China’s blank paper protesters vanish without trace
Fate of young professionals who took to streets over lockdown remains unclear after December arrests
CAO ZHIXIN usually responded quickly to texts and calls from her friends, happy to chat about everything from arthouse films to rare birds. But in late December, a month after she joined a protest in Beijing, she suddenly stopped.
Ms Cao, an outgoing 26-year-old who loves nature, had predicted something like this might happen and prepared a video just in case. Several friends who had joined the unprecedented demonstrations against Covid restrictions in November had already been detained by police when she filmed it.
“None of us had any idea what to do, what would be best,” one of her friends said. “We never dealt with this kind of situation before.”
In the end, they released the threeminute clip, which quickly went viral despite being censored in China.
“If you are seeing this, that means I have been taken away by the police, like my other friends,” Ms Cao says in the video, which was recorded a day before she disappeared on Dec 23.
“On Dec 18, the police started making criminal arrests and quietly took a few of my friends away,” she continues. “They were forced to sign a blank arrest warrant.”
Ms Cao has since become a symbol of resistance, part of a new generation of young Chinese people paying the price for the most widespread demonstrations on the mainland since 1989, when pro-democracy protesters were gunned down in Tiananmen Square.
She is among about a dozen people in Beijing alone who have been in police custody for weeks, after mostly being taken over the Christmas holidays.
None of them were activists or even especially political, but they were fed up with the three years of lockdowns they had endured.
Shortly after, Xi Jinping, China’s president, ditched his zero-Covid policy and some protesters cheered what they thought was a victory. But now, the authorities are cracking down.
For as little as holding up blank pieces of paper, protesters have been accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – a vague charge that Chinese authorities use to go after anyone deemed a troublemaker. The offence carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Human rights groups are calling on the Chinese government to release all those detained; if authorities move forward with trials, that essentially guarantees a guilty verdict given the country’s 99.9 per cent conviction rate.
Protesters in at least eight cities have been arrested, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of rights activists and groups.
But what is known to the outside world is only the tip of the iceberg, according to Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer living in exile in the US.
He said that is because families of those arrest are warned by the authorities not to disclose information to the outside world.
Among those detained in Beijing is Li Siqi, a freelance writer and graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London.
She joined Ms Cao and others in a public vigil after at least 10 people died in a residential block fire, unable to escape from the building because of lockdown restrictions.
They brought candles and flowers, sang, and held up white papers – a symbol of defiance against censorship.
For Ms Li and Ms Cao’s crowd – young, educated, urban professionals in their 20s – the protests were completely novel.
“None of us were ever really political types; we’re just regular people who were upset by the lockdowns and the deadly fire,” one of Ms Cao’s friends said.
In the following days, police started detaining people – including Ms Cao – and confiscating phones and laptops. But by the evening, she and others were freed, so they shrugged it off. Weeks later, the police came knocking again, arresting one person after another.
Human rights activists say there is a chance they could start to be freed from this weekend. Under Chinese criminal law, the police and prosecution have 37 days to make and approve a formal arrest after detaining a suspect.
But there have been a growing number of cases of people languishing for years in pre-trial detention, something that weighs heavily on Ms Cao’s friend.
“The other day, I saw a cute squirrel outside and wanted to snap a picture to send her, but I couldn’t do that,” he said.