For those who have demonstrated in recent days, they represent both their demands and the censorship which prevents them from expressing themselves. In Shanghai and elsewhere, a blank page is enough to be arrested. On social networks, they are immediately erased.
by Simon Leplâtre (shanghai, correspondence)
The protest movement that has been trying in Chinese cities for a week has found its symbol: a blank page. The protesters who brandish these virgin sheets of paper explain that they represent both their demands and the censorship which prevents them from expressing themselves. These days, in Shanghai and elsewhere, a blank page is enough to be arrested by the police, who does not hesitate to control the smartphones of suspect passers-by. Because after the surprise effect, which allowed hundreds of people to come together on Saturday 26 November in Shanghai, the time is for repression. And on Chinese social networks, WeChat (conversation and sharing application), Weibo (similar to Twitter), or Douyin (Chinese version of Tiktok), gatherings, but also simple white pages, are now censored by the plates- forms.
The images of a small crowd on Saturday in Shanghai, with flowers and candles on the ground, in tribute to the ten victims of Urumqi’s fire, seen as a new drama of zero covid politics, circulated On the WeChat social network. Many others were censored afterwards, but it was too late. The word had passed: hundreds of young people released a drink in the bars of the city center flocked, forming an exceptional demonstration where the crowd was going to resume slogans against zero covid politics, but also against power. Participants had never taken part in such a demonstration, or even imagined being able to flourish in the cry of “XI Jinping, resignation!”
platforms responsible for control
In China, censorship is the responsibility of companies owners of the platforms, which employ a plethora of small hands to verify the content deemed suspected by algorithms: politics, violence and sex are the three themes targeted. At the end of 2021, Bytedance, the company that created Tiktok and Douyin, employed more than 20,000 people for “content check” in China. Not all subjects are equal before censorship: the rape accusations formulated by tennis player Peng Shuai, at the end of 2021, were thus completely censored in China. Conversely, current demonstrations are all the more difficult to censor since they occur in the four corners of China and take various forms: students protest on university campuses, residents refuse to submit to confinement …
Effective in the long term, to prevent the dissemination of information and disseminate the authorized discourse on platforms and in the media, censorship is sometimes exceeded in the moment. Long enough in any case for connected youth to wind certain events, not enough for the majority of the population to be aware. The official media being careful not to evoke the slightest demonstration in China, the result is a very diverse level of information among the population. “I saw some videos on WeChat, something happened on rue Wulumuqi, but I don’t know what they [the demonstrators] were doing. I have no opinion on it, the People my age do not take care of the news, “says a volunteer, 61, in the red jacket of the neighborhood committee, keeping the entrance to a residence at the center of Shanghai. A little further, the owner of a DIY store, 35, heard about it by neighbors, “but I am not participating in this kind of gatherings”, he defends himself.
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