The anti-COVID lockdown protests: The view from Beijing

Below is a complete transcript of the special episode of the Sinica Podcast with David Moser and Jeremiah Jenne.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.

A reminder that if you like this podcast, subscribers to Access get an ad-free version of the show every Monday, that’s four days before the public release. I am Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Joining me is Jīn Yùmí, aka Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of The China Project. A man who has yet to correctly solve a single Wordle puzzle after nearly 400 attempts. It’s amazing. I think that’s the record. Jeremy, greet the people.

Jeremy Goldkorn: Yeah. Wordle is a curse on the world. At least Twitter is dying now, so I don’t have to see your Wordle results every day, Kaiser.

Kaiser: Well, I’ve stopped posting. I stopped playing Wordle. Anyway, today we’ve asked two old friends, who are still in Beijing, to join us on the show to talk about the remarkable protests that took place over this last weekend in Beijing, Shanghai, and at least six or seven other cities around China. Jeremiah Jenne and David Moser are both familiar to anyone who remembers the show from back in the day when Yumi and I were still in Beijing in that grody apartment. And they are the co-hosts of the excellent Barbarians at the Gate podcast, which we hope you will check out if you aren’t already a subscriber.

Jeremiah Jenne is a writer and historian who’s lived in Beijing for over 20 years, and he is somebody who’s witty and often profound observations I have quoted quite often and liberally in various talks that I’ve given. Jeremiah, great to see you again, man.

Jeremy: David Moser has, of course, co-hosted the Sinica Podcast on numerous occasions. He is a true polymath — a linguist, a composer, an outstanding jazz pianist, and a savant on all things Beijing and China. He’s lived in Beijing for about 30 years now. David, welcome back to Sinica.

David Moser: Well, thank you for that, Jeremy. That’s very flattering. I don’t know much about math, though.

Kaiser: Or apparently the definition of words.

Jeremy: And the word “poly” now, I realized from the recent implosion of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire, poly now means polyamorous in the discourse. But anyway, enough of that. Let’s start with the situation in Beijing and elsewhere right now. It is Tuesday evening for you too in Beijing. And I imagine, by the time people hear this podcast, it’s going to be at least Wednesday morning. What is the latest?

David: Well, after a very intense Sunday evening, yesterday evening was relatively quiet, and of course, all attention was on the spots in Beijing and the Urumqi Road or street in Shanghai, where the biggest protest took place. But from what I can see from the news and from actually going by Liangmaqiao today by taxi, there’s quite a police presence there already. The police presence, and then also the actual tension of the protests, as well as the freezing weather today, probably kept some of the people that were there last night from coming back again.

Kaiser: Yeah, I heard it was like minus 10 with wind chill or something like that, huh?

Jeremiah Jenne: Yeah, I mean, David’s absolutely right. The two biggest factors, I think, overnight were just that it’s incredibly cold today. And it’s going to be cold for most of the week. And also, I get the feeling that in a lot of the major cities, and there seems to be a different response in the big cities versus some of the smaller cities, but in the big cities, it seems like on the first instance of protest, that the police either didn’t have orders or they were at least given orders to not crack down so heavily on the demonstrators unless things got very much out of line. That was certainly the case in Beijing.

But the question is what happens on night two and night three? And it was clear, at least in Beijing, going into Monday night, that they had gone to DEFCON, [bleep]-around-and-find-out. And so, as a result, they flooded the zone throughout Liangmaqiao, but also in other parts of the city too. So, it would have to be a pretty brave group of people or brave person to go out there, stand in the freezing cold, being surrounded by so many of the forces of order. I think the only people who were out there, honestly, were a lot of the journalists just kind of checking out to see if anything was going to occur.

Kaiser: I’ve never seen that happen before. So, you’re telling me that the A4 revolution turns out to be a paper tiger?

Jeremiah: No, I mean, I think it’s too soon to tell, because I think, just because the demonstrations haven’t continued doesn’t mean the sentiment is not there. I think one of the things, David, you can jump in here too, but just talking to people on almost all different levels, it’s hard to find anyone who’s not frustrated, pissed off, depressed, all at the same time over what’s happening over the zero COVID situation. And also, there are some people too, for whom the zero COVID situation is a doorway through which other feelings have been building up about things that have been happening in China. That’s not everybody, but there are some people who have expressed frustration with the policies in terms of public health, but also see that as part of a larger issue too.

Kaiser: Sure, sure. Absolutely.

David: Yeah, I also thought that was a serendipitous moment on that Sunday night when lots of things sort of coalesced. Like revolutions in the past, though, in ‘89, it sort of happened unplanned and on the spur of the moment. And so, suddenly, they had a lot of people out there, and they sort of had a movement without knowing that it was going to happen. I think that from talking to some people today, I think there’s a little bit of feeling that this was a sort of, in Chinese, the word is fāxiè (发泄), right? You’re just letting off steam, blowing off steam. And there was tension built up, and these protests actually succeeded in blowing off steam, and also for people who were just watching secondhand, blowing off secondhand steam as well.

People watching also felt it. I think one of the reasons is that everyone knows that there’s a problem to be solved here. I think a lot of people were thinking, “Well, now wait a minute. There’s a lot of things we’re upset about and there’s a lot of aspects of the quarantines and lockdowns that we would like to be, at least modified, if not canceled, but we have a big problem to solve here, which is this virus.” And this is something that the government has got to take charge of, and we have got to participate in it. And this is not the time for a full-fledged revolution where the police, the resources of the government are wasted on things like crowd control and the people on the street will only exacerbate the infectious rate. And so, I think a lot of people, there was a kind of a sensible, immediate pullback, is the way I felt for people I was talking to. Yeah.

Kaiser: That’s interesting.

Jeremy: David, I mean, how would you characterize people’s feelings about the virus at the moment? Because it certainly seemed that the World Cup was one of the factors in this, in that people were seeing the rest of the world without face masks. At least that’s how it’s been read abroad that seeing vast crowds of face-maskless people was one of the things that added to the anger. Are people worried about the virus still?

David: Yes, of course. I think people are still worried about the virus. The problem is that there’s frustration that after a sort of spectacular kickoff where you did have an incredible success at crushing the virus very early on, and then preventing the spread and the incredibly low death rate for such a large country. But it seems like China didn’t sort of go the extra mile and finish the job. And it seems like when people are looking at the outside world, like the World Cup, they’re sort of thinking, “Why aren’t we there yet if our strategy, if our zero COVID strategy was so successful?” But another problem is that people are afraid of the virus, but the precise sort of risk has been blurred by the fact that all these lockdowns and all these sort of inexplicable temporary quasi-shutdowns, all come without any explanation of exactly what the scientific basis for it is.

In fact, one of the biggest problems with all of this is there’s a huge lack of information, official information explaining exactly the epidemic science here that’s supposedly dictating all of these very drastic moves. I think that people have sort of lost the focus because there’s a lot of statistics about how many cases or how many positive cases in each district, and it’s broken down in sort of micro statistics. But everyone has lost touch of, what is the risk of this new strain? How infectious is it? What is the death rate? What if we just ignored it and went about our lives? Would there actually be any sort of a disaster? So, I think the government has done a terrible job at informing the populace exactly where the risk is here to justify all of these drastic moves.

Kaiser: Yeah, it’s interesting that one of the things that I keep seeing over and over again in posts and so forth is just bù kēxué (不科学, unscientific).

David: Right.

Kaiser: And there’s always this sort of appeal as though something scientific would be acceptable if they were actual appeals to legitimate science. We’ll drill down a little bit into that in just a bit, but Jeremiah, first, I want to turn to you and ask, just so that we’re clear, what cities are we aware of where actual large-scale protests have taken place? I mean, we’ve talked about Beijing and Shanghai, but Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Lanzhou, Urumqi, of course, and even little sleepy Dali, I’ve heard.

Jeremiah: Yeah. The Dali protests were very much on brand as they walked down the street with the acoustic guitar.

Kaiser: Right.

Jeremiah: Well, there is a good online map, or at least there’s a map that’s been circulating on Twitter, and I haven’t had a chance to take a look and verify all the data points on it, but it shows a pretty large number of cities. Now, of course, I think, so there’s a little bit of conflation between the kind of demonstrations, as spontaneous as they were that we saw in Shanghai and Beijing, and also acts of resistance, sometimes quite forceful resistance to zero COVID measures. For example, a factory or a housing complex bursting through the gates or taking down some of the barriers. And these are also happening everywhere as well. I think those tend to reflect very much, very specifically local concerns, like, “I really need to get out of this apartment complex now.”

And maybe a little bit less on some of the broader issues that have been talked about in the international media. On the other hand, it is very clear that some of the protests in the bigger cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, there’s been some sympathy protests in Hong Kong, Hangzhou last night as well. And there are some good Twitter feeds that are also archiving this as it happens in real time, kind of scraping things off of the Chinese internet and taking in videos from people who are submitting them. So, it’s clear that this is something that’s happening everywhere. Although the things that are happening everywhere may not be the same if you know what I mean. They may not all have large-scale demonstrations. They may all be talking about general policy. Some of them are very specific to local situations.

Kaiser: I hope you’ll give us all lists of these good Twitter accounts to follow.

Jeremiah: Yeah. The one I’ve been following is one called, I think it’s Lǐ lǎoshī bùshì nǐ lǎoshī (李老师不是你老师). It’s in Chinese, And it’s been under attack actually on Twitter most of the day from the usual suspects. But they or the people who are behind this have been, as far as I can tell, really kind of the best resource for tracking all kinds of different events as they’ve unfolded in the last, at least four or five days I’ve been following it.

Jeremy: Yeah, this has taken my recommendation, but that account, the Li laoshi bushi ni laoshi account, there’s also @Whyyoutouzhele on Twitter.

Jeremiah: I think they’re the same account, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Is that the same account? Okay.

Jeremiah: I think so. I think that’s his handle, or their, excuse me, their handle.

Jeremy: Ah, okay. And then the INTM Media Group, which started in Hong Kong, has been putting out various maps. They were the ones that calculated that 79 tertiary education institutions had students organizing protests. What about the size of the protests? Have either of you got an idea of how big the crowds were? And what are the demographics? I mean, there were some interesting things. They seemed to be a lot of students. Young women have also been rather prominent. Any comments on that?

Jeremiah: Well, the size of the protest is, like any kind of demonstration, is something that gets contested, and especially because a lot of these have been very… They’ve been in areas but have moved around in neighborhoods. So, it’s hard to get everyone together to count. It does seem like, at least in Beijing, the journalists who were there, and I should point out, I live only about a kilometer or so, a kilometer and a half away from this, but I wasn’t there on Sunday night. It happened after I’d gone to bed. There are journalists and people who have a better firsthand account than I do. But it does seem that… I know the size of the space they were in, and just based on an eyeball estimate, I mean, you’re talking, for a few hundred people at least, and I would imagine estimates might be even more. I don’t know, David, if you heard differently.

David: The interesting thing I heard was from a former student who’s in Shanghai right now, and he happened to, I think he said he happened to just wander into the protests there. Actually, I asked him that question, I said, “Well, what was the size of the crowd exactly?” And he said an interesting thing. He said, “Do you mean the size of the crowd or the size of the onlookers?” And I realized that, in fact, that makes it very difficult to come up with a number because for all the people that are yelling or holding up A4 sheets of paper and so forth, there’s also a lot of people that are just gawking, we call it rubber-necking, I guess. And they may participate, or they may yell, or they may just be walking through the street.

I don’t know. But I mean, I think it’s probably impossible once the… And especially you might ask the question also, you mean the crowd in front of the police line or behind the police line? So, I think it’s a blurry concept of crowd size. If you mean everyone that’s just there, sort of aware of it, that could be in the many hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more. If it’s just people are actively shouting and getting a press coverage, it may be only dozens or a hundred or something. I have no idea.

Jeremy: That’s long been a feature of dissent in China, though, hasn’t it? The melon eating on the sideline, whether online or in the streets.

David: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jeremiah: I think the arguments over crowd size may obscure a larger point, though, which is that, even to be out there, we’ve seen some videos of people who could have been outspoken, even if it’s a few dozen people, few hundred people, they’re taking an enormous risk. And to do that can’t be diminished. At the same time, just because they weren’t joined by thousands of other people marching in the street, doesn’t necessarily mean that there weren’t the same sentiments. There’s a lot of reasons why people don’t go out in the streets to protest in China, not the least of which in Chaoyang District, many people are still locked in their apartment complexes. I saw some arguments on Twitter about, oh, it was this size, it was that size, we’re under counting, we’re over counting.

I’m not quite sure that’s the discussion we need to be having. I think the discussion is, should be, those people who are brave enough to go out and say something, how reflective is what they’re saying of a general zeitgeist in a particular city or even in the country?

Kaiser: Yeah. And I mean, let’s stay with that. How would you describe the general level of anger and frustration on the eve of this crisis? We’ll go into it, what touched it off in just a second, but were you surprised that something like the Urumqi fire was enough to set this tinder alight? Or was this something you saw as pretty inevitable?

David: Jeremiah and I were talking about this just last night actually. I think part of it was the sort of let down when, after months and months of thinking the trajectory was a positive one, and we were moving out of this phase, that suddenly, for some reason we still not are sure about, there was a spike in cases everywhere, and especially in Beijing. And so, everything immediately went back into lockdown after several months of relative freedom. I think that, even though it’s no worse than it was in the past, I think there was a massive sense of frustration that happened to coincide at the same moment that there was the fire in Urumqi, and also the fact that you had this connection to other sorts of demonstrations happening throughout the world.

I mean, people were bringing up the protests in Iran and elsewhere. It was kind of a, a triggering mechanism that set off this, as I say, fāxiè (发泄). They just wanted to blow off steam or something like that. Yeah.

Jeremiah: Well, you brought up also, one of the aspects of the crowd is the demographics and the number of young women who are speaking up. I think that’s been a pretty remarkable thing. Part of it, and there are people, let me just be clear, there are people who are much better qualified to speak on this than a 50-year-old white guy. But there is a sense that the restrictions, the stress, the anxiety, the pressures of living with zero COVID for three years, and there have been good moments and there has been bad moments, but at the same time, a lot of those pressures have fallen disproportionately on women in relationships, in marriages, in mothers who have to be accountable for kids who are being in and out of school because, unfortunately, childcare often falls on the women in China, even those who are fully employed.

And just a very non-scientific anecdotal spectrum of people that we know. It is striking to me just how much angrier/depressed so many of our women friends are than necessarily a lot of our male friends, who are also upset too. I can’t even really pin the name for this emotion of just somebody who is so pissed off and depressed at the same time. It reminds me a little bit of the way that people felt, some people felt, not everyone, in the immediate aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. There was that moment of just frustration, anger, resignation, depression, all at the same time. And I think that-

Jeremy: Impotence too, right?

Jeremiah: To some extent. That’s a good point, Jeremy. I think what’s being expressed here, and I know we’re hearing different things like for free speech and for free media and an end to zero COVID, and all kinds of things. I don’t know if necessarily anyone is advocating a particular ideology or ideological movement. I think these are ways to express that very complicated bundle of emotions that have been building up for a while and have finally found, if only for a moment, brief release.

Kaiser: Yeah. I think it’s a really good point that you make about the burden falling on women. I heard a lot of reporting, you’re talking about three years of lockdown, and I wanted to quibble with that. Just to say, “Hey, let’s not forget about that relative freedom between, what? April or May of 2020, all the way through early this year.” Actually, a lot of us in the U.S. and in Europe were quite envious of you guys. But we shouldn’t forget that schools for a lot of that period were still remote and that children were at home, and there was a lot of disruption to work-life balance and women, it fell on the shoulders of women. And I think the other co-manelists on this manel will agree.

David: Yeah. Also…

Kaiser: By the way, just an apology that, I mean, I reached, I had to find people who had been living in Beijing for a long time. And, sorry, the only two that I thought of were two white dudes.

Jeremy: Middle-aged white males.

David: Yeah. Well, I mean, the other thing-

Kaiser: Technically, David, you’re a senior now, right?

David: That’s true. I’m a senior. Yeah. I’m minority. I’m an oppressed.

Jeremy: You’ll never be a senior, David.

Kaiser: That’s worse. Boomer!

David: Another side to this is that in terms of, you say, what’s the demographics of the anger? I mean, this has a lot in common with some of the past events in that basically every demographic group has been affected by this. And every class has been affected by this. Right now, in my apartment here, our āyí (阿姨), who is our sort of cleaning woman who comes a couple times a week to clean the apartment for the last seven, eight, whatever, 10 years, is now living at my apartment, because last week, she heard that the area that she lived in was going to be shut down at midnight, locked down, and that there was no timetable event when she could get out. And she’s someone who’s living from month to month, if not week to week, on the money she gets from cleaning houses.

She’s a bǎomǔ (保姆, nanny), probably taking care of kids occasionally. And she panicked and she called me up and said, “Can I stay at your house for a few days? I don’t want to be stuck there.” And so, she’s actually living with me here now for a week or so. And like yesterday, a day before yesterday, she was in the hallway and overheard, she saw a hazmat suited dàbái (大白) going upstairs, and heard some people talking about getting a test on someone on the third floor. And she was in a sheer panic. She was just literally cringing in her room there, saying, “Oh no, they’re going to shut this place down too. And if they find out I’m here…” She was afraid she was going to get in trouble.

This is just a slice of the kind of mixture of fear and confusion and uncertainty and monetary insecurity and all these sorts of things. She’s already gone way out of her way to figure out a way to get through this. And now, there’s all these… Every situation is fraught with potential disaster in one way or the other. Everywhere you look, anyone you talk to, there are these pieces or these extended periods of insecurity, frustration, rage, impotence, just a feeling that there’s nothing I can do about this. And I think that’s another reason too. Everyone, and also women, of course, are being hit, but everyone from every demographic, every age group, including kids, are under extreme stress.

Jeremiah: Yeah. I want to speak up to about that three-year thing, Kaiser. You’re right that there was a time when we, in China, were able to do some things people in the U.S. weren’t able to do. China made that very clear because there was a triumphalist narrative as the media here proceeded to dunk on the rest of the world, and in an almost mocking tone, would regularly post the death rates in the U.S. and other places as well. But that doesn’t mean the last three years have been easy. Even back in the days of 2020 and 2021 when the rest of the world was obviously in crisis, and it wasn’t so much of a crisis here, we were still only one outbreak away from getting our apartments locked down. Businesses were one outbreak away from losing all their employees.

So many businesses that were part of the fabric of Beijing have not survived. So many restaurants, stores, travel businesses, the number of people who are key parts of the fabric, both Beijingers and international residents who had to leave because they weren’t able to make a living in the last three years, the last year has been particularly hard. But I think part of it was that, in those first two years, people here could say, at least say, “Hey, listen, the rest of the world has gone to hell. This is the one safe space, so we’re willing to put up with this.” But now we’re in a situation where, right or wrong, I mean, the pandemic is still a very serious problem, but right or wrong, people are looking at the rest of the world and going, “Okay, now why are we doing this again?”

And as David says, the explanations remain consistent, they haven’t changed, and there’s been no new information about why we’re keeping going in this way. There is no sense of, hey, this is the plan. We’re starting to see a little bit of that this week, just a little, tiny bit, but I don’t know if it’s going to be enough or if it’s going to be too late to keep people’s anger in check, even if they’re not on the street.

Jeremy: I mean, today there was a little bit of commentary that suggested there may be more flexibility from one of the state organizations, but even in early November, there was quite a lot of talk that I heard from friends in Beijing about a relaxation of COVID restrictions. And in fact, the party leadership published a 20-point guideline for easing COVID restrictions. What was the reaction to those guidelines, and do you think, in hindsight, that the population was already grumbling about covered curbs that the 20-point guideline was the state giving a little or signaling a willingness to soften up a bit? I mean, if you think of sort of Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime, the theory that once the sort of autocratic regime softens, shows a little sign of softening, that’s when the trouble starts. Is there any substance to that?

David: Well, both of us can talk, Jeremiah can talk to this as well. But first of all, 20 points. That’s a lot of points to remember. And there also, the fact that there are so many points, meaning there’s a lot of futzing around with little details. Some of the easing had nothing to do with the domestic situation. It had to do with flights coming from abroad and the shortening of quarantine times for travelers, and things like that. So, most of those, of the tweaking in those points, had very little effect on everyday life. And even the ones that have been promised, the end of the… What do they call it? In the second level contact, when the windows pop up, even though they’ve loosened that restriction, it has very little effect on the actual day-to-day life. And it has very little effect on these insecurity that people feel.

And as Jeremiah was saying, we would have two weeks, three weeks, a month of relative freedom, and then, arbitrarily, there would be a sudden lockdown. I had a lockdown here in my building in my residence compound for about a week. It literally happened instantaneously. It had happened just a few minutes before I came home from work and was told that if you go in, you can’t come out. We had no idea how long it would last. It turned out, they said maybe five days, maybe a week. It turned out to be just four days. But we were never given any explanation. There was never any mention in the Jūwěihuì (居委会, neighborhood committee) of exactly the timetable.

And there was certainly nothing about from the Chaoyang authorities saying anything about… And there was actually only rumors that the reason was that five or six people had tested positive in a compound that was a short distance from our compound. I mean, this is typical. This is absolutely typical. And so, you may have a brief period of freedom and of relatively normalcy, and then it just goes away. And it could go away, like with my ayi, suddenly she doesn’t know when she can go back. No one’s told her, even given an estimate. So, these 20 points… By the way, I just noticed that as soon as these protests occur on Sunday, there’s these sudden announcements.

The one I saw just today was, oh, they’re going to hold weekly press conferences now, giving updates on the epidemic condition. Well, fancy that. Actually, updates every week. And the same thing with talking about loosening restriction in Xinjiang came at exactly the same time for exactly the same reason. And also, an announcement they’re going to step up vaccination efforts for people over 80. This came in almost instantaneously after the protest on Saturday night. Go figure.

Kaiser: Yeah, go figure. Speaking of restrictions, how severe has internet censorship been? Are you hearing about outright bans of Weibo accounts or Weixin, WeChat accounts? Or has it just been mostly post deletions? And as always with these things, people have found really, really clever workarounds, which I always delight in reading about. What are some of the more clever things that you’ve seen deployed in the avoidance of censorship?

Jeremiah: Well, you have the usual workarounds on of playing around with the files that are actually posted, or images or videos that are posted onto Weixin or Weibo that have different elements put into them that help to kind of disrupt the algorithms and require a much more manual process of actually looking at the videos, and that can slow down the censorship. I’m not an engineer, I don’t know the technical side of it, but it does feel like there are times, and people debate this, but especially overnight when there’s a huge deluge of videos, and it does feel like the censorship apparatus gets a little bit overwhelmed, or at least more things are visible. There have been people who have had their WeChat accounts suspended, which if you live in China and your WeChat accounts suspended, I mean, it’s like someone had taken away your wallet, your house keys, and your phone at the same time.

Yeah. That has happened. I know people have had their WeChat accounts locked, which is not quite the same thing, but it’s still a pain in the. There are stories, and it seems to be quite… has been verified that, at least in Shanghai and one presumes in other cities where we don’t necessarily have people checking that police are asking people to open up their phones just like they do… When you get detained, one of the first things they’ll do is they’ll ask you to open up your phone so they can check to see what’s on it. Now they’re doing that is kind of a random process in some parts of Shanghai, at least in very sensitive areas and if anyone looks like they’ve taken a picture. We’ve even seen some reports, and you’ve probably seen the same one that they’re checking for things like…

David: VPNs.

Jeremiah: Different VPNs and things like that. I don’t know how widespread that is, but that’s something that’s been happening in places like Xinjiang for quite a while. If that’s now happening in some of the big cities, they’re going to get a lot of people who have things on their phone they probably shouldn’t. I don’t know that many people in Beijing at… Again, the circles that I run in are international circles of people who often have lived over broad. Many of them have VPNs and other software on there that would be seen as problematic. I don’t know about auntie Lee or auntie Wong, but still, it is an interesting ramp up of those precautions.

David: Also, the great firewall is and has always been leaky. And when I first began to get suspicious on Saturday that something was about to happen was that in my WeChat, what do you call it? My WeChat moments? Do we use that word? WeChat moments?

Kaiser: Yeah, we call it moments. Right.

David: I began to see people retweeting. We don’t say retweet. What do we say? Reposting videos, very obvious protests and various memes. And these are from people who’d, my friends who would normally not post such things. And I would go back and find some of them deleted maybe 15 minutes later. But it became such a deluge that there was literally no time, and they came one after another. And so, I think there was a moment when the levee broke, and people went, “Oh, it’s happening so fast and furious that there’s really no risk at all, because there’s way too much for them to take notice of this one.

And then I began to notice, and I’ve actually heard also some reporters talking about this, that a lot of people do have VPNs or people that are reading their tweets do have, or their postings have VPNs also, or have access to the great firewall outside the firewall. And so, they would take screenshots or save videos, put them on Twitter, and then now they’re worldwide. And then other people began to get on Twitter and find stuff they like and then put it back on Weixin or Weibo. So, you had this flow back and forth of people posting stuff, putting it on the foreign internet, getting it back inside of the great firewall. Sometimes the same people, but sometimes people just sharing stuff indiscriminately. So, the leaky, the levee broke for a while with the great firewall is what happened.

Jeremy: Let’s talk a little bit about students. The Communist Party is used to, but also, particularly jittery about university protests for some reason. What has happened on college campuses in Beijing and elsewhere? I think I’ve heard rumors that Tsinghua is planning to end the semester early and go to remote learning, sending students home. What, what do we know about that?

Jeremiah: Yeah, it does seem that the universities are offering special discounted or free tickets for students who want to depart early for vacation. It’s not just Tsinghua. Apparently, other universities are doing the same thing as well. And yeah, there is a sort of, I guess, feeling of sending the youth back to the countryside or back home to… But the other thing too, and David who works more regularly on campuses right now than I do can talk about this, but university campuses have been particularly sites of frustration. The restrictions placed on faculty and students have been much more onerous and ongoing, like all the way back to 2020 than almost any, at least any other subset I’m aware of. Maybe in factories it’s the same thing, but I just know in Beijing, talking to people who work in universities, who are students there, they have to apply, sometimes they have to apply to leave campus, faculty have to apply to go back home.

Some students aren’t able to leave campus at all. A lot of students that I’ve talked to have this feeling of like, going a little bit stir crazy. It wasn’t terribly surprising that once a couple of students or a few students at, especially at elite universities, like Peking University or Tsinghua start speaking up. They’re going to attract a crowd and a crowd will make people brave, and people will also start speaking out as well. And because these are some wicked smart kids, they’ve got some wicked smart ways of doing it. Some of the manifestos that have at least been circulating online that are purportedly from the students, they’re the kind of documents that are interesting to read and maybe worth saving depending upon how things turn out as a primary document for future historians.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.

David: Yeah, it’s definitely been a hardship for students because they sort of live in their sort of limbo. They either have homes in other provinces or in Beijing, and then they have their dorms. The constant switching back and forth, I mean, it is been hard enough on me as a teacher to keep ping ponging between campus teaching and online teaching. It gets very disorienting. But for them, it is really hardship because they have to take into account their daily lives, their meals, their families. How do they actually go about their daily lives? But also, I’ve had a sense that the student demographic, when you mix it into all the other people that are upset, they are the ones who have a little bit more of a historical awareness and a sort of ideological grievances that they bring to the complaint as well.

Whereas most of the people, if you ask them, what’s the point of all this disgruntled writing and protests, they would say it’s the COVID protocols and the lockdowns and the uncertainty. That’s what’s making us mad. The students will say the same thing, but they have very quickly gone to the other very long-standing grievances about freedom of speech, academic freedom. They’ve also been the victim, in the last 10 years or so, of increased ideological education. Students are now… They’ve gone back to the 1970s, at least, ‘80s, with useless dry requirements for Marxist education.

They, of course, they’re very invested in freedom of the internet and freedom of exploring cyberspace, and they’re frustrated with that. And also, they see themselves, what you saw during these protests is people were bringing up the same things as the ‘89 protestors were. They’re bringing up the New Youth magazine of the May 4 movement, and bringing up quotes from Chén Dúxiù 陳獨秀 and from Chairman Máo [Zédōng 毛泽东] and think things about freedom and Lǔxùn 鲁迅. Bringing up this famous story about, or the analogy or metaphor of the iron house, Lu Xun’s famous metaphor, and all these.

And the students are more aware of that. That goes into the mix. But my feeling is that the people who are not students, they may resonate with that to some extent, but that’s not really their gripe. And the students, I think some of the students are trying to write manifestos and getting a movement going, but I don’t sense any enthusiasm for that. People are not in the mood. People are not in the mood for an ideological revolution, or we’re not in the mood to solve that problem right now. I think the immediate problem is the epidemic.

Kaiser: Yeah. You’ve anticipated the question that I was going to ask you, which was about the inevitable comparisons to 1989. I don’t think that people can be faulted for going there mentally right away. I mean, it obviously is something that many of the students themselves are doing, so people who, on the outside, who make those comparisons aren’t completely without some foundation. But again, I was going to ask you how useful those comparisons are, and I think you’ve answered that pretty well. I mean…

Jeremiah: Well, I think one of the questions, we always talk about this, the last couple generations of Chinese students who grew up after 1989, they were part of the patriotic education that was brought in, was brought in as a reaction to what had happened in 1989. And of course, there’s been all this debates about student nationalism and patriotism and the little pinks, and all these kinds of thing. I think one of the interesting things that I’ve been seeing, and again, it is impossible to generalize. We’re talking a lot of different people, a lot of different students, a lot of different places, but it is interesting to see how a lot of the students are framing their dissent. And this does have some through lines to 1989 as well, as part of a nationalist movement.

They are still being patriots, they’re still being nationalist, but they are opposing certain policies, they’re opposing certain aspects of how things are being run. And that if you’re a member of the party, that could actually be, on some level, a little bit threatening because the idea that many of these students might be waking up to the notion that the party and the government, and the government and the people may in fact have some visibility is probably a lesson the Party would not want the students to learn. I don’t want to take this too far. I’m not saying there’s some huge wedge or anything, but I do think that there are some students who have been raised in this patriotic education hothouse who are starting to question some of the assumptions that they’ve been making over most of their lives. One could make an argument that part of the sort of depression, anger dissonance that we’re seeing is a little bit of that awakening process.

Jeremy: Connected to that, there has been a lot made of people in Shanghai shouting, “Xí Jìnpíng xiàtái (习近平下台)” and “Gòngchándǎng xiàtái (共产党下台)”. These were indeed very shocking. I mean, if you’ve been following China since the chairman of everything has been in power, I mean, you don’t hear this, you don’t see this kind of language in China. But how big of a threat to the regime do you think this really is?

Jeremiah: I think that, first of all, we don’t really know where this is going, but I do feel that for most people who are out there, who are either resisting the zero COVID policies or demonstrating with blank pieces of paper or in other ways, I think the catalyst for this has a lot to do with the immediate situation right now and a questioning of the governance of the party, rather than necessarily a questioning of the Party’s existence unto itself. And so, I think a little bit like how it was possible to misread some aspects of 1989, we, outside of China, are conditioned to see any kind of unrest as being specifically attacking the system itself. And I’m not saying there weren’t people who were definitely saying that or who have that idea in mind. But my feeling, and this is also just kind of talking to people who weren’t at the protest, kind of private conversations, I don’t feel like there’s that many people who are like, “We have to overthrow the system.”

It’s more like, “We need the system to work, and right now the system is not working for us and we need to do something about that.” Now, in a system like this, of course, there’s not much that can be done. And so, you can understand why that frustration, at least for some of the bolder people, angrier people or more ideologically minded people might take the form of shouting things like down with Xi Jinping or down with the Party. And I’m sure those sentiments were in the crowd. Absolutely. I just wonder how much that was the dominant feeling versus some of the other more immediate problems.

Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: Which echoes, I think, what David was saying earlier. Now, on another subject, coming from completely the other side, there have already been some state actors and pro-state voices who’ve suggested that all of this is, of course, a plot by hostile foreign forces, including some fairly influential people like Chairman Rabbit, Rèn Yì 任意, who’s a popular kind of nationalist blogger. Do you think that this story will have legs in China that the foreigners are behind all of this?

Jeremiah: Already seeing it on WeChat, like WeChat groups I’m in. oh, I’m just seeing some crazy (beep) like this is also part of the whole, the U.S. Navy has shown up off the coast. This is a coordinated effort that saboteurs within your… No, within the apartment complex, saboteurs are going to be weakening the resolve of the Chinese people at the same time the U.S. Navy is planning its attack. And yeah, I saw this afternoon. That was fun. I thanked my father-in-law for sending that message.

Kaiser: No, I mean, the protests in Beijing were by Liangmahe right? That’s close to be the U.S. embassy.

David: That’s the foreign district. Yeah, right.

Jeremy: That was Chairman Rabbit’s primary evidence for the hostile foreign forces.

Jeremiah: I don’t know where Chairman Rabbit lives, but Liangmaqiao, that area has been an attractive spot for all kinds of activities since COVID occurred. When they closed the bars, that’s where everyone went to go drink. It was called like hookup by the hé (河) because everyone would go out there and party till like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. I’d go running out there at like five o’clock and there’d still be like a couple hundred people, just hanging out, just drinking and playing guitar and stuff. And so, you had families picnicking and people partying. It’s not a surprise. It’s one of the few spaces right now in Beijing that’s kind of park-like, it’s scenic. It’s in an area with a lot of residential compounds. There were a lot of restaurants and bars in the area that are now closed. Yes, it’s close to the embassy, but I think a lot of it had to do with, it’s one of these spaces where you don’t have to go through any gates or any checkpoints to get to. And it’s been a place where people have been hanging out for most of the last couple of years, especially this last year. Yeah, I think Chairman Rabbit needs to do a couple of deep knee bands.

David: There was a, I think again, a woman I think stated this when someone was accusing foreign influences in these protests. And she said, “By foreign influences, who do you mean?” People like Marx and Engels.

Kaiser: Just what the hostile foreign forces would say.

David: Yeah, exactly. But my response to that would be foreign influences, haven’t you come to Beijing? There’s no foreigners left. There’s no foreigners here to influence anything.

Kaiser: David, you circulated on Facebook and Twitter, a recent Nature Medicine paper that models likely consequences of actually lifting restrictions. And it was written, a multi-author, peer reviewed paper, and the projections are pretty grim. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you think the regime is thinking about changes to COVID, to dynamic zero COVID?

David: Right. Yeah. So, this paper is just one of many, right? So, it doesn’t really matter too much the specifics, but basically, it was modeled on, I think as of May of this year, if they had lifted restrictions and there was still no new vaccines available or any better vaccines available, the prediction was that something like 1.5, there would be 1.5 million deaths within a certain amount of time, 77% of those being people over 60. There would be 15 fold stress on the ICUs that would be beyond anything that they could currently handle, and so on, and so forth. This is just one model, right? And you don’t know, I mean, there’s all sorts of contingencies that could occur, but the idea is that any model you do at this point is going to look something like that.

The quandary that the Party has now, and many people are discussing this, is that they basically had a really good idea of how their system could be employed early on to go a different route, which is zero COVID, to crush it, and then with monitoring and stuff to keep the cases as low as possible and to keep the death rate as low as possible. But incredibly, it seems like they didn’t think ahead to the fact that at some point you have a population that doesn’t have any herd immunity that you ought to have been spending the last two years rushing to get vaccines in the arms of people over 60 because that’s where the death rate is. And yet, astonishingly, the Party didn’t do that.

They sort of squandered the entire last year without actually promoting more vaccinations for older people, and either developing or borrowing a vaccine that would work. People know this. It’s completely open. And people, it’s not a secret to the general populace that just merely lifting all the restrictions is not going to solve the problem. It’s going to just create another problem. So, they’ve created a situation where all they can do is keep zero COVID policy, which is destroying the economy and actually leading to the sorts of situations we have now, where people are revolting, or you can just loosen things up and let the death rate take its natural course. There’s no other choice. They painted themselves into a corner, right?

I have talked to some people, this is even before all these protests, and the issue of vaccines would come up. I have a neighbor here in the compound who goes out for yángròuchuànr (羊肉串), invites me along, but he said, literally, this is like a month or two ago, he said, “They’re afraid of losing face if they say, “Look, we can’t develop a good vaccine. We’re going to borrow Pfizer or Moderna or something, or other, and we’re going to put it in the arms of everybody over 60.” He said, “They’re afraid of losing face.” And he said to me, he said, “That’s exactly the opposite case. If Xi Jinping were to come out and apologize and say, “Look, we miscalculated, we’re now going to buy a billion doses of Moderna, and we’re going to give it to everyone free who’s over 60, the exact opposite would be the case.”

“Everyone would applaud. Everyone would say, “At last, an enlightened ruler who sees things clearly and is working for the will of the people.” He said, “It would be the exact opposite. His approval ratings would go through the roof if he did that.” But do you think he’ll do that? Do you think the Party could survive the loss of face of depending on a foreign vaccine? Evidently not.

Jeremy: I mean, I think a lot of the vaccination discussion does… It starts to feel like people have staked out their positions. I mean, I’ve heard frequently that older Chinese people simply won’t get vaccinated because of the history of low quality vaccines in China. That seems to be an argument that is made to back up the fact that the Communist Party refused to use its awesome power to vaccinate everybody. I don’t know. Is that a factor, Jeremiah and David, older people’s reluctance to get vaccinated?

Jeremiah: I think that just like in the United States, there’s a lot of reasons for vaccine hesitancy. Some of it, you’re right, there’s some historical reasons here. That’s certainly part of it. Some of it is that the most vulnerable populations are not necessarily in the cities. They’re in the countryside or in smaller villages or towns. And the education level of that generation in those places is not super high. And so, they’re very susceptible to rumors, they’re very susceptible to misinformation about vaccines as well. But I think one of the biggest reasons is that this kind of goes to what David was saying. The plan seems to be that eventually COVID would magically disappear in the rest of the world, or there would be some magic cure for it.

David: Right.

Jeremiah: And so, most people in China were just like, “We’ve got, we man the walls, pull up the draw bridges, and let us know when it’s over.” And then it didn’t end.

David: Exactly.

Jeremy: And that was an attitude amongst the people as well as from the government.

Jeremiah: Right. Because most people still don’t think they’re going to get COVID ever. The real challenge here, as David is saying, so a lot of older people are like, “Well, I’m not going to get COVID anyway, so why do it?” even in the very beginning, there wasn’t a real effort to vaccinate older people because the first target groups were always the economically important workers, young people. We got to keep them in the factories. And so, there was some mixed messages in the beginning. Think about how various forms of information and mixed messages cause all kinds of problems and confusion in the United States and other places over vaccine, talking about a one-way trip to crazy town. The exact same thing as here. All those different, the spectrum of hesitancy.

And as David pointed out, there hasn’t been, for whatever reason, a concerted effort, or at least until this week, a concerted effort to really combat that hesitancy and to set a realistic target. What they probably need to do is also set some kind of date, but that, of course, opens up all other issues. So, we’ll have to see how this goes. I don’t have a lot of faith, not so much in the vaccines. I mean, whether they work or not, it’s great if they do, but whether or not they’ll be able to meet these targets.

I guess a crucial question is, was this decision to keep pursuing the zero COVID policy, the decision of thousands of medical experts having months and months of meetings on the topic, or was it the decision of one person?

Jeremy: And we probably know the answer to that.

David: That’s the question.

Kaiser: Right. And we don’t know, but…

Jeremy: We can make an educated guess about the answer to that.

David: Yeah.

Kaiser: Right. And most people have made that same guess, but yeah, I mean, especially because the optics right now about Xi coming out of Party Congress, having aggregated to himself more power than ever. Yeah, I think it’s a fair assumption. Speaking of coercive authority, what have you guys made so far of the police response to bring this back to the protests themselves? I mean, it differed obviously in different cities. Like in Shanghai, you had this BBC reporter, Ed Lawrence, roughed up, even kicked, as I understand it, by cops, and then detained. But what about in Beijing and other places that you’re aware of?

Jeremiah: It does feel like, at least in Beijing, that the initial response was to contain the protests, make sure they didn’t get out of hand. I mean, people were saying some pretty inflammatory things, and the police, it felt, I mean, you may want to also, again, talk to people who are right in the middle of the crowd. My general policy in these situations is not to be there because there’s nothing I can do to help, and my presence is probably just going to make it worse. But it does feel like the police were a lot more hands off. Now, there’s an example. There was one group that loudly proclaimed they were heading for Tiananmen, and this kind of got all on Twitter, like they’re marching on Tiananmen Square. Well, I think what happened was they hived off from the main group on the Liangma River, were heading in that general direction 10 kilometers down the road.

And the police were like playing pond hockey and kicked them back into play, like, “Nope, nope, nope, you’re going to be over here.” And so, that was the first night. But again, it does feel like in Shanghai, and we talked about this in the beginning, that on night two and night three, either they got new orders or they were just tired of having to be passive in the face of direct challenges to their authority. So, the police were much tougher. And journalists, you got to remember what these security guys, they’re hearing. We think about the external propaganda about the west and hostile foreign forces and the evil media and all this stuff that gets published. Imagine what these guys get in their private briefings. I mean, it’s a horrifying thing. I mean, say there aren’t that many journalists right now in Beijing, and it is so much harder to be a journalist right now in China than at any other time I can remember.

The fact that the government comes across and says things like, the statement about this, that they were just protecting him from getting COVID by kicking him in the head.

Jeremy: Well, it’s a well known cure actually.

Jeremiah: It’s a cure for a lot of things, but it ain’t a cure for that. It’s probably a cure for whatever ails Zhào Lìjiān 赵立坚. But it was not something that was appropriate for a journalist who was just doing his job.

Kaiser: With that great image of Zhao Lijian being kicked in the head, I think we can wrap this conversation. Thanks, guys. That was a ton of… Well, I wouldn’t say it was a ton of fun, but it’s great to catch up with you, and thank you for that on the ground reporting about what’s happening. Jeremy and I are frustrated at not being able to actually see what’s going on right now. At the same time, I’m really glad as hell not to be there. But anyway, thank you both, and I look forward to having you guys back on the show again soon. Don’t forget to check out the Barbarians at the Gate Podcast. But let’s move on to recommendations. First, Jeremy, do you want to make a quick plug for some of our fine China project products?

Jeremy: Yeah, one thing I should plug that I haven’t done on the podcast recently is Tipsheet, which is our morning, at least morning in the U.S., evening in China, business newsletter that covers one major business story and updates from the Chinese business press every day. And it’s currently free. You don’t actually have to be a paid subscriber to get it. That may not last much longer. But yeah, Tipsheet.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, great. Help us keep the lights on. All right, let’s move on to recommendations. And Jeremy, why don’t you kick us off. What you got for us?

Jeremy: So, I am, in fact, as I mentioned earlier, going to recommend that Twitter account that Jeremiah mentioned, and it is indeed the same as 李老师不是你老师, which means Teacher Lee isn’t your teacher, but the actual Twitter handle is @Whyyoutouzhele, of course, means laughing, sneakily laughing. If you’re trying to follow what’s going on in China, it’s collecting pretty much everything that is being circulated on social media, including some of the images that may become iconic of this time, such as the workers hauling off the Urumqi Road sign in Shanghai. It’s the kind of most obvious kind of censorship, people are gathering at Urumqi Road. So, let’s remove the sign.

Kaiser: They won’t be able to find the protest that way.

Jeremy: I’m really horrified at myself for recommending anything on Twitter, because I’m really hoping Twitter burns itself down at the moment, but nothing has yet replaced it as the sort of global place for breaking news. And one other account is Cindy Yu, who’s The Spectator editor and podcaster based in London. And she actually put subtitles on video of the person that one of you mentioned who said the only foreign forces here are Marx and Engels. So, Cindy Yu’s Twitter feed and @Whyyoutouzhele Twitter feed.

Kaiser: All right. Great recommendation. Jeremiah, you’re up next, what you got?

Jeremiah: Well, that Urumqi Road thing reminds me of something from back home in New Hampshire. The old joke about the guy who didn’t want the deer crossing in his road, his yard anymore, so he moved the Deer Crossing sign. What I’d like to recommend is a book that I’ve been talking about in a history discussion group here in Beijing. For people who are interested in a historical context for why public health and disease matters so much in modernity and in the self-image of China as a modern nation, I highly recommend a book by the historian Ruth Rogaski, called Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Yes, it’s an academic book, but it’s really well done and it touches on a lot of the issues of why things like disease, smells, hygiene, all of these things became encoded in a definition of modernity that then, of course, has been perpetuated and deployed throughout the 20th, into the 21st century. If you’re looking for the historical context for a lot of what’s happening, this is a great place to start.

Kaiser: Yeah, only $36.99 on Amazon. Hard cover. No, that’s not bad for an academic book. Usually, they’re just totally, totally unaffordable. So, Ruth Rogaski, excellent recommendation. Thank you, Jeremiah. And David, what you got?

David: Yeah, I’d like to do a recommendation of a couple things by the same person. James Griffith, who’s the Asia… Griffiths rather, is the Asia correspondent for The Globe and Mail. And actually, we’ve interviewed him for our podcast. He has a great short article, I guess today in The Globe and Mail called “In rare show of weakness, China’s censors struggle to keep up with zero COVID protests.” He basically says the same thing that I just said about this sort of bleed through of Twitter and WeChat, and Weibo, and the fact that the great firewall was actually became a little bit of a bridge instead of a wall during that. He mentions other aspects of the censorship, but the main thing is by the same author is what we interviewed him about is his book of last year, I guess, called Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language. So, the book is about language death, in general, worldwide, starting with his own native languages, which is Welsh. But then, most of the book, or a huge portion of the book talks about the languages that are near and dear to our hearts or my heart anyway, the Cantonese, Tibetan, the various Xinjiang languages in China, and language, sort of cultural erasure, or assimilation, the assimilation policy of downplaying and through the educational system.

Letting the local languages erode so as to promote national unity. His book is about that and covers some of these issues very well. It has to do with a worldwide phenomenon, but in China, it’s particularly insidious, and I think it’s a good book to read just in general. And he’s a smart guy too. You should get him on the podcast.

Kaiser: He’s very prolific. No, he wrote that book in 2019, The Great Firewall of China.

David: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Kaiser: He’s quite an expert on internet censorship in China. Excellent. And to me, my recommendation is a short documentary that you can actually find on the New York Times Op-Doc channel. It just dropped last night. It’s called Happiness is 4 Million Pounds. It’s a documentary by Hao Wu (吴皓 Wú Hào) who made 76 Days, The People’s Republic of Desire, and of course, his old classic from I think ‘08 or ’09, Beijing or Bust. Hao is a New York-based really, really great filmmaker. This is really short. It’s like 27 minutes or something like that. It’s fantastic. It follows a young cub reporter as she tries to figure out this guy who’s on the opposite of the spectrum. She is idealistic and quite naïve and lacking in confidence often. He is this real estate speculator, this guy who’s published all these books about how to get rich, and he’s just obsessed with wealth and showiness.

I mean, it’s just people from different ends of, of modern China colliding. The interactions between them, it’s just fascinating. It’s great piece of filmmaking. Very short, so please watch it. It’s called Happiness is 4 Million Pounds. I’ll put a little link to it in the show notes, of course. All right, guys, thank you so much. What a fun conversation.

David: Thank you.

Jeremiah: Thanks, Kaiser. Thanks, Jeremy.

Kaiser: Great to see you. And I miss you both. And when you’re in the state side, I hope we can hang out because I don’t see myself getting back to China anytime very soon. Anyway…

Jeremy: Yeah, I don’t know. I hope they let you out, the two of you, hostile foreign forces, at some point.

Kaiser: We’ll start a campaign if you get detained.

Jeremiah: It’s been like three-and-a-half years since I’ve been home. It’s a long time.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Jeremy: It is a long time.

Kaiser: Thanks again.

David: Okay.

Kaiser: We’ll see soon. Jeremy, as always.

Jeremy: Thank you, Kaiser.

Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, since Twitter is still unbelievably alive, you can follow us there or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.