“Compared to 1989 it is a very different kind of protest,” said Feng,who was detained by Beijing in 2017 and whose friend,Chinese-Australian pro-democracy writer Yang Hengjun is currently behind bars in Beijing.
“I don’t think there has been an order from the top because,in Beijing,Shanghai and Guangzhou,the police have largely refrained from taking violent measures. That is a clear indication that the top did not give an order for them to suppress the protests.”
Yan Long,an associate professor of sociology at the University of California,Berkley,said the mobilisation process was far more important than outcomes.
“The majority of social movements do not lead to immediate changes,” she said. “But the participation itself means a hopeful future for China.”
At Tsinghua University,the site of one of the largest gatherings on Saturday,officials have not responded to the open show of defiance by hauling off students. Instead,they offered them free transport to their hometowns to avoid lockdowns on campus.
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“They are making concessions rather than suppression,” said Feng. “But if they keep making concessions they will embolden the crowd to organise more protests. If they go the other way,to escalate the suppression,it may also trigger a stronger response from the population as well.”
“I see the current situation as a stalemate.”
Cheng Youquan from the National Disease Control and Prevention Administration was the first government official to acknowledge the concerns of protesters on Tuesday.
“The problems highlighted by the public are not aimed at the epidemic prevention and control itself,but focus on simplifying prevention and control measures,” he said at a regular COVID update in Beijing.
Chen also gave the government more room to relax restrictions by stating that symptoms for the Omicron variant were milder than other strains.
Police blocked off most major gathering points across the country on Tuesday,preventing the weekend’s scenes from repeating,but a fresh round of lockdowns could trigger another wave of dissent as the government’s censorship machine struggles to respond to the wave of subversive content flooding the social platform Weibo.
Activists have been taking videos of videos to get around triggers for sensitive content flagged in live streams. Censors are responding by scouring the internet for blank pieces of paper. Protesters are posting inane comments like “I want to see a movie!” to navigate the restrictions while telegraphing their displeasure with the COVID-zero policy.
“It has failed miserably,” said Feng.
The videos,symbols and photos have multiplied across Twitter,where anonymous activist accounts distribute them to the outside world. Chinese government-linked accounts have responded by flooding the site with spam and complaints about activist content,overwhelming Twitter’s moderators. In the days since the first protests,Chinese police have been asking pedestrians to show them their phones and forcing them to delete Twitter and Telegram apps.
China’s satirical edge has moved from online platforms to the streets of Shanghai. At a rally on Sunday police asked the crowd to stop chanting for an end to restrictions. The crowd responded by yelling “we want more lockdowns” and “we want to do more COVID tests”.
“People across China are taking extraordinary risks to demand their human rights,” said Yaqiu Wang,senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Chinese authorities should not suppress the protests but instead allow everyone to peacefully express their views.”
The Chinese government is now attempting to lay the blame for the protests on “hostile foreign forces”– Beijing’s shorthand for the United States and the West.
“On social media,there are forces with ulterior motives that relate this fire with the local response to COVID-19,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian,referencing the 10 deaths in a fire in Xinjiang that sparked the protests.
But many of those gathered in Beijing,Shanghai,Taiyuan,Wuhan and Hangzhou have grown tired of the scare campaign.
In Beijing on Sunday,one student used a megaphone to warn the others to wary of “external,anti-China forces” stirring dissent.
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“Do you mean Marx and Engels?,” responded another student,referring to the German Marxist philosophers.
“Did external forces cause the Xinjiang fire? Did external forces cause the quarantine bus in Guizhou to overturn? We can’t even connect to the internet abroad. We only have internal forces preventing us from gathering. Where are the external forces? The moon?”
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