The Decibel - Zero-COVID protests break through the Great Firewall of China

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Protesters in China are blaming zero-COVID policies for the deaths of 10 people in an apartment building in the city of Urumqi. Demonstrations erupted in dozens of cities around the country, including in Shanghai and the capital Beijing.While protests do happen in China – despite the country’s reputation for absolute control – the way unrest spread online is remarkable given China’s internet firewall that censors dissent.The Globe’s Asia Correspondent, James Griffiths is the author of The Great Firewall of China. He tells us how these protests are evading the censors, what the government is doing in response and what these demonstrations mean for zero-COVID policies in the country moving forward.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Maina Karaman-Wolmes, and you're listening to The Decibel. That's the sound of protesters in Shanghai on Sunday. Over the weekend, protests like this one erupted in dozens of cities across China. Demonstrations aren't unheard of in the country, but what makes these protests so remarkable is how the unrest spread widely online, evading China's internet firewall that clamps down on dissent. Today, we have James Griffiths on the podcast.

He's The Globe's Asia correspondent, and he also wrote a book called The Great Firewall of China about the country's online censorship. This is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. James, thanks so much for joining us on the show again. Thanks for having me. I know we just talked to you last week, and we are talking to you still from Qatar. I believe you're in the media center there. Is that right? Yeah. So people might hear some noise around me, but unfortunately, this is the quietest place I could find to record. Fair enough. No problem. So let's get into what we've been seeing in China the last few days. I just want to start with why these protests got underway in the first place.

Like what got people so mad? The immediate cause was a fire on November 24th, last Thursday, in a large apartment building in Urumqi, which is the capital of Xinjiang province in the far western region of China. And, you know, it's a fairly kind of normal apartment fire. It seems to have started with a faulty power strip, but it spread very quickly. It engulfed a couple of floors of this building. Smoke was pouring out, enveloping, you know, multiple stories. It's a huge kind of 20 plus story building. And eventually 10 people died, nine people were hospitalized. The authority said from inhalation of toxic fumes. And this was, you know, this is a disaster in itself, but it reports quickly spread. The two things that the fire brigade was delayed in arriving, it took them three hours to extinguish

this fire. And some people were saying that there were delays in them arriving because of COVID kind of barriers that are placed in lots of cities to stop people moving around too much. And also potentially because of cars been abandoned on the streets because their owners have been quarantined. There was also rumors that spread and kind of photos that spread of locked doors on the buildings, suggesting that fire escapes might have been blocked to stop residents leaving because most of Xinjiang has been under quarantine, under home lockdown for about three months now. And the local authorities, it's important to say,

the local authorities have denied these claims, and they've said there's no link between COVID regulations and the deadliness of the fire. This was just a horrible accident, horrible disaster. But the sense that it was and the feeling that this was linked to COVID restrictions kind of spread very quickly around the country. And it led to initially just protests in Urumqi itself. And then we saw protests over the weekend in Shanghai and Beijing, but also in around a dozen other cities around the country, particularly on university campuses. So this was a kind of real, you know, spontaneous outpouring, both of grief for the disaster in Xinjiang and also of anger at COVID policies. And that type of thing we have not seen in a long time.

Okay. And how big of a deal is it, James, that people are actually going out into the streets and saying these things? Yeah. So protests do happen in China, you know, despite the country's kind of reputation for absolute control. And, you know, it's not somewhere where people think of having a lot of protests. There are, you know, hundreds of small demonstrations. You've got to remember, this is a country of 1.3 billion people. It's something like the third largest in the world by land. There is lots of space and lots of people who are, you know, not all of them are going to be happy all of the time, even if you have a police state trying to keep them down. And so there are protests, but they tend to be geographically isolated.

They tend to be about specific issues, be it labor unrest or rural land use issues, things like that. And they don't tend to happen nationwide. Okay, so let's talk about this anger towards the COVID policies, because you're saying, you know, this started from this fire, and there's people were connecting that to the COVID policies that were in place and the things as a result of that. China has a zero COVID policy. Can you remind us what that means? Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has responded zero COVID policy. Can you remind us what that means? Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has responded very forcefully to COVID infections anywhere in the country, first in Wuhan and then throughout China. And the idea is to cut off infection as soon as possible through whatever means really. So that it can involve lockdowns of buildings, neighborhoods, cities, even counties for

indeterminate periods of time until the infection rate drops. There's tough quarantines on people coming into the country and even on some internal travel. And then there is very, very, very frequent testing of people in areas where there's any kind of outbreak. So if there is a couple of cases in your city, you can kind of expect to go through as much as three rounds of mass testing in a week. I'm curious, James, how has the vaccine rollout gone in China? Yeah, so one of the strangest thing about China's approach to COVID has been, you know, you have on one side, this incredibly coercive

system of frequent testing of lockdowns of controls on movement and yet there hasn't been as big of a push for vaccination as you would expect so we just got some new stats today from China they said about you know it's over 90% of the entire population has been vaccinated has received three doses but once you get into the older age groups that goes down dramatically. And so only about 65%, 66% of over 80s who are, you know, the most vulnerable group have received three vaccine doses. And so the danger of that, if you do get a big COVID wave, is really high. And we actually saw this in Hong Kong. So Hong Kong was pursuing zero COVID. But Hong Kong's defenses have essentially failed and the virus was spreading wildly earlier this year.

And there was an equally low number of elderly people vaccinated and it resulted in thousands of deaths and even more hospitalizations. It was a disaster for the healthcare system. If that happens on a scale, on a Chinese scale, when we're talking tens of millions of people, that will, you know, truly be a disaster. OK, so that kind of gives us the context for these protests that started over the weekend.

A number of media outlets have described these widespread protests as rare. Can you just help me understand, James, why are these protests considered so rare? What's rare is this kind of national level process, this to have things happening in multiple cities at the same time. We've not seen that in years. I mean, the example people keep reaching for is the Tiananmen Square protests, which while they're very associated with Beijing, were actually happening in cities across China. In 1989, so over 30 years ago. Yeah. And they were the last kind of nationwide political movement of this scale. But the last time we saw people protesting or demonstrating in cities across the country was kind of 2012. And that was these anti-Japan protests that sprung up. But they also had the more or less tacit approval of the government because it wasn't targeting the government, it was targeting Japan. And how does China usually prevent this from happening? Like,

why haven't we seen these protests happen in so long? So there are a couple of tools that China uses to prevent protests. One of it, which is obviously a huge police state surveillance, things like that. And another one is widespread censorship. So the Great Firewall, which is what we kind of call the huge online censorship and surveillance apparatus that have built up over the last couple of decades, one of the primary purposes of that is to prevent any kind of protests happening. It doesn't prevent everything. Like I said, there are protests, but it prevents those protests kind of taking on another life.

It prevents someone being inspired by some protest at a factory in Guangzhou and thinking, actually, you know, this connects with me. I feel pissed off too. I'm going to take to the streets in my city. You know, it prevents that kind of second wave of protest, which is when you start to see things get a lot larger. To put that in a Western context,

if people think about the recent Black Lives Matter process that we saw across the US, you know, they were often inspired and provoked by instances of police brutality, you know, so you had something happen, and people would then learn about it, they'd feel aggrieved, and they'd want to go out and protest. In China, these instances still happen, even the small kind of local protests still happen. But the censorship kicks in to prevent that kind of evolution from the initial anger into any kind of nationwide movement. But the interesting thing with these COVID protests is that because COVID affects everyone equally, and it essentially cuts across class, cuts across geography in China, you already have this kind of unifying anger or frustration that people can tap

into instantly. So when people saw the news of the Urumqi fire, it kind of tapped into this pre-existing frustration and anger that a lot of people already felt with COVID restrictions. And, you know, I think that's what helped prompt all these spontaneous demonstrations that you saw in cities across the country, that there was no need for organizing, there was no need for kind of people to post and say, let's go out and protest. People kind of felt instinctively that they wanted to go and both mourn the people in Urumqi and also, you know, vent their anger. And so that almost bypassed these systems that are in place to prevent just this, because you can't censor calls to protest if no one's making a call to, because you can't censor calls to protest

if no one's making a call to protest. You can't, you know, surveil people trying to organize this stuff if no one has to organize it. And so I think it really showed a bit of a loophole and a weakness in the Great Firewall in this regard. We'll be back in a moment. So the point of the firewall, too, is to keep down the news of this kind of protest when it does spring up. So can you just help me understand, James, how did this spread so quickly over the weekend? Why did this firewall not catch things? There are two things happening here. Both, like we said, there was the initial failure to kind of stop people taking to the streets to begin with, because there was no

need for organization, because it's all kind of seemed to happen spontaneously. And a lot of it, I think, spread through word of mouth. And then there was this huge spreading of photos and videos of posts about the protests throughout the weekend, which definitely helped inspire more protests on Sunday and got more people to come out. And that stuff is really what the firewall should be stopping. If the first protests were kind of a fluke, the Sunday protests were a real failure of the censorship system and of the surveillance system kicking in. And I think there's a few reasons why that might have happened. One is just the sheer volume that was coming through. There was just a huge, huge amounts of videos and things online for the censors to try and tackle. There's also

probably a degree to which these companies that do the censorship, a lot of this is private, it's not done directly by the state, it's kind of farmed out to private companies. A lot of them, you know, there's less staff on the weekends, That probably didn't help. And that some of this stuff wasn't caught by the artificial intelligence, by the kind of automated censorship that happens a lot of times because it is the hardest type of stuff to censor. It's videos. It's stuff from, you know, the middle of big cities in China. There's not obvious keywords.

It's not obvious kind of tags to pull and kick in censorship. And I also noticed that people are holding up blank pieces of paper. Like what's happening there? One major purpose of these blank pieces of paper is so that people can hold up something and they can display something but can't, in theory, get in trouble for it because after all, they're just holding up a blank piece of paper. They haven't written down with the CCP. They haven't written down with Xi Jinping on it. It's just a blank piece of paper. But this also speaks to that shared frustration and anger that we've been talking about, that they don't need to write a slogan on it, because everyone implicitly understands when

they see someone holding up a sign like this, or, you know, a blank piece of paper like this, they implicitly understand what that person is saying, because they feel it as well. And that's been, I think, really effective. And it's really kind of hit a nerve with people. And we've also kind of seen a, you know, an online version of that, in that people have started posting good, good, good, good, they've like literally, you know, write good, like 1000 times in a post, or they write, they cheer on on a post by state media about COVID policy, they'll kind of, you know, in all caps of letters, cheer it on, or they say, they cheer on, on a post by state media about COVID policy. They'll kind of, you know, in all caps and letters, cheer it on, or they say, we're doing great, you know, China's number one. And some of that, I think you could mistake for, you know, kind of nationalist

pride, but a lot of it is clearly really darkly sarcastic. That's kind of a way to get around the firewall then it sounds like too. Yeah. And this also challenges censors. I mean, they have been deleting some of these posts because, you know, this is China, you don't actually have to explain why you do things. So they are able to delete a lot of this stuff and just kind of use their own judgment. But it does really challenge them. And I think the best example of this, and we saw this in during the Hong Kong protests as well, is the adoption of the Chinese National Anthem. Because the Chinese National Anthem is a revolutionary song. One of the key lines in it is arise, you who would not be slaves.

It is basically the perfect protest song. But it's also impossible to say you can't sing the Chinese National Anthem. You know, how can you tell people you can't sing the National Anthem? It puts the authorities in a real bind. So for China's Communist Party, I mean, this is not what they want to see happen. How have they responded to the fact that these things were getting around the firewall? So as well as throwing hundreds of police officers out onto the street and, you know, throwing numbers at the problem, they've also done that from a censorship perspective. There's been a clear ramping up of censorship in the last couple of days and just mass deletion of content that's been posted over the weekend.

So some of the sites were filtering stuff. They were tracking down protest videos or photos from the protest and deleting them. And then some of the smaller sites that maybe don't have the resources to do that were just mass deleting. So like everything posted within the last 24 hours got deleted. So you know, this stuff is being wiped away. But like I said, it was spreading so widely to begin with that, you know, that is only going to be somewhat effective. Xi Jinping just recently secured a third term as leader of China's Communist Party. And he's

really consolidated power throughout the years to make him one of the most powerful leaders in the country's history. I'm curious, James, what do these protests mean for his reputation? The protests are definitely a dramatic challenge to Xi Jinping, especially just after he secured power, secured a third term. You know, he was looking as strong as he ever has. And suddenly you have this massive flowering of national dissent. But if we compare these to the unrest in 1989, he looks a lot more secure. So one of the reasons the protests in 1989 were able to go on for as long as they did and to have the kind of effect that they did was because there was a split within the Chinese leadership over how to handle them. And there was a lot of kind of inter-party politics happening behind the scenes. Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has become even more of a black

box. But we can relatively safely assume that kind of split is not there now, because he's just appointed a new Politburo, a new Politburo standing committee that is packed with his allies, packed with loyalists to him. But one of the really interesting things about the protests is that it exemplifies this thing that analysts have been warning for a long time as Xi Jinping has been consolidating power and as that he's been making it clear that the only person in charge of a lot of things is himself, that he's at the same time made himself a focal point for anger. You had quotes from protesters who were saying, look, Xi Jinping is the person in charge of this. Of course we blame him. You know quotes from protesters who were saying, look, Xi Jinping is the person in charge of this. Of course, we blame him. You know, there is Chinese officials today came out

and said that a whole part of the problem is local authorities being overzealous or applying these policies wrong. But that excuse only works so well because people connect everything that's happened in the last couple of years with Xi Jinping himself, because he is so clearly in charge. And he's, you know, publicly been very in charge of COVID policy and of, you know, seemingly everything else. Yeah. There does appear to be a lot of frustration, though, obviously, with these protests. People are frustrated with the zero COVID measures in China. Is there any chance that these measures will be lifted anytime soon? So even before this weekend, there has been a gradual trend from the Chinese government of easing and of finessing their COVID policy. You know, they're not opening up anytime soon, but they've indicated that things are going to slowly get better. And there was a press conference on Tuesday where we saw senior health officials kind of repeat this message, you know, saying that,

look, some of the worst stuff that's been happening, that's because local governments aren't applying our policies properly. They also said, for example, that lockdowns should be applied quickly, but also lifted as quickly as possible and try to indicate that, you know, there is going to be kind of slightly less arduous restrictions in the weeks to come. But also what we saw out of this press conference was there was no roadmap for how we're going to get out of restrictions and open China up in the way that a lot of other countries have opened up. And I think that's one of the main things that people really want to see, that they've been putting up with these restrictions for three years now.

They want to know when they're going to go away. And that doesn't necessarily mean that people disapprove even of these restrictions. They just want to know when they're going to go away. And that doesn't necessarily mean that people disapprove even of these restrictions. They just want to know when they're going to end, when things can return to normal and how they'll return to normal. Just very lastly here, we've already seen in the early part of this week, the crackdowns on these protests. Do we have a sense of how long this protest movement will go on? I think it's difficult to describe this as a movement at the moment, because while we saw two days of protests, and that is remarkable, like we've said, from a Chinese perspective, this is not something that's been able to continue. There aren't obvious leaders. Organizing around this is incredibly difficult because that really is what the Great Firewall is good at preventing and China's surveillance state is good at preventing. But while there isn't a movement, I think the anger and frustration that led to these protests isn't necessarily going to go away, especially if restrictions continue, especially if we do see a wave of cases this winter and they actually get worse, which they may do in a lot of parts of the country.

The officials at the press conference on Tuesday warned that some places are facing the grimmest and most challenging situation since the beginning of the pandemic, which is not exactly hopeful for, you know, not seeing lockdowns in the future and things like that. So I think this anger is going to continue to bubble away and it may bubble up again in the near future. James, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this today. Thanks, Manika. That's it for today. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.