The A4 Revolution: Zero-COVID Protests in China
Over the past few weeks, protests have ignited across China in opposition to the country’s strict “Zero-COVID” campaign. After years of intensive lockdown procedures and testing that have greatly interfered with China’s everyday life, protesters are calling for more lenient policies, even asking President Xi Jingpin to step down. While protests do occur occasionally in China, they usually pertain to local areas and tackle issues such as workers rights and environmental health rather than freedom and censorship. For the world’s second largest economy, the recent demonstrations mark the first large-scale acts of public defiance on such issues in decades. At the center of this defiance is a defining symbol: a blank sheet of paper.
Dozens of photos show protesters holding up blank sheets of paper, often directly in front of their faces. The blankness is suggestive of words left unsaid and speaks volumes to the frustrations of the Chinese people.
"There [is] definitely nothing on the paper, but we know what's on there," a protester in Shanghai told the BBC, “What’s on there” is up to the interpretation of the viewer, but most interpretations include a desire for freedom of expression.
China has long employed one of the world’s most rigid censorship systems, with the country’s “Great Firewall” strictly controlling citizens’ access to news, social media, and the internet. This system is said to maintain social stability, but it also allows the government to monitor and remove almost all political opposition. The blank papers critique China's extreme censorship system, which technically can’t find fault in signs that say nothing at all.
On the global level, blank paper has been used before to protest censorship. Notably, it was used in Hong Kong following the enactment of the National Security Law, which made it easier to prosecute people for protesting and in Russia leading up to and during the war with Ukraine. In countries such as China and Russia, which rely heavily on censorship to minimize the influence of protests on public opinion, the use of blank paper as a symbol of protest is especially powerful.
Aside from their symbolic value, blank pieces of paper are also beneficial in spreading the message of the protests online. Censorship algorithms are easily able to pick up common symbols of protest, but blank paper is entirely uncommon. According to an anonymous former censor, the creation of new algorithms targeted to specific situations such as crowds of people holding up blank papers would be both costly and time consuming. As an object that is common to daily life and appears in many images unrelated to protest, it has been especially hard for authorities to censor white paper. This has allowed some images of protests to bypass the system and gain massive attention on the internet before being taken down.
The words “blank sheet of paper” and “white paper” have now been censored on the Chinese internet, but the symbol has already left its mark on the ongoing movement. Because of the standard A4 size paper that is most commonly used by protesters, many have referred to the protests as the “A4 Revolution.'' In response to the protests, the government has announced an intent to ease COVID restrictions–a major victory for the protesters. However, due to China’s advanced censorship (which has already begun to erase evidence of the movement) and the divided preferences of the Chinese populace, the A4 Revolution is unlikely to bring about the political liberalization that some protesters call for. Nonetheless, this is a significant yet rare example of nation-wide, highly publicized civil disobedience in China and a demonstration of how a population can use ingenuity to battle controlling regimes.
BY VIVIAN WANG