The Daily - What It’s Like Inside One of China’s Protests

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Over the weekend, protests against China’s strict coronavirus restrictions ricocheted across the country in a rare case of nationwide civil unrest. It was the most extensive series of protests since the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989.This is what these demonstrations look and feel like, and what they mean for President Xi Jinping and his quest for “zero Covid.”Guest: Vivian Wang, a China correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Demonstrations against coronavirus restrictions in China have evolved into broader demands. What are protesters calling for?In a country where protests are swiftly quashed, many who gathered to voice their discontent — under the watchful eye of the police — were uncertain about how far to go.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. In China over the weekend, thousands of people gathered in cities across the country demanding an end to COVID restrictions. It was the most extensive series of protests since the failed pro-democracy movement in 1989. My colleague Vivian Wong went to one in Beijing. Today, I talk to Vivian about what she saw there and what it means for China's leader, Xi Jinping, and his unwavering quest for zero COVID. For Zero COVID. It's Wednesday, November 30th. Vivian, tell us what's happening in China right now.

Over the weekend, we saw demonstrations in at least 18 cities with people calling for an end to zero COVID, which is the Chinese government's policy of trying to eliminate coronavirus infections through whatever it takes, including really severe quarantines and lockdowns. And it has been astonishing to see because you just don't see protests like this in China. And Vivian, when did we see the protests begin? Start that story for me. What happened? So on Thursday night, a fire broke out in the city of Arunchi in western China in the Xinjiang region. And officially, 10 people died. And officials have said that the deaths were not because of COVID restrictions, but there has been a lot of suspicion and speculation online that, in fact, COVID lockdowns did play a role because Urumqi has been under lockdown for over three months. People have been

unable to leave their homes, and there have been reports of people's building doors being welded or sealed shut. Wow. That's a lockdown like we in the United States do not understand a lockdown, right? Absolutely. Yes. And there are currently over 300 million people under some form of lockdown in China. That's the population of the entire United States. And in Xinjiang and across China, people have reported being physically unable to leave their homes because the doors are locked from the outside. So there's speculation that people in a room could not get out of the burning buildings. There's also speculation that firefighters could not get toward the building because the roads around the building were blocked by physical barriers or

blocked by cars that had been parked there and sort of left there because lockdowns were imposed so suddenly. Next, social media footage from China appears to show people in the western city of Urumqi protesting against COVID restrictions. So on Friday evening, videos started circulating on social media of people in Urumqi marching to the city hall and around the city, really just furious that people had died

in their minds because of coronavirus restrictions. And then... Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Shanghai, calling for President Xi Jinping to stand down. The next day, Saturday, we saw protests in Shanghai and it had started, according to witnesses that we spoke to, as a candlelight vigil for the victims in Urumqi. But as images of this gathering started spreading online, more and more people started joining. The crowd grew into the hundreds and it became a protest.

Protests are erupting across China, from major metropolises to elite college campuses, even far-flung cities. The largest protests since Tiananmen Square in 1989 are rocking China. And on Sunday was when you really started to see it go nationwide. Four different cities, Wuhan, Xinjiang, Beijing and Shanghai. We started seeing footage of people in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic began. That's right. Marching down the streets. There was also talk of people getting ready to go out in Chengdu, which is a city in the Southwest that had been locked down earlier this year. And there was just all of this momentum snowballing.

So here in Beijing, I went to go see the protests. And as I was heading out to the site of the planned protest, I was really wondering whether there would be anyone there, what the scene would be that I would encounter. And I know that a lot of people were feeling the same way because there are group chats where people were saying, is anyone there yet? Should I go? Should I head out? And even as I was approaching the site, I was really unsure what I would find there. It was by this really beautifully renovated riverside in the middle of the city. You have willow trees, you have tall skyscrapers, although most of them were dark at this point, both because it was nighttime and because office buildings have basically been shut down for the past few weeks because of Beijing's outbreak.

And as you got closer, you saw a group of people in dark coats. It was quite cold out. Protesters were mostly young people, probably in their 20s or 30s. The evening began as a vigil, and it was very muted, very somber. Gentle is sort of the word that comes to mind for me. People had lit candles and they were singing morning songs for the people who had died in the Urumqi fire. And some people were holding up white pieces of paper. And what do the white pieces of paper stand for, Vivian? The white pieces of paper are really an implicit protest

against censorship because so many people in China are so accustomed to anything they say, if it's critical, being scrubbed immediately. And they often can be held responsible for what they're said online. And a blank piece of paper is a blank piece of paper. How can you say that somebody has said something wrong? So these white pieces of paper are a way of protesting without necessarily saying anything. Right. And there were some chants about, you know, we want an end to COVID testing, we want an end to lockdowns.

But the mood was more restrained. There was one point where a police officer had come to the riverside and was telling the crowd to keep it under control, encouraging them not to get political. And the crowd just started very gently singing over him. It was really a very poignant moment. There was another point where they had started chanting about wanting an end to lockdowns. And the police officer again said, you know, let's not get political.

If this is just a morning event, let's keep it to morning. And so very quickly people pivoted and said, continue lockdowns. We want more COVID tests in a very funny, sarcastic moment. And then as the night progressed, people started to get bolder and you heard more explicitly political demands. People were calling for an end to censorship. They were calling for artistic freedom, freedom of the press, democracy. And you could really sense the scope of the demands growing. The most explicitly political slogan I heard was honoring a man who had hung banners on a bridge in Beijing in October,

denouncing zero COVID, but also calling on China's leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. And even when that bridge slogan, protester, was mentioned, you very quickly heard a lot of the protesters in Beijing saying, don't talk about politics. We're just here to be good citizens, to talk about COVID. Were those dangerous things for people to say? Yes, they were definitely dangerous things for people to say? Yes, they were definitely dangerous things for people to say. I think what was really surreal for me was that as people were, for example, referencing the bridge protester, they were essentially saying things that you would only know if you had access to the internet outside of China's firewall. The firewall meaning the censor's control of everything that happens online. Yes, exactly. So the apparatus that stops people within China from accessing websites like Facebook, like Twitter, like New York Times. And so people would probably really only know about

the protester, for example, if they either had access to information outside of the firewall or they had people telling them about it. That's just not something that you hear people openly talking about in China. I mean, just the fact of getting over China's firewall is technically illegal. And for that sort of open acknowledgement of that alternate source of information to be out in the public was really extraordinary. Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking, you know, this is China. We're not used to protests like this. People were, you know, they had such an interesting mix of astonishment that this was happening. People really described a feeling of gratitude is a word that a lot of people used. Why gratitude?

So many people had showed up and that they felt this sense of camaraderie. Because, you know, the thing about censorship in China is that it makes it so difficult to find any sort of sense of community. It's so hard for people to mobilize. It's so hard for people to know if people around them other than their closest friends are like-minded. And so people were feeling extremely grateful to be in this place where they realized that people were like-minded. I mean, being there and seeing so many people on the streets, I mean, it's hard to explain how surreal that felt. And the really important thing to note about this is that protest is rare in China, but it does occur. But when it usually occurs, it's hyper-local.

It's about a local pollution issue or it's about a local construction issue or corruption. But what's so extraordinary about these protests is that they're all about zero COVID. And so it's unifying and mobilizing in a way that these protests that we've seen over the past few decades really haven't been. And they're also happening with knowledge of each other. People in Beijing took to the streets with knowledge of what had happened in Shanghai, with knowledge of what had happened in Arunji. They were chanting, they said, we're all Shanghairs, we're all Xinjiang people. And so there's this clear unifying thread around zero COVID, which is really different from the protests that you usually see in China. We'll be right back.

Vivian, these protests that you're telling me about, at their core, they're really about zero COVID. So here's my question for you. Most of the world has stopped these really restrictive measures. Why is China still doing them? Why is China still in zero COVID? I think the really important thing to remember is that when zero COVID was first introduced as a policy in China, it worked. It was really effective. You look at the number of infections and the number of deaths that China recorded in 2020 and 2021 compared to the rest of the world, and it was so much lower, especially for a country of China's size. And many Chinese people really appreciated that. They really felt that they were so much

safer in China than they were elsewhere. And the government really grabbed onto that success. There was so much propaganda. There was so much messaging saying, look at what a good job we have done. Only in China could you build all of these makeshift hospitals so quickly. Only in China could you be testing so many people all the time so effectively. delivered such safety for our people. And look at the mess, look at the deaths in these other countries, especially Western democracies like the United States. It became in a way, their brand almost. I mean, it was proof that this Chinese communist system was better than the system in Western democracies. Exactly. And not only did zero COVID become sort of a signature policy of the Chinese government, but it really became a signature policy of Xi Jinping. He really gave this policy, his personal imprimatur, he linked it essentially to his own rule and his own centrality at the heart of the Chinese government. And so zero COVID is Xi's policy. He has tied it very closely to his own legitimacy. And Vivian, what happened next? I mean, it was very successful in China, this policy of zero COVID. What happened after that? So zero COVID is really just a principle, right? It's an idea that you're going to keep infections at

zero. And at the beginning of the pandemic, that really meant that Wuhan was locked down. It meant that some other cities underwent relatively brief lockdowns. But what really started to change over the course of the past year is that chasing this goal of zero became much more invasive on the daily lives of many more people, in part just because the virus is so much more transmissible now, which means that it's harder to control. And what did that look like, Vivian? I mean, in the lives of daily people? So there are really two levels of controls to enforcing zero COVID. One is technological and one is personal. On a technological level, everybody in China has a health code, which is basically a QR code that you have on your cell phone. And it's either green, yellow, or red. Green is good. It

means that you can basically live your life. But if your code turns yellow, you will have a hard time entering public spaces like a mall, like public transport, like the supermarket. And if your health code turns red, you are not allowed to enter public spaces. You at any minute could be called by local health officials and told that you need to be sent to quarantine. So it's really a big deal if your health code turns red. And is the government controlling the color? Yes, the color of your health code is assigned to you by the government. Ostensibly, it's dictated by both where you've been,

which is tracked via your GPS location on your phone, and whether you visited, say, a mall or a restaurant that somebody infected has also visited. And it's also dictated by the results of your latest COVID test. But in reality, it's a little bit of a black box. We don't actually know what determines the color of your health code because there have been people who say that they are perfectly healthy, they haven't gone anywhere that an infected person has gone. And yet for some reason, their health code has turned red. What's an example of that, Vivian? So the most infamous example was this summer when there were a group of people from around the country who independently had deposited money in a series

of local banks in Hunan province in central China. And suddenly these banks froze their savings without any explanation. So of course they were quite upset and they were making plans to go to Hunan province and demand some answers. And just as they were preparing to travel there, or just as they were getting there, they mysteriously found that their health codes had turned red. Whoa. And of course, if your health code turns red, you can't get on a plane or a train and go to Hunan province to protest.

Wow. And so people were really quite suspicious of why their health codes had turned red at this convenient moment. Interesting. So in a way, that was some measure of social control, right? This technological side. Absolutely. This is clearly a weapon, if you will, that the government can use to control people's movements and make sure that they are not doing things that they don't want them to be doing. Now, the government has

said many times that the health code is only a tool for public health. It can't be manipulated for any other reasons, but it's incidents like what happened in Hunan that have really made people suspicious. Right. Okay. So that's the technological component. What about the personal one? So the personal one is really enforced through just this army of local neighborhood officials who manage basically just a few blocks, a few streets within cities in China. And before the pandemic, they were really a non-entity for many people. You might go talk to your neighborhood officials if you had a problem with the construction going on next door, if you had some sort of plumbing issue. But they were not a presence that people really thought about in any way. But during the pandemic and during zero COVID, they have become empowered on a whole new level.

zero COVID, they have become empowered on a whole new level. They have essentially become some of the most feared officials in China because if you get a call telling you that you need to quarantine at home, that's coming from your neighborhood officials. If you return from a business trip or a trip outside of the city where you live, very often you will get a call from your neighborhood officials saying, hey, we would like you to quarantine at home for a few days just in case. So they are really the human element keeping people in place. So it sounds like taken together, these two levels of control really amount to a pretty significant loss of personal freedoms. Yes.

levels of control really amount to a pretty significant loss of personal freedoms. Yes. And in addition to that, the economic toll after three years of this has really, really started to wear on people as well. Right. Like it stands to reason that if you're locked down for months at a time, you can't go to work, right? Like what's happening to people? The economic effects of zero COVID have really affected people all across the socioeconomic spectrum. So of course, for people who can't afford to work from home, for migrant workers, factory workers, for restaurant owners, all of these years of lockdowns and travel restrictions have been really brutal. Zero COVID has been especially hard on small businesses. But we've also seen it affect white-collar workers, people who were very, very comfortable before the pandemic. We've seen giant tech companies doing layoffs. We've seen college graduates having a really,

really hard time finding jobs. The youth unemployment rate is at 20%. No way. That's crazy. 20% youth unemployment in China? Yes. And so there have been stories of people who graduate from the top colleges in China, and they instead go to become COVID testing workers and other COVID control workers, because that's where the jobs are right now. Right. I mean, I would imagine that that leads to some pretty intense frustration in neighborhoods and communities all over the place. Definitely. Because even as China has for a very long time been an authoritarian system,

for the past 40 or so years, people have actually enjoyed a significant amount of freedom in their economic lives. There was sort of this unspoken agreement between the government and the people that we, as the Chinese government, will take away some of your civil liberties. But in return, you can be assured that you will get economic growth. You will get safety, comfort, prosperity. And that was this unspoken social contract. As long as the people did not try to challenge the Communist Party's grip on power, they could do whatever they needed to make money. They could enjoy the prosperity that the booming economy had brought to them. But that's no longer happening. The economy is slowing.

People are really suffering on a livelihood level. Right. Like the government, in a way, is just not holding up its end of the bargain anymore. Absolutely. There is really this rewriting of this longstanding bargain between the Chinese government and the Chinese people. That prosperity is gone or is fast slipping away. And so that trade-off of rights and freedom becomes much harder to stomach. Which in some ways brings us to today. What's happening now with the protests? You told us about that very dramatic night on Sunday. What's happened since? I think everyone is really waiting to see right now. So over the past few days,

there had been discussion of trying to continue planning protests in Beijing, in Shanghai, in other cities. But in the hours and days after Sunday, you really started to see the security apparatus that China has honed so well really swinging to life. And over the past few days, people who attended the protests have reported getting phone calls from the police or even being door knocked by the police, asking them, were you at this event on Sunday? Why were you there? Have you been talking to foreign media? And the plans that people had, for example, for protests on Monday night in Beijing, basically did not materialize because hours before people were planning to gather, there were already police cars up and

down the street. It was really clear that there was going to be a security blanket. And so the time came and went and people did not show up. And so right now it really feels like a moment of expectation and anxiety as protesters are deciding whether they can go back out, whether they feel it's worth it to go back out. Right. But one thing we do know is that the government does not seem to be budging anytime soon on zero COVID. They held a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in which they basically said zero COVID is still correct. Maybe there have been some problems in implementation, but really we haven't seen the government change its tune much in response to what happened this weekend. Okay. So even if the government, at least for now, is able to suppress these protests,

all of the frustrations that undergirded them, that really kind of propelled them to the surface, are still there. So why wouldn't the government just stop trying to do zero COVID, just like scrap the policy? There are both practical and political reasons that the government feels that it cannot back away from zero COVID yet. On a practical level, there are very real public health considerations for China. So the vaccination rate is actually lower than you might expect, especially among the elderly. Only about 65% of Chinese over the age of 80 have gotten two shots, let alone a booster. Wow. And so if there were to be an outbreak among the Chinese people in general, and certainly among the most vulnerable,

there actually could be a significant number of deaths. So if China's government were to open up then, it does risk a huge public health crisis. Yes, but there's also a related political reason for why they might not want to lift zero COVID. So the fact is that the Chinese Communist Party has invested so much political capital in saying that zero COVID is the proof that the Chinese government system is better than any other government system. And Xi Jinping in particular has tied it so closely to his own leadership that it would be really hard for them to step back and say that this is no longer the way forward without somehow, at least implicitly, detracting from those previous

statements and raising the question, well, were you wrong before then when you were saying that this was proof of China's superiority? And so Xi and the Chinese Communist Party have really sort of backed themselves into a corner because of how insistent they have been that zero COVID is the only way forward. So in many ways, the Chinese government and's health or people's trust in his government. There is definitely no easy way out of this situation. Either you stick to zero COVID and people continue to be extremely unhappy, people continue to lose faith in the government, as we've seen this past weekend. Or you back off a bit, a little bit, but you risk that people lose faith in a different way and wonder why the government is no longer keeping them safe or why it had been misleading them for so long about the direction it was taking the country. Vivian, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. This week, new protests flared up in southern China, where migrant workers and residents

rebelled against a pandemic lockdown in an industrial district. Crowds of hundreds of protesters on the edge of Guangzhou clashed with riot police in hazmat suits. Some threw glass bottles at anti-riot officers and tore down barriers meant to lock down buildings. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On the subject to avoid the rail strike, tomorrow morning we will have a bill on the floor. On Tuesday, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress vowed to pass legislation that would avert a nationwide rail strike. They said they agreed with President Biden that a work stoppage during the winter holidays would disrupt shipping and deal a devastating blow to the nation's economy.

Weighing the equities, we must avoid a strike. Jobs will be lost. Water will not be safe. Product will not be going to market. That must be avoided. The unions had threatened to strike over pay and leave disputes. But the Biden administration offered a compromise in September. Four of the 12 unions rejected that compromise.

And they had promised a strike in early December if their demands were not met. To head off a strike, Biden took an aggressive stance and called on Congress to pass legislation that would effectively force the workers to accept the terms of the compromise. And... And in the FIFA World Cup, the U.S. national men's soccer team is now advancing to the next round after it won against Iran 1-0. against Iran, 1-0. The winning goal was scored by 24-year-old Christian Pulisic, who injured himself while colliding with Iran's goalkeeper in a tense, politically charged game. Again, an Iranian player looking for a penalty. And the game is over!

Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan, Nina Feldman, and Rob Zipko, Thank you. YouTube, and Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Rochelle Banja. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.