

He wears glasses, has a lively look, and has come with a friend who, on the other hand, was not at the protests.

The friend carries an old reflex camera with film on his shoulder.

They are young educated, thoughtful and open to the world.

They speak perfect English.

Demonstrators on November 27 in one of the streets of Shanghai where some of the protests against the Chinese government's covid zero policy have taken place.

HECTOR RETAMAL (AFP)

Last Saturday, Li says, he had had a hard day preparing for a shoot, but as soon as he began to see images of what was happening in the city, shared instantly through Wechat (the Chinese WhatsApp), he took his camera , got on a rental bike and went to the area without thinking.

“I knew it would be something special,” she says.

He was not inspired by “foreign forces”, as a myriad of analysts affiliated with the Chinese government quickly accused, to delve into the confrontation with the West.

His was a mixture of rage and fury hammered since 2020. “Nobody organized these people.

Nobody told me to go.

We wanted to show our compassion, our empathy with those who lost their lives."

Originally, he recalls, it was not a protest, but a vigil called for the death two days before of 10 people in a fire in Urumqi, capital of the autonomous province of Xinjiang, in the far west of the country.

Many immediately connected the tragedy with excessive zeal and the iron implementation of the policies against the covid: the building on fire was still semi-confined and the firefighters could not arrive on time due to the obstacles raised to impose the closure, according to dozens of people denounced in social networks (version denied by the authorities).

"It's business as usual," says Li, "there was no official clarification."

He explains that much of what the government says is no longer believed.

He talks about a gap between the young people and the elders in the villages, who feed on propaganda.

They have ways of observing the world out there, through virtual private networks (VPNs).

And he complains that the authorities often treat them like “little children”.

An example: Chinese television has been broadcasting World Cup matches avoiding shots that show the public's faces without a mask.

Chinese citizens queued to determine through a PCR if they have coronavirus, at a mass testing station. Andy Wong (AP)

“At the beginning of the pandemic,” Li says, “we had some trust in the government.

The country was doing well."

But that relationship took a setback late last year.

By then, the rest of the world had decided to live with the virus while China remained immersed in a kind of perpetual 2020, closed to the world and fighting each positive case on a parallel plane of massive testing, total or partial closures of cities and millimeter tracking. and hyper-technological through ubiquitous health applications that work with the scanning of QR codes through Alipay or Wechat (which in the West would be equivalent to portals developed by Amazon and Facebook).

Many citizens are aware that the invasion of the private sphere in this

health has exceeded limits that will hardly return to its course when the pandemic is left behind.

One of the genuine cries chanted in Shanghai was: "Fuck the QRs!"

The fire in Urumqi set fire to the rest of the country.

The vigil of the financial capital was intentionally called in the street of Wulumuqi (Urumqi pronounced in Mandarin), which almost everyone knows as one of the fashionable arteries, lined with cafes and shops.

The event exceeded expectations, hundreds of people attended, chants and slogans began, spread like an earthquake to Beijing and reverberated in 20 other cities in the country -according to the count of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute- until it became one of the largest signs of discontent in China during the Xi Jinping era of rule.

The tragedy in Urumqi was added to other previous ones.

In September, 27 people died in a bus accident whose occupants were being transferred to a quarantine center and many Chinese looked in terror in the mirror of that accident.

That sparked vigils online, but no one dared to take to the streets in a country where activism and social movements have been largely derailed over the past decade under Xi's leadership.

A man was arrested by the police on November 27, at a rally in Shanghai.

PA

The first spark of physical protest came two days before the 20th Communist Party Congress got underway in October, where Xi consolidated his power with an unprecedented third term.

A lone man hung a pair of banners on a bridge in Beijing: "We don't want PCR, we want food" and "We don't want lockdowns, we want freedom," read the banners, which also called for the downfall of the president.

They lasted a breath.

The author was arrested and little is known about him since.

But the transition from the aseptic virtual complaint to the protest in the real world was key to raising spirits.

His messages inspired the most chanted words in the demonstrations: "We don't want PCR, we want freedom!"

According to Li ―and other interviewees for this report―, there had not been a similar outbreak “in 30 years”;

that is to say: since the Tiananmen student protests, one of those enormous taboos for Beijing.

The riots of 1989 ended in a massacre that the Chinese can only know through the oral memory of the family, traveling abroad or bypassing the censorship of the Chinese Great Wall of the Internet.

Li and his friend confess that the first time they both had contact with a protest was in the United States, as university students.

They arrived in the North American country at the time that Donald Trump took over the White House;

the streets boiled with demonstrations, also crossed by the Black Lives Matter movement.

“In the last 30 years we have seen China become an economic powerhouse.

We have been consuming and buying”, argue the filmmakers.

"But we did not have this awareness until we went to the United States," they add.

“We are people born in the nineties, who have not seen a social upheaval of any kind.

We have seen the economy

, we have been able to travel globally and study abroad.

Until now, ”they both lament.

The protesters have turned a blank page, in the image during a vigil in Beijing, into an icon of the protests, hence the name of the DIN-A4 revolution.

MARK R. CRISTINO (EFE)

For sanitary reasons, the interview with them takes place almost outdoors, in a modern windowless cafeteria that has kindly allowed a reporter from Beijing to sit inside, but almost outside the premises.

It is terribly cold.

That afternoon the first snow will fall in the city, but the zero covid policy does not allow any newcomer to Shanghai from the capital to enter any establishment until five days have passed and they have passed a string of PCR tests, which makes them one almost in an outcast on the brink of freezing.

The protests have had much of a generational milestone.

They have been something of a baptism of fire in the arena of political demonstration for those born in the 1990s.

It has also been a hatching of trying the repression firsthand.

There have been numerous arrests -including a BBC reporter-, although there is no official figure and videos of clashes with the police have circulated on the networks.

Yang, a 27-year-old woman, recounts traumatized the beatings that several members of the security forces gave one of her companions in the early morning of the protests in Shanghai.

It is difficult for her to show the video that she recorded and passed on to another of the protesters because the image, which she saw live, suddenly returns to her memory.

She finally sends it through Telegram, a messaging application that many young people use to avoid Chinese censorship.

It only lasts a few seconds.

The boy is on the ground, he seems to be handcuffed, and four men dressed in dark clothes try to reduce him.

They give her a kick that hurts to see.

Yang says that the boy was held in a van for what seemed like an eternity to her, and they finally released him that same night.

She claims to know directly five other people who have been detained in Beijing and Shanghai (all of them have already been released).

She also speaks English perfectly, she earns her living as a “

” in an industry that she prefers not to mention in order not to be recognized, and she also spent time as a university student in the United States during the Trump era.

“I think a lot of the people who have gone to protest have had the experience of living or studying abroad,” she says.

“When Trump was elected, in my college, which was very liberal and even socialist, we all went out on the streets and we went to a lot of demonstrations.”

Commuters on the Shanghai subway on November 30.

Qilai Shen (Bloomberg)

Yang gives a detailed and almost minute account of the two days of protests in Shanghai, as if he wanted to prevent them from being lost in memory once the zero covid policy is blown up, in that script twist that the government seems to have already started. this week.

Talking to her, it doesn't seem by chance that many of those who took to the streets were born shortly after Tiananmen.

In China, he relates, this generation is known for being the great beneficiaries of the reform and opening-up period that President Deng Xiaoping began and continued and deepened ―after the repression of the 1989 protests― Jiang Zemin, who died this week at 96 years in Shanghai, in one of those surprising synchronicities: on Thursday, the police deployment for the protests in the city was joined by the armoring by the funeral procession of the ex-president,

whose body was on its way to Beijing.

Hurricane winds were blowing.

Sitting on the sofa in her small apartment decorated with stuffed animals and Ikea furniture, Yang speaks, where a curious cat swarms: “We are the generation that benefited [from this period of reform and opening up] because our parents were the first to do business and in having enough wealth to give us a better education.

This is helped by the fact that we are mostly only children [fruit of the country's birth control policy]”.

Also, she adds, they are the generation that was born with internet access.

Skilled with the telephone, which in China is almost as necessary as the air, the usual thing is to be aware of what is happening inside, but also outside the great firewall.

The revolt these days may not reflect a general malaise.

But it has revealed the anger of an urban generation, educated, open to the world, and to which the three years of the pandemic have curtailed the possibilities of movement, socialization, leisure, work, life.

They are young people who see few prospects for the future with the country withdrawn into itself and an economy shrouded in dark clouds.

They have not been the only ones to take to the streets.

In recent weeks, there have been riots among workers at China's largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which erupted into a violent roar of fury in a labor dispute over health measures;

and also among the workers of the internal migration to the textile workshops of the Guangzhou manufacturing center, affected by the continuous closures.

"They are a tear in an ocean," defines the protesters a person who was present at the Tiananmen protests and also lived closely the shock in Shanghai.

Between those protests ―organized, massive and long in time― and those of last week ―improvised and quelled in a couple of days― there is an abyss, according to him.

But the two have shared something: the marked political character.

Xi Jinping has not spoken publicly about them.

But he has confessed in private that the origin of the demonstrations is to be found in "frustrated students" after years of pandemic, as he told the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, during their fleeting meeting in Beijing this week, and senior officials have revealed Unidentified from the European Union.

He also assured her that the omicron variant was much less contagious, in one more sign of what looks like a shift towards reopening China and ending the zero covid policy.

Some of the protesters see this turn as a triumph of the protests.

“I think they work,” says filmmaker Li.

"It seems that things have improved," he adds, referring to the relaxation of restrictions decreed in Xinjiang and Guangzhou this week after the protests.

Not everyone sees it so clearly.

Among the protesters who attended the protests in Beijing next to the Liangma River on Sunday was a 31-year-old artist, with whom days later EL PAÍS is still in contact through a messaging system that allows them to bypass Chinese censorship.

The day after the demonstrations, he says, he was contacted by the police with threats of being arrested, as were several of his friends.

On Thursday he wrote and sent to this newspaper a text about the origin of the discontent that led him to the protests: “I have lived in a lie since the first day of my life.

We have been enslaved and we have had to do what we were told.

We have never had basic human rights, democracy, freedom of expression, or constitutional right to rely on.”

The zero covid policy, in his opinion, is part of a machinery governed by this fallacy, which subjects people to continuous PCR and mandatory confinement.

But going against what is stipulated implies risking the type against the State.

“We have to lie without dignity in order to survive,” he writes.

In his opinion, “most of the protesters are just unhappy with the covid policy, they have not woken up and they have not realized that it is a systemic problem”.

He does not believe that the protests manage to change the policies and neither does the government.

"More than discontent, I am desperate."

The shakedown has not been an organized or homogeneous movement.

Many of those who attended just wanted to live again in 2019. No one believes at this point that the protests will have much more of a run by now.

But they have been a warning.

“We want to have a normal life again,” said a 22-year-old student who called himself Peach in the heat of the Beijing protests.

He carried a wad of white paper under his arm among the crowd gathered along the Liangma River.

The empty pages, he explained, were the symbol of the silenced voices, and they wanted to turn them into something as recognizable as the rainbow of the LGTBI collective.

Other voices sounded more radical.

"I am against the entire Xi regime," added a 32-year-old woman, a musician in a band, who had come to join "a mutual voice" that "wake up the people."

Around her, slogans against the PCR and the confinements were shouted, the song

by David Bowie, was heard on a loudspeaker, and the cocktail included

and the Chinese national anthem, with its powerful anti-slavery lyrics: “Stand up!

Get up!

Get up!".

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