Terry Glavin: The Chinese have had it with Xi Jinping’s cruel Covid lockdowns

Something extraordinary is happening in China. It’s an event that is as tectonic as anything since the democracy movement that was crushed in the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. However it ends, the time and place that can be pinpointed as its beginning is roughly 2 p.m. on October 13 on the six-lane Sitong Overpass above on the Third Ring Road in the Haidian District of Beijing.

A plume of thick black smoke was rising from a pile of burning tires on the bridge deck. There was a man up there in a yellow hard hat and orange work vest hanging banners from the railing. No need for lockdown, need freedom. No need for lie, need respect. No need for cultural revolution, need reform. No need for a Communist Party leader, need for real elections. Be citizens, not slaves.

The police came. It took only minutes to put the fire out, pull the banners down, arrest the man and take him away.

Protests, rallies and riots are far more common in China than is generally understood in the outside world, and even within China itself, owing to the regime’s iron-fist capacity for information control and censorship. The China Dissent Monitor, just launched by the global democracy watchdog Freedom House, has managed to record 636 “offline” events in China between June and the current disturbances, mostly demonstrations, strikes and occupations, some involving thousands of people.

What’s happening at the moment is extraordinary mostly because the censors just can’t keep up. The Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission is overwhelmed. So is the Internet Security Emergency Command Center, the Internet Management Office and the Illegal and Unhealthy Information Reporting Center. Videos of the uprisings are flooding out from underneath the “Great Firewall of China” that the Chinese Communist Party has constructed around the country.

There are just so many people pouring into the streets in so many cities, calling for the end of Xi Jinping’s vicious rule, unafraid of the ubiquitous security cameras with their advanced face-recognition technology, that it’s impossible to hide it all from the people, and it’s impossible to hide it from the outside world. So, more people are becoming unafraid. That’s the main thing happening now in China.

Xi Jinping’s censorship apparatus employs millions of web monitors and expends vast resources to patrol an ever-expanding list of banned words, search terms, phrases and hashtags. But that vast multi-agency infrastructure for censoring and obliterating messages and suspending accounts and disappearing netizens just couldn’t keep up last month, when all the “Bridge Man” posts started showing up on Chinese Tiktok, Weibo Wechat and other microblogging sites.

And the censors can’t keep up now as hundreds of thousands of people stare down riot police in Beijing, Shanghai, Urumqi, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, and in Wuhan — the city in Hubei province where the coronavirus was first unleashed upon the world in late 2019, several weeks before the authorities publicly admitted what was happening. Protests have been logged pretty much everywhere. Students have joined in at more than 50 universities across the country.

And we still can’t say with much accuracy how widespread the uprising has become. A month after Peng Lifa’s defiance on the Sitong Overpass, little can be reported with any certainty about him except his name, and that he is or was a physicist who enjoyed a brief online presence under the name Peng Zaizhou. And that he has, or had, a sense of humour.

Last year, the Chinese state-run journal Science and Technology Innovation Herald published a paper he’d written about electromagnetic fields. The Herald has expunged it, but the paper is still online at the international Research Gate site, with this author tag: “Universal Suffrage Committee of the People’s Republic of China.” His whereabouts are now unknown.

What was extraordinary too about his protest that day is that it occurred at a moment when every corner of Beijing was crawling with police, and the Ministry of State Security was in a heightened state of paranoia. There were more than 2,000 senior Communist Party officials in town for meetings that take place only once every five years.

Only the day before, the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee had concluded its 19th Congress, and all the bloated plutocrats were hanging around for the opening of the 20th Congress that cemented Xi Jinping in an unprecedented third term as the most successful Chinese megalomaniac since Mao Zedong.

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So, Peng Lifa’s one-man operation was a work of genius. We can say that. We can also say what he was protesting about: China’s tyrannical one-party rule.

As for the country-wide tumults that kicked off last week, the proximate cause, you could say, was a fire last Thursday in the capital of the Uyghur-minority province of Xinjiang. Much of the city of Urumqi had been subjected to rigid lockdown orders for more than three months by then. The disputed official count of the dead from the fire is ten. Protests broke out when it appeared that the building’s fire-escape doors had been locked from the outside and firefighters were delayed in getting to the scene owing to the strict quarantine protocols

But the protesters across the country have made it clear they’re not just angry about Xi’s absurdly routine city-wide Covid lockdowns and quarantine camps. They’ve had it with the regime’s zero-Covid pretext for insinuating itself into every aspect of the lives of ordinary people, for testing mass behaviour-control technologies, for persecuting minorities and enforcing compliance with the most absurd and cruel do-as-you’re-told orders.

While the regime’s censors have effectively disappeared Peng Lifa, one thing that he managed to get through the firewall before his arrest was a kind of manifesto to “take China onto a path to freedom, democracy, and prosperity.” In order to avoid the violence of a civil war, activists should remain non-violent, he wrote. Protests in the early innings should be decentralized, based at the community level and in the universities. Open lines of communication should be maintained with the people, the military and government officials. Don’t hurt people. Don’t damage property.

So far the uprising in China seems to be following those principles, and they’re uttering the same sentiments as Peng put on his banners: No need for a Communist Party leader, need for real elections. Be citizens, not slaves.

We can say we know something about how it all began. Nobody knows how it will end.

National Post