Tag: Demonstrations, Protests and Riots

Protests Stretch China’s Censorship to Its Limits

Chin@Strategy

He too shared videos of the protest on WeChat, though he deleted them after 24 hours in an effort to evade the authorities, who had begun to go after some demonstrators. Though only up shortly, his videos changed the minds of two people he had thought would be unreceptive: his parents. “My parents, like many Chinese parents, used to think what I’m doing is meaningless and childish, but they have changed dramatically in the past two days,” Mr. Qu said. His parents now understand why he would participate in such…

What China’s Covid Protesters Are Calling For

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As he crossed a small road in Shanghai, the man held up a bundle of flowers and issued a rallying call to a crowd of excited onlookers. Within minutes, he was surrounded by security officials and wrestled into a police car. It was one of the more dramatic moments in several days of protests in China that captured the boldness of young Chinese demonstrators as well as the risks they face in challenging the country’s authoritarian leadership. The protests have been fueled by anger over an apartment building fire in…

Proud, Scared and Conflicted. What the China Protesters Told Me.

Chin@Strategy

They went to their first demonstrations. They chanted their first protest slogans. They had their first encounters with the police. Then they went home, shivering in disbelief at how they had challenged the most powerful authoritarian government in the world and the most iron-fisted leader China has seen in decades. Young Chinese are protesting the country’s harsh “zero-Covid” policy and even urging its top leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. It’s something China hasn’t seen since 1989, when the ruling Communist Party brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrators, mostly…

China Regroups to Snuff Out a Wave of Covid Protests

Chin@Strategy

After China experienced its boldest and most widespread protests in decades, defying Xi Jinping, a Communist Party leader who prizes his reputation for ironclad authority, his security apparatus is scrambling to reassert control. Public security personnel and vehicles have blanketed potential protest sites. Police officers are searching some residents’ phones for prohibited apps. Officials are going to the homes of would-be protesters to warn them against illegal activities and are taking some away for questioning. Censors are scrubbing protest symbols and slogans from social media. On Monday, the demonstrations were…

China Protests Over ‘Zero Covid’ Follow Months of Economic Pain

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The toll of China’s unwavering approach to fighting Covid has rippled through the world’s second-largest economy for months: Youth unemployment reached a record 20 percent, corporate profits sagged, and economic growth fell well below Beijing’s own projections. The economic pain has intensified the pressure to ease pandemic restrictions to salvage the flagging economy and restore some semblance of normal life. Frustration with the government’s zero-tolerance Covid strategy, which has failed to prevent a big jump in cases, escalated over the weekend as a population tired of unpredictable lockdowns, extended quarantines…

White House Weighs How Forcefully to Support Protesters in China

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WASHINGTON — The surprise eruption of protests in China over Covid lockdowns presents President Biden with his latest challenge in balancing an embrace of democracy with the need to prevent a fast-decaying relationship with an autocratic nation from rupturing. The White House reacted cautiously on Monday to the scenes of Chinese citizens denouncing the country’s zero-Covid policies and the revival of widespread censorship. In a statement, repeated almost verbatim in the White House press room by John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, the administration said only:…

At a China Covid Protest, a Mix of Giddy Elation and Anxiety

Chin@Strategy

BEIJING — The crowd was hard to make out at first, a dark mass huddled along the Beijing riverbank after sunset. They stood quietly, almost nervously, dozens of people bundled in thick coats beside yellowed willow trees. At their center was a small altar, strewn with candles and flowers, for the 10 people who died in a fire in western China last week. Two hours later, that crowd had swelled into the hundreds, a mass of people marching and chanting for freedom, rule of law, an end to the three…

Zero-Covid Protests in China Shake Global Markets

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Crypto investors see trouble ahead Crypto asset prices sank again on Monday even as Binance, the industry’s biggest exchange, tried to restore investor trust by pushing for greater transparency across its exchange following the collapse of its rival, FTX, earlier this month. How bad could it get? Mark Mobius, a co-founder of Mobius Capital Partners, told Bloomberg this morning that his new price target for Bitcoin is $10,000, implying a further drop of nearly 40 percent. Binance sought to calm investor nerves. This weekend, Changpeng Zhao, its founder, said that…

Memes, Puns and Blank Sheets of Paper: China’s Creative Acts of Protest

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In Shanghai, a vigil grew into a street protest where many held blank sheets of white paper in a symbol of tacit defiance. In Beijing, students at Tsinghua University raised signs showing a math equation devised by the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann, whose surname in Chinese is a homonym for “free man.” And on China’s suppressed internet, where positive messages abound and negative ones are scrubbed, protesters resorted to irony: They posted walls of text filled with the Chinese characters for “yes,” “good” and “correct” to signal their discontent while…

The Covid Protests in China, Explained

Chin@Strategy

“Lift the lockdown,” the protesters screamed in a city in China’s far west. On the other side of the country, in Shanghai, demonstrators held up sheets of blank white paper, turning them into an implicit but powerful sign of defiance. One protester, who was later detained by the police, was carrying only flowers. Over the weekend, protests against China’s strict Covid restrictions ricocheted across the country in a rare case of nationwide civil unrest. There had been signs of dissent, but the new wave of anger may pose a bigger…