How a blank page became a Chinese protest (non) symbol

Innovative ways to thwart artificial intelligence (AI) censorship show human ingenuity still trumps machine learning. But for how long? The bravest protesters in the world this year are arguably the Iranian soccer team, who refused to sing their national anthem at the controversial World Cup in Qatar.

Compared with the frankly pathetic climb-down by European soccer teams that balked at Fifa threats to yellow-card anyone wearing a rainbow-pride armband, it’s even more stark. These men face real consequences when they get home – from a brutal regime that has been trying to suppress a months-long revolt by its citizens over the killing of a young woman for not wearing her headscarf correctly.

If those European players had any real courage, they would have all worn gay-pride armbands and called Fifa’s bluff. But that is another story. Elite soccer players aren’t known for doing anything that doesn’t enhance their massive pay cheques.

Meanwhile, another group of people have evolved a quite unique form of protest. Because of the enormous censorship operations conducted using algorithms on Chinese social media and messaging networks, protesters have found a novel way to express their rage at the brutal Covid-zero policies that have kept people barred inside their homes and apartment buildings, and other restrictive measures.

To counter these AI forms of monitoring, angry protesters are holding up blank pieces of paper. To the AI systems trained to pick up words or phrases that are banned, these appear as, well, blank white pages. But to us humans who can read between the lines, as it were, it is a powerful symbol.

China has been rocked by Covid lockdown protests in the past few weeks after a fire in Urumqi killed 10 people in a locked-down building that many people believe prevented victims from escaping and firefighters from getting in.

Workers at Foxconn’s primary facility making top-end iPhone 14 models also fled the factory in Zhengzhou because of severe lockdown protocols and disputes over salaries. Turns out nobody likes having to do daily, or just regular, PCR tests to check for Covid.

This wave of protest has been likened to the student uprisings in 1989 that culminated in the infamous Tiananmen Square crackdown.

“The mood on WeChat was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before,” a British expat living in Beijing for more than 10 years told Wired. “There seemed to be a recklessness and excitement in the air as people became bolder and bolder with every post, each new person testing the government’s – and their own – boundaries.”

Other censorship-busting techniques include disguising protest videos with effects filters or playing Western songs that have similar protest themes. One trick involves sarcastic singing of the Chinese Communist Party anthem, which has the word “good” in it.

This kind of smart skirting of the strict censorship rules shows that the human brain can still thwart the literal logic of AI and its algorithms.

In another clever protest, students from Tsinghua University protested with the Friedmann equation. As Hong Kong activist Nathan Law, now exiled in London, tweeted: “I have no idea what this equation means, but it does not matter. It’s the pronunciation: it’s similar to … free man – a spectacular and creative way to express, with intelligence.”

Right now it’s human creativity 1, AI literal logic 0.