The Role of Social Media in Chinese Protests

By Federica Cidale

Xi’An and Shanghai Lockdowns

On December 22, 2021, Xi’An, a city with 13 million inhabitants, was put under lockdown after a cluster of COVID-19 cases was detected (AFP, 2022). It was the longest lockdown since the original 2020 Wuhan lockdown  (Stevenson, 2022). Compared to the astonishingly high COVID-19 case numbers of the US and European countries, such a drastic measure seems to be unnecessary, but adopting a  zero-covid policy means that, no matter how small the cluster is, the contagion must be contained. The severity of the legislation prevented an 8-year-old boy suffering from leukemia and a pregnant woman from accessing medical care. As public discussion about the government decisions in China are almost non-existent, Xi’An residents could only draw attention to their hardships online. They took to social media to share their grievances, such as the difficulty faced in collecting groceries, and their experience of officials caring more about containing the outbreak than about the well-being of the residents (Stevenson, 2022). 

Besides being the most populous city in China, Shanghai is well connected internationally, an economic hub and home to the country’s most educated people as well as many social media influencers and foreigners (Yuan, 2022). So, when Shanghai was placed under yet another sudden lockdown on 27th March 2022, the residents could make use of social media in a more systematic and effective way than in Xi’An (Galbraith & Stanway, 2022). The lockdown lasted for two months (Davidson & Ni, 2022) and revealed widespread discontent towards the dynamic zero covid policy (Ni & correspondent, 2022). Social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat became the only way for these people to express their grievances, frustrations, anger and fear. Shanghai residents would often call for help, e.g., dialysis patients trying to get treatment, people running out of food, etc. (Yuan, 2022).

Several kinds of videos were being shared online, such as residents in neighborhoods  banging their pots and pans to demand food (W. Yang, 2022), building complex residents yelling “we want to eat, we want to go to work, we want freedom”, patients in quarantine centers showing awful living conditions (Carter, 2022). Even Chinese censors were having a hard time to keep up (W. Yang, 2022) as the flow of information was so large. A montage of audio recordings of Shanghai resident’s pleas for food, crying babies and people asking hospitals to cure their family members, called “Voices of April”, went viral on the Chinese internet but was taken down quickly (W. Yang, 2022; Yuan, 2022). Even the Chinese national anthem’s opening lines “stand up, those who do not want to be slaves” were banned as keywords on Weibo (Hao, 2022). 

Brief Overview of Social Media’s Role

All the described events are tied together by the use of the internet – specifically social media platforms – as a space to vent frustration and complaints, and attract attention to issues people were experiencing. In a country like China, where public life is tightly monitored, the internet became a public platform to express oneself. According to Habermas (1989, as cited in Shao & Wang, 2017), the public sphere is independent from the private sphere and the state, and enables the citizens to express their concerns. With the advent of internet technologies, this public sphere is now expanded into online space. In an authoritarian country, mainstream media present a limited prespected, determined by the state’s views. They are so detached from the reality around them that they are perceived as unimportant and unresponsive by the citizens (Weiss, 2013). In this context, the internet can become a public sphere where internet users can express their views. In a country where politics is taboo, everything can become political (Tang & Huhe, 2014), and this is especially clear on the Chinese internet where internet users use creativity to circumvent censorship (G. Yang, 2009).

During COVID-19 lockdowns, what connected all the people was them sharing concerns, fears, and anger online which is crucial to bring people together and increase their motivation to take action (Papacharissi, 2014). This is called “affective news”: media are used to share stories and feelings connecting people. Furthermore, when analyzing the use of social media, it is important to take a look at the social context in which they are used. Various scholars (Comunello & Anzera, 2012; Howard & Hussain, 2011; Papacharissi, 2014; Tudoroiu, 2014) emphasized the importance of the social context that motivated these protests. Social media platforms are mostly seen as a tool of coordination and organization, rather than the root cause. It would be impossible to comprehend the media’s role in political processes without first understanding the local context in which it takes place. The technology does not determine the social outcome but are variables to take into consideration. In the case of COVID-19 protests in China, many factors that led the people to protest must be taken into consideration: the economic downturn (Sun, 2022), fears of sudden lockdowns (BBC, 2022) and the psychological trauma that long lockdowns have on the human psyche (Yu, 2022).

Recent Protests and the Role of Social Media

On 23th November 2022, rarely seen scenes of protests erupted at the Foxconn iPhone plant in Zhengzhou. The trigger for the protests was a delay in bonus payment, but this was just the tip of the iceberg of pent-up frustrations towards the country’s COVID policy (Goh & Lee, 2022). The Foxconn plant had imposed a strict closed loop system that made workers live and work on site to avoid infection (Goh & Lee, 2022). The factory, though, did not maintain positive living conditions and left many without food. In late October, this prompted many workers to flee the factory (Woo, 2022). Local government helped the factory hire additional workers on the promise to give them bonuses and higher salaries, but the plant did not live up to its words (Goh & Lee, 2022). To make the matter worse, on 24th November a fire in a building in an Urumqi residential area killed 10 and wounded 9, and rescue operations could not be conducted due to lockdown restrictions. The anger triggered crowds of people to march down the streets of Urumqi chanting “End the lockdown” and singing the Chinese national anthem (Tian, 2022). The events in Urumqi were widely shared on social media with videos of people screaming for help from the building on fire, sparking public anger even in the capital, Beijing, where some residents staged small-scale protests (Tian, 2022).

The protests soon took over other cities in China: Xi’An, Nanjing, Chengdu, Lanzhou and Shanghai (Hall et al., 2022; Kuo, 2022). In Shanghai, residents held a vigil on the Wulumuqi Road – named after the Xinjiang capital, Urumqi – for those who died in the fire, which turned into a demonstration. Protesters started to hold blank sheets of paper, to symbolize opposition to the censorship (Kuo, 2022; Pollard & Goh, 2022). On Weibo and WeChat, as a sign of solidarity, many internet users posted blank white squares or photos of themselves holding blank sheets of paper (Pollard & Goh, 2022). Other protestors shouted “We don’t want masks, we want freedom. We don’t want COVID tests, we want freedom" (Kuo, 2022). There were many other creative methods employed by Chinese internet users to evade online censorship and share their messages. For example, internet users started to flood the internet with phrases meant for praise and agreement like 是 (yes), 对 (right) and 好 (good), repeating these characters hundreds or thousands of times. (Lin & Hao, 2022)

Due to the pervasive censorship on Chinese platforms, many videos of the protests were posted on Twitter. Despite being banned in China, during the protests, Twitter served as a critical tool to spreading information on what was really happening in the country to the rest of the world. The Twitter user Teacher Li (@whyyoutouzhele) would post the videos he received from fellow countrymen. He said that at one point during the protest, he received more than a dozen messages per second containing protest material (Kuo, 2022). Li posted real-time protest footage to help Chinese people get information so they could decide whether they wanted to join and inform the world about what was really happening. (Z. Yang & Li, 2022)

Conclusion

The socio-political context in which these protests took place point to the pent-up frustrations of many Chinese citizens towards the harsh regulations imposed by the zero covid policy. The internet, seen as a public place for discussions, despite the continuous Chinese censorship, served as an outlet to vent their feelings of frustration and as a tool to connect with others and eventually organize protests. 

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