Keeping filmmaker Chen Pinlin in jail is part of a massive effort to cancel all traces of the victorious fight of students and citizens that compelled the CCP to abandon the “Zero COVID” policy.
by Hu Zimo
There are many ways in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tries to erase history. What may seem futile to the non-Chinese readers of “Bitter Winter” may actually work in China. All traces and references to the Tiananmen Square June Fourth Incident of 1989 are carefully cancelled. The event does not exist in textbooks about China’s history and even Internet searches about the incident are blocked. Of course, the CCP cannot prevent the world outside China to remember and celebrate June Fourth. But its efforts are not entirely fruitless as many Chinese born in the 21st century have never heard of the event.
The CCP is now engaged in an even more ambitious endeavor. It tries to cancel all traces of something that did not happen 35 years ago—not to mention older crimes and massacres of Chairman Mao’s times—but in 2022. The massive effort is worth following, as it confirms that what some called the White Paper Revolution of 2022 is a subject of both embarrassment and great concern for the CCP.
It all started on November 24, 2002, and it started in Urumqi, Xinjiang, with a tragedy that in a few hours gave the lie to both the rosy propaganda about happy Uyghurs singing and dancing their gratitude to the CCP and the black propaganda depicting Uyghurs as terrorists. China woke up on November 25 with a feeling that Uyghurs were simply fellow suffering human beings.
What had happened in the night between November 24 and 25 was a fire that had erupted in an 18-storey building inhabited by Uyghur families in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. Some trapped inside the building were able to post terrifying images on social media. As Uyghurs commentators writing in “Bitter Winter” noted on the first anniversary of the tragedy, “The screams of mothers and children coming out of the fire spread through the buildings to Urumqi and reached the world via the internet; but no one could help them. Because this was the period when the region was under lockdown with China’s plan to reduce the COVID to zero, and therefore the doors of buildings and houses were locked from the outside. Moreover, since the parents and husbands of some of those who burned in the fire were in prisons and camps, women and children in the buildings did not have the physical strength to break down the doors.”
This was the proverbial drop that broke the camel’s back. Students first in the main cities of China, many other citizens later, not only took to the street to protest on behalf of the suffering Uyghurs. They had enough of the idiotic and ineffective “Zero COVID” policy, that had condemned them to the worst lockdown in the world without stopping the pandemic and causing many local tragedies that did not reach the mediatic impact of the Urumqi fire.
Chinese started gathering spontaneously in streets named after Urumqi in Shanghai, Beijing, and many other cities, lighting candles, praying, sometimes (but not often and not always) even shouting anti-CCP slogans. When the police arrived and told them that holding signs was a crime, they started holding pieces of white paper, showing to the world that claiming their freedom of expression and writing anything on them was something the CCP would not tolerate. Some tried to persuade the police officers to join their fight. CCP officials came and told the crowd that they were manipulated by “foreign forces.” They were ridiculed, with the students telling them that the only “foreign forces” they had been exposed to in school were Marx and Engels.
As the days passed, Xi Jinping realized that the protest would not go away. He had two alternatives, replicating the June Fourth incident of 1989 and killing thousands in multiple cities, or abandoning the Zero COVID policy. We will never know, at least will not know for many years, what deliberations within the CCP led Xi to choose the second alternative, just as we will not know for long how many really died in the Urumqi fire.
What we know is that by December 2022, Zero COVID was gone, and on January 8, 2023, Xi proclaimed that COVID-19 was no longer, and he had defeated it. The attempt to transform a defeat into a victory did not fool many. Not surprisingly, the sudden re-opening after the harsh lockdown caused an outbreak of the virus and, again, casualties whose numbers we may never know. Certainly, crematoriums were unusually busy for months.
More dangerous than the COVID deaths for the CCP was the fact that, unlike in 1989, a popular protest had succeeded, and the government had to renounce a policy it had just declared beneficial, successful, and irrevocable. Perhaps, if one protest succeeded, other protests may succeed too. In fact, after 2022, public protests on a variety of subjects are becoming more common in China. Each time they are called unprecedented and surprising, but soon they will become routine.
What happened in 2022 was important, and Xi and the CCP may have seen the writing on the wall. They decided the wall should be cleaned immediately. With patience, the authorities are scouting all possible Internet repositories of stories and images of what happened in 2022 and erasing them. The emblematic story of this campaign concerns filmmaker Chen Pinlin, who goes under the nickname Plato and posted on YouTube (which is blocked in China) a documentary on the protests in Shanghai. He called the documentary “Not the Foreign Force.” He was arrested in January 2023, charged in February with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (a serious crime in China), and kept in jail.
Is the CCP afraid of the 2022 movement? The answer is yes. Did 2022 change China forever? We don’t know yet. While some anti-regime slogans were heard, they did not dominate the protests. Subsequent popular demonstrations all focused on limited, often local grievances. Even 2022 did not aim at overcoming the CCP regime. Its aim was to eliminate the Zero COVID policy. We should not read too much in the new spring of popular protests in China. But we should not ignore them either. Perhaps one day some event or movement will arise, able to coordinate the local protests into a national claim that oppression should cease.