Protests in China: why blank papers have become a symbol of demonstrations

Often, an ordinary item can become a symbol of protest. In China, this is the case with a simple blank piece of paper.

On Sunday (27/11), some people gathered in Shanghai held papers to commemorate the victims of the fire that fueled the latest wave of demonstrations in the country.

Similarly, in the capital Beijing, demonstrators used scraps of paper at a protest at the famous Tsinghua University, which was once attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

A stunning video shows a young woman walking the streets of Wuzhen, a city in eastern Zhejiang province, with chains around her wrists and duct tape over her mouth. He had a blank sheet of unbroken paper in his hand.

“There was absolutely nothing on paper, but we know what was there,” a woman who participated in the Shanghai protests told the BBC.

The trend is returning to the 2020 demonstrations in Hong Kong, where residents hold blank papers to protest the region’s brutal new national security laws. At the time, activists removed the papers after authorities banned slogans and phrases related to the mass protest movement in 2019.

The BBC’s China correspondent, Stephen McDonnell, said the move was not only a protest against censorship of dissidents, but also “a lot of things, as if telling the authorities ‘you’re going to arrest me for stopping a protest'”. the sign that says nothing?”

Johnny, a 26-year-old protester in Beijing, told Reuters news agency that the newspaper “represents everything we wanted to say but couldn’t.”

This trend has also overdriven China’s massive internet censorship machine. The removal of “blank paper” phrases on Weibo, the country’s main social network, angered many users.

“If you’re afraid of a blank sheet of paper, you’re weak inside,” wrote one person.

But the emblem has also become the target of abuse by those still loyal to the central government and resentful of the waves of protest.

Video recorded at the Communication University of China in Nanjing city on Saturday shows an unidentified man angrily snatching a blank piece of paper from a protester.

In another video from the same night, dozens of students were seen silently holding blank papers on campus.

Protesters – with their hands tied by Beijing’s censorship machine – have also resorted to other forms of expression, including cynical demonstrations, to support China’s tough policies to combat COVID.

In one, after authorities ordered dozens of protesters to stop shouting anti-curfew slogans with blank papers, protesters responded with sarcastic “more curfews” and “I want to get tested for Covid”.

And some students at Tsinghua University put away scraps of paper with Friedmann’s equations describing how the universe evolves over time.

Since Friedmann is understood to mean “free man,” the use of the equation is a pun on the scientist’s name.

However, the most common view is blank paper at Chinese demonstrations that combine elements such as umbrellas (Hong Kong), rubber ducks (Thailand) and flowers (Belarus) as modern protest emblems.

– This text was published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-63782951.