If short is the soul of intelligence, like some wag once said, perhaps no word is the most witty choice. Late November at least 10 dead in high-rise building fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang region, western China. Many believed that Covid restrictions prevented the victims from escaping, and anger spilled into the streets, first in Urumqi and then in all over China, where strict anti-Covid measures have forced people to close their homes, undergo constant testing and confinement in grim isolation centers. Protesters appeared in cities and on university campuses, criticizing Covid’s policies or even condemning the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping. Many brandished symbols of protest: plain, unmarked white sheets of paper.
The video converter appears. In a vigil in Shanghai, mourners held up sheets of paper as the candles flickered. Students at Tsinghua University in Beijing hold up sheets of paper and chant slogans calling for democracy and free speech. At another protest in Beijing, a crowd waved a white sheet of paper while chanting against Covid protocols. A highly shared tweet that introduced someone Throw stacks of paper in the air in the middle of city traffic. Another viral clip shows an impressive street play: one young woman marching among pedestrians holding a piece of paper, Her mouth was covered with black tape, and her wrists were tied with chains.
Commentators were quick to explain the meaning of “white paper protests”. The blank is both a symbol and a strategy. It was an active passive protest against censorship, a satirical display of compliance signaling defiance. Its strength rests on a shared understanding of both the public and the government about the unwritten message; it is also based on the perception that saying anything is a violation of a government that does not accept objections, blocking even the intention to speak. A tweet posted days after the fire showed a photo of a man, apparently in a shopping mall in Shanghai, holding a sign that reads: “You know what I mean what”. According to the tweet, he was taken away by the police.
In the days following the fire, the Chinese Communist Party’s censors moved to remove hashtags such as “A4 Revolution” (regarding the size of the newspaper) and “exercise on white paper” from social networks. A piece of paper may be the ultimate “analog” artifact, but it has emerged as a digital-age totem with unusual powers — a meme that is reviving in fascinating ways between the streets and the world. virtual world. For all the chaos at barricades, white signs can reveal more about algorithms, data flows, and how images and ideas resonate online.
‘If you fear a blank sheet of paper, you are weak inside.’ — A highly cited social media post from China
Find out the situation in China
The Communist Party has ignored the restrictive “no Covid” policy, sparking mass protests that are a rare challenge for the Communist leadership.
The premise of the white paper protests dates back to at least 1924, when a Krakow newspaper is said to have published a particularly blank addendum as a satirical rebuke to the censors. In 1965, an episode of “Candid Camera” had a prank in it Protesters with blank placards stand in front of a vacant lot in New York. Four years later, students at a Toronto high school staged a mock sit-in demonstration with blank placards and an empty “demand” list. One Associated Press report about the protest bears the cheeky headline, “Student Requests.”
In retrospect, those 1960s stunts seem ideologically conservative: They were parodies, staged at the height of the civil rights era and the Vietnam War, intended to mock political ideology. thought resistance. But in recent times, people have turned the comedy of empty signs in the opposite direction. The signs have been used as props during pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and by opponents of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In September, following the death of Queen Elizabeth, anti-monarchy protesters were arrested in Scotland. Soon, more protesters showed up – now carrying blank placards.
These signs tell a silly joke, mocking both the censorship and its enforcers. They act as decoys: When security forces — often uniformed and well-armed — arrest a citizen holding a blank placard, the paranoia and irrationality of state power will is released. Like an internet-wise troll, the blank sign is a push-button tool to lure its target into self-revelation.
Traditional protest symbols, like banners and flags, may be less of a currency in the age of social media. Icons that capture the imagination tend to be humble and unexpected, giving a sense of natural memes, like the umbrellas used as shields in Hong Kong. Usually, these symbols mark irony and absurdity. In Thailand, pro-democracy protesters have embraced a symbol even more unbelievable than a blank sheet of paper: the inflatable rubber duck.
China’s blank signs have proven to be superlative fodder. T-shirts have appeared with an illustration of Winnie-the-Pooh reading a blank page — a double joke aimed at Xi Jinping, who has been likened to AA Milne’s roly-poly bear in banned memes on the Internet. Chinese Internet. The signs have inspired more ambitious spectacles. Ai Weiwei, Chinese artist in exile, posted an Instagram video in which he is shown writing a free speech message on white paper in UV invisible ink. A work of performance art has a woman covered with white paper was sprayed with red paint by someone in a hazmat suit reminiscent of the “big whites” wearing Chinese PPE.
Internet battles between protesters and major powers are on the rise in China, where the Internet is heavily censored and a surveillance network sweeps through life online and offline. Since the time the protests broke out in Urumqi, skirmishes have begun between users uploading pictures of the protests and the state censor, which has been working to erase all traces of them. Users used a trick to evade algorithms designed to catch outlaws: They took videos of the videos or rotated them sideways, or used VPNs to “store” data on the internet. sites like Twitter and Instagram, which are beyond the control of Chinese censors. Efforts to find cracks in the country’s “great firewall” are essential to the protests. There is reason to believe that they have succeeded: The Chinese government has since taken steps to limit its strict Covid guidelines.
Of course, protesters could still face harsh consequences, especially those who dare to voice broader criticism of China’s authoritarianism. But their criticism lingers in all those blank sheets of paper, empty signs echoing ideas from decades and centuries. There is a famous paradox by John Cage: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” There are blank pages in Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” and Robert Ryman’s white-on-white paintings — works of art whose eloquent emptiness is capable of expressing the unspeakable. The blank sign, for the protesters who use it and the government that despises it, is full of potential: It’s a tabula rasa, on which every complaint, exhortation, protest, provocation, mockery, threat and the incontrovertible truth could one day be written into . Or, to be more precise, those things were written there — figuratively at least — in invisible ink. The signs say nothing; they talk a lot.
Image source: Ben Marans/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty Images
