Shanghai protests turn political | Live with Lizzi Lee

In this episode of Live with Lizzi Lee:

Simon Leplâtre, a freelance journalist based in Shanghai, discusses the feelings and frustrations brewing behind the protests that erupted over China’s COVID-zero policy this past weekend, and why some people began calling for Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 to step down.

Below is a transcript of the video:

Lizzi Lee: Hello and welcome to this episode of Live with Lizzi Lee powered by the China Project. I’m your host, Lizzi. Today we have a journalist on the ground in China, Simon Leplâtre, with me. Simon, thank you so much for joining me here.

Simon Leplâtre: You’re welcome. Happy to be here.

Lizzi: Simon, Can you please first tell us what happened in Shanghai in recent days? How was the general sentiment towards zero COVID policy before November 26?

Simon: Well, Shanghai is a bit special because most people have been through the long lockdown of last spring. And that left, I think, a trauma for a lot of people here. So that’s my impression. I’ve lived through it. It was pretty long, pretty tough. And since then, I don’t think the city has fully recovered because there is still the threat of more lockdowns. And it has happened on and off for some compounds, even a few streets at a time. So that’s a thing. And also, the rest of China has lockdowns that keep happening all around, which means traveling, for example, is still very complicated. So basically the feeling and the atmosphere was still a bit awkward. I spent the summer in France after the lockdown because I couldn’t do it and I needed a break. And I came back late September when I was out of quarantine.

Early in October, I caught up with friends that I hadn’t seen since before the lockdown. And what surprised me is that they brought it up… I was just asking how are you, and some really opened up and said like, well, actually, it’s terrible. I’m still depressed.

We can’t travel. I want to see the world. I want to have fun and we can’t. And so after hearing that from a couple friends, and I insisted on the fact that I was not trying to interview anyway, it’s just like, how are you? Yeah, I was in France. How was your summer? And they were like you were lucky you managed to get out of China. I really want to as well.

And so then I thought, okay, there’s a story. And I started contacting more people to have a larger sample. And indeed, there is a very deep frustration among young people because of COVID-zero policy, obviously. But also, I think this frustration is getting political. What I mean is the first time that some friends for example… We’re not super close. We never had in-depth conversations. They would bring up political topics and say, Yeah, especially after the 20th Party Congress, it feels like it’s only going to get worse.

And yeah, that feels like, wow, something is happening. So I could see that something was brewing. But I would just say I couldn’t predict something like that, because usually it feels like, well, in China there is often frustration and there are people who want to criticize, say what they have to say, but it’s not possible.

And so I think part of this frustration is linked with the feeling of being powerless. And that’s what some people have told me. So I had a strong sense of that frustration being here, but I couldn’t predict that people would actually take it to the streets.

Lizzi: Right. So lots of frustrations are simmering for a while, now boiling over finally. But take us back to the night of November 26. How did a vigil turn into a massive protest with some political demands? Who were the protesters and what were the sources of their frustrations? Why was there this outburst of energy and anger that night?

Simon: Well, I think it started as a vigil indeed with a few people, maybe a few thousand, who brought candles and flowers and wrote a few messages to remember the victims of Urumqi. But the messages I saw on the ground were also mentioning victims in Guiyang. You know, there was this accident of people being sent to a quarantine center in September when 27 people lost their lives.

It’s not the first scandal or tragedy related to COVID-zero, that one that happened in the Urumqi fire that killed at least ten people, according to authorities. But each time that kind of scandal, like children who didn’t make it to the hospital and lost their lives, triggered pretty widespread anger in China, but never much action.

And this time it felt like probably the tolerance of a lot of Chinese people for COVID-zero policy is reaching its limits. And yeah, the anger was quite high. I get these people. I mean, Chinese people are pretty good at making, you know, a vigil into political events. They have done so in the past. Recently, Lǐ Wénliàng’s 李文亮 death triggered a lot of political protests, at least online. But yeah, in the past, it’s been the case several times.

This is what happened there. When I got there, the scene was already really packed. So I got there around midnight. I think it was going on for maybe a couple of hours and it was really busy. You had already a lot of police officers all around, like hundreds, but people were gathered in the center city tightly and the police were not threatening at that moment.

And so I think what happened was like it started with slogans against zero COVID policy that were pretty concrete, like criticizing the health QR codes, for example, or the other kind of QR code.

You need to scan them whenever you go to a place. So all these things related to daily life, annoying little things of daily life under zero COVID in China. And then it was like, for example, asking for freedom of expression, freedom of the press, which always feels good when you’re a journalist in China struggling to get sources and people say, well, we want freedom of the press, but actually they care about it.

And then little by little, you could really see the slogans getting more and more political. And I think it felt like people felt empowered by seeing like, oh, actually, we’re not alone.

And because there’s so many of us, like, we’re not at risk. And and some people told me, like, all of them, I think… So you ask who they were. It was mostly young people, I would say between 20 and 35 or the majority of them, probably also because that’s the crowds at night in Shanghai.

I mean, people go to bed pretty early and the streets are very different that night. And it looks like a rather educated upper middle-class youth with their students and young workers.

And a lot of them told me, like, yeah, the first time I saw that and a girl told me, well, for the first time, I feel like I’m free here. It may not last long, but for an instant, I can say what I want to say. And that was pretty moving.

And actually when she said that, her friend started crying. So it was a very moving moment for a lot of people. And then indeed some people starting with more political slogans like down with Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, down with the Communist Party.

Lizzi: Fascinating. But how did the police react? Were there any arrests after the protests?

Simon: So during the protests, I think the police were quite careful. I would say they were smart about it. Like they didn’t try to interrupt or crack down right away because there were hundreds of people gathered. That would have been messy.

It was on Urumqi Road, which was chosen symbolically because it’s the name of the capital of Xinjiang. It’s really in the center of Shanghai. So I think it would have been difficult to crack down without having images all around, including in foreign media. So they waited.

The police presence was very impressive. There were hundreds of them, several hundred all around in the streets. And they waited until five or something when most people started to leave, and they caught a few of the most excited protesters at the scene that night, but apparently not many.

But apparently it’s more like Sunday and Monday (when they made more arrests). Those who kept going, you know Urumqi Road is very busy on Sunday with possibly just some curious onlookers and some demonstrators. It’s hard to tell.

And so whenever people tried to gather, the police were already there. So their mission was much clearer at that time. It was to prevent anything from happening, anyone from gathering. And so they pushed it back. And what I was told was when they got into less busy streets, then they made arrests. They would keep some of them and especially the ones who were the most active shouting slogans or resisting a little bit.

And another thing I heard that tells you a lot about surveillance in China is that they would grab some protesters, scan their faces from all angles with a smartphone, and let them go.

So I guess it’s a quick way of saying, okay, you were there. We know what you did and we’ll deal with you later. And I also heard that some people were picked up at work. One guy I chatted with during the protest on Saturday night, who was like 27, he was pretty excited with chanting slogans, including like…

You have the people repeating the slogans, you have the people throwing them first. And he was one of the ones who would launch slogans like “Xi Jinping step down. “And so I heard from a colleague of his that he was picked up from work on Sunday. So, yeah, it’s really happening right now. It seems like after the maybe the surprise of police that allowed this to happen on Saturday night. Now it’s time for the crackdown. So we will still need to wait and see how large the scale of crackdown or potential retaliation is.

Lizzi: Do you get the sense that major protests will reemerge at some point or have those protests largely fizzled out at this point?

Simon: I think it has not fizzled out. And you can see it by following what’s happening all around China.

In Shanghai, apparently some protesters want to keep gathering, but I guess it’s difficult because, I mean, if I know there is a meeting point at five or seven at this metro station in Shanghai, it means the police also know. So if they’re going to expect it, it’s going to be more and more difficult. But what we see is that some people are picking it up in the cities yesterday night in Guangzhou.

We see a lot happening on university campuses. So I think this kind of small-scale political protests are going to keep happening with people holding white sheets of paper to symbolize all they want to say. Because censorship in China doesn’t allow them to say. And I would say there’s another kind of even more difficult for for for Beijing to handle. It’s less political, but it’s simply civil disobedience, people not complying with COVID-zero anymore.

It’s what happened in Urumqi after the fire. People went to the streets and actually managed to get local authorities to relax the lockdown that had been imposed in the city for more than 100 days. Now we’re seeing it happen in many other cities like Chongqing, Wuhan, Lanzhou. This is very unpredictable. This is a much more diverse demographic. You can’t blame it on some youths that would be influenced by foreign forces. I expect this to go on and that will be hard to handle for the government.

Lizzi: Do you get the sense that people are scared or concerned with potential retaliation at this point?

Simon: Yeah, of course. I mean, people know how the system works. That’s why also I think a lot of the people who gathered on Saturday were quite impressed themselves because they never expected that many of them. I’ve never seen that.

I’m 25. I’m 27. I’m 30. I’ve never seen something like that. I never experienced that in China. I mean, it was just a few hundred people. So when you’ve seen demonstrations in other countries, I mean, in France, it would be a tiny demonstration. Hong Kong protests used to have like millions of people. But for China, just a few hundred people gathering is already huge and people were very aware of that.

I think, however, there was this feeling at some point that, yeah, we are powerful. You could feel like some of them were experiencing kind of the excitement and the empowerment of a crowd, maybe for the first time.

And at some point some people started to try to start slogans like, “Oh, get down your mask!” As if we can, you know, we don’t need to hide our faces. We’re not doing anything illegal. We can say what we want. This slogan didn’t really work, so you could see some people were not that comfortable with taking down their masks.

I would say half of the people wear masks, but rightly so. Like I saw, plainclothes officers — they are usually pretty obvious, especially this one. I saw him later chatting with policemen and toward the end, he was scanning people’s faces very close to them.

So yeah, like we know there is very heavy surveillance in China. We know it’s a risk. I don’t know if doing that protest on the spot, they really had a sense of the risk because you get a bit excited with the crowd surrounding you. But yeah, people are very aware of that. And I actually chatted with friends who were not there who told me, “Well, I’m scared, I don’t want to go to that kind of thing. And I’m afraid it’s going to turn out like Tiananmen in 1989.”