Activists roll their eyes at the powerful
Don’t pull a face, we were told as children. If the wind changes, you’ll stay like that. What always seemed like a tall tale seems now to be expressing a new truth. For the right face, pulled at the right time, can change the very winds of history.
As regimes clamp down on dissent, it can be difficult to march in the streets. Authorities have been brutally suppressing protests in Tanzania and Iran. Thousands are protesting the suspected police shooting of anti-corruption activist Marielle Franco in Brazil.
But now, the internet gives power to the most subtle of political protests: pulling a face.
When China Business News TV reporter Liang Xiangyi rolled her eyes at a long, patsy question to a foreign ministry official, the video memes moved faster than the censors could chase them down.
And Liang’s rolled eyes made a powerful point: as the journalist next to her boasted at length of China’s great infrastructure achievement without ever coming to a question, real journalists were denied the opportunity to ask serious questions about contentious issues including North Korea, the South China Sea, USChina trade tensions – and the near-unanimous approval this week of a constitutional amendment to abolish term limits for president Xi Jinping.
Liang’s small protest does not compare with the unknown man who stood quietly in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989. To suggest that would be vacuous.
But the face she pulled has gone around the world.
So, in her honour, here are five more great expressions of protest that, at the very least, sensed the changing winds of history.
1 In 2007, on his return to the New Zealand cricket side after an enforced leave of absence, batsman Ross Taylor scored a century – and celebrated with a cheeky tongue-poke at selectors.
2 At Nelson Mandela’s 2013 funeral US president Barack Obama was seen giggling with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Michelle Obama’s glare spoke volumes.
3 In 2014, a young scallywag on a bike rode up behind Britain’s campaigning Labour leader Ed Miliband, and poked out his tongue at him. Miliband didn’t see it – much as he didn’t see his impending electoral defeat.
4 Nobody knows what Russian president Vladimir Putin was saying to his German counterpart Angela Merkel last year but it looked a lot like mansplaining. Her eye roll left little doubt.
5 This year, at Donald Trump’s state of the union speech, Bernie Sanders’ resting Bernie-face was accompanied, for good measure, by a slow clap.
None of these five faced any repercussions. For Liang Xiangyi, that is less certain. She has disappeared since her eye-roll went viral; neither her employer nor the Chinese government will say where she’s gone. Worryingly that, more than anything, shows the real power of her protest.