NEWS | November 30, 2022
Reuters video carried by Voice of America documented residents in the Lixia District of Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, confronting police and attempting to push through barriers erected to enforce COVID lockdown restrictions during the nationwide protest wave that became known as the White Paper Movement.
In the Jinan footage, residents demanded that authorities lift the lockdown. The significance of the scene is best understood as part of a much broader wave of demonstrations that spread across cities and university campuses in mainland China after years of increasingly severe zero-COVID controls.
Elsewhere in the same protest wave, demonstrators went considerably further. In Shanghai, Reuters-documented footage showed protesters openly calling for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to step down—an exceptionally direct public challenge to the political leadership. Other demonstrations raised demands involving freedom of expression, political rights and opposition to authoritarian rule.
The events demonstrated how an immediate administrative grievance could develop into broader demands concerning fundamental rights and political accountability. The people participating in different cities did not all use identical slogans, and their demands should be documented accurately rather than merged into a single narrative.
Why It Matters
Taken together, the White Paper demonstrations revealed that citizens inside mainland China were willing to demand rights publicly despite extensive censorship, surveillance and the risk of punishment. In some places the immediate demand was an end to arbitrary lockdowns. Elsewhere protesters demanded freedom and political change, and in Shanghai people crossed one of the most sensitive political boundaries by publicly demanding that Xi Jinping and the Communist Party step down.
Fear is not the same thing as consent. When citizens in mainland China peacefully demand freedom and accountable government, their voices deserve to be documented, preserved and heard.
Sources
Primary reporting: Reuters footage carried by Voice of America, November 2022. VOA Chinese coverage of the Jinan lockdown protest and contemporaneous reporting on the nationwide White Paper protest movement.