In the wake of mass protests, the government has rolled back some Covid restrictions, but young people tell Rolling Stone they still want more freedoms
“A single spark can start a prairie fire,” Song, an e-commerce worker in Shanghai tells me, quoting a traditional Chinese saying. “The Chinese Communist Party likes to use this idiom to praise their achievements in the past.”
By the second day, Nov. 28, things began to escalate. The police started to block streets and targeted people who stood out from the crowd by holding blank pieces of paper. The “A4 revolution” or “white paper revolution” as it is known has largely been spread by social media, with photographs of people holding up the symbolic blank pieces of paper. The message of defiance is effective — images of white paper are much harder to censor than frequently used terms like “Shanghai.
Online censorship in China has been the most severe it has ever been since the protests began, to the extent that Konrad’s parents were oblivious to the widespread protests. “My family only knew about it after hearing [me talk about it]. My university classmates didn’t know about it at all, and there was no report about it on Chinese social media and entertainment software, so the Chinese government must have concealed this matter to the greatest extent.
Something Konrad cannot forget are the videos of Covid enforcers welding shut the entrance of a residential building in Chengdu. “It’s inhumane,” he says.
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