Science fiction is becoming science fact as the Chinese Communist Party used sophisticated surveillance technology to crush the anti-Zero Covid protests. The Telegraph has more.
Many of the protesters were understandably oblique. Some held up blank sheets of paper. Others displayed an exclamation mark on a red background – the symbol of a message that can’t be delivered on WeChat, China’s main messaging platform. One woman brought a pair of alpacas, the physical manifestation of an online meme based on the Mandarin for “grass mud horse” – cào nǐ mā – sounding like an insult that urges the subject to perform an unspeakable act on their mother.
But a few brave protesters were more direct. When police told those gathered in Beijing not to complain about lockdown, the crowd deployed sarcasm to demand more frequent Covid tests. Some even dared to chant slogans specifically denouncing the Chinese Communist Party and calling for President Xi Jinping himself to go. They will have done so in the full and certain knowledge that they were being watched and recorded by the state’s hyper-sophisticated surveillance apparatus and in all likelihood had already been identified by the authorities.
The spark for the wave of protests that has swept across China in recent days was a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi in the far-western province of Xinjiang on November 24 that killed ten people. Many blamed the government’s strict zero Covid policies for hampering the response of fire services in tackling a blaze and adding to the death toll. By last weekend the protests had spread across the country, with thousands gathering in Beijing, Shanghai, Urumqi and other major cities.
Protests in China are not quite as rare as one might perhaps assume. Between May this year and November 22nd, before the latest wave of dissent, there were 822 protests around the country, according to China Dissent Monitor, a database run by the US think tank Freedom House. But most have been small-scale, isolated and focused on important but tangential issues such as frustrations around the country’s struggling property sector. The latest protests have been much larger, more widespread and taken aim directly at the heart of the government and its signature policies.
Sam Olsen, the head of the Evenstar Institute, a strategic intelligence and political risk firm focused on China, says that “every dynasty” in Chinese history has been plagued by unrest. The difference with the latest demonstrations is that they have been nationwide and, in common with the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the authorities haven’t been able to keep them under wraps.
They have also simultaneously occurred on the ground and in cyberspace. Reports suggest there have been so many posts about the protests on WeChat that censors have at times been overwhelmed.
The onset of Covid meant that the Chinese population, in common with those in other countries around the world, was initially prepared to tolerate even greater curtailment of their freedoms in order to combat the virus. Drivers still have to scan a code held up by a drone in order to enter cities; once inside everyone must produce their phones at the many checkpoints and display a green QR code.
However, acceptance of this way of life is waning as the pandemic drags into a fourth year. Residents in Chengdu, a city of 22 million people, were barred from leaving their flats in September even when an earthquake hit. Many people are upset they have been unable to earn a living even as the price of food spirals. This was all tolerable while the virus was kept under control perhaps. But now Covid is spreading and the death toll is rising.
“Despite their relatively small size, it is notable that protests and expressions of dissent are happening both online and offline, and in very different parts of the country,” says Katja Drinhausen of the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
“While protesters mainly raise livelihood issues, they also target a key policy adopted by the central government [zero Covid] and in some cases systemic issues, such as lack of respect for freedom of expression, rule of law and individual human rights.”
Back in 2011 the Arab Spring was spreading fast through the Middle East and North Africa and social media was thought to be fanning the flames of democracy. The still nascent technology helped demonstrators to organise and bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information to broadcast their messages to the world. The names of Twitter and Facebook were written on placards and daubed on walls by protesters.
At one point the Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak cut off internet and mobile phone service in the country in order to try and regain control. The move backfired, focusing global attention on what was happening.
But the great hope that the internet and new technology would help protesters shake off authoritarian shackles proved to be short lived. When Mubarak fell and a military council replaced him, it opened a Facebook page as the main outlet for its communiqués. When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil in 2019, the crowds chanted ‘Facebook! Facebook! WhatsApp! WhatsApp!’ at his inauguration, such was the perceived importance of social media in sweeping the right-wing populist to power.
As the Chinese government faces its toughest political test since 1989 there are fresh questions over whether technology can be a means for protesters to circumvent state control or the boot heel under which the government will crush dissent. The Chinese population has arguably never been so angry about being watched and living in an “invisible cage” but, equally, it has never been watched more closely.
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This implies banks will be forced to provide a service. It is remarkable how often freedom loving individuals, want to take away the freedom of others to comply with what they want.
People will have a Right to have access to cash.
Quite apart from the tyranny, these Rights will have a cost the incidence of which will fall on a majority who are ‘tech savvy’ and who don’t need cash.
So the rest of us have to suffer to accommodate a minority.
For shame.
A.I. that beacon of customer service excellence that’s what they will offer, basically a talking jam pot
😀😀😀
There is a cost to receive banking services whic we all have to pay through unpaid interest on credit balance and bank charges. The status quo is that cash is legal tender and individuals such as I wish to exercise their continued right to use it. Those that wish to take advantage of perceived convenience of digital transactions most
of whom, smug in their tech savviness, don’t see the obvious surveillance and coercive risk. I am sufficiently tech savvy to see the necessity to choose to use cash going so far as to tell the local community pub that if they wont accept my cash I wont be buying any drinks there. Those that uncritically accept convenience will suffer far more further down the line. Shame on them
Knock yourself out. Use cash but those of us who are economics savvy know there is a cost to using cash.
Use it but don’t expect me to pay the cost.
Cash is FREEDOM cash is KING. Hope you enjoy the Gulag mate.
Something very wrong with you mate
Phoney Bliar. Nuff said.
You cannot trust anyone in Parliament, They are all Liars, Good Liars, bad Liars, One or two great Liars. But remember all are liars.
I wish that were less true. Until a few years ago the Netherlands, my adoptive country, had an apparently unshakeable tradition of very high trust in government. That trust had been genuinely earned over a century or more. It was what made the Dutch parliament believe it had the power and authority to introduce mandatory QR codes during Covid, and what made much of the unthinking public accept that decision at the time. Now, trust in politicians here is roughly where Britons’ trust in their politicians was perhaps 20 years ago: a certain cautious benefit of the doubt, perhaps, but always granted with great wariness.
That may be more realistic, but it’s very sad – most politicians here actually were and still are generally much more straightforward and trustworthy than Westminster ones, so that level of distrust is less realistic. It’s also pushing the more image-conscious and radical politicians (which group easily includes Frans Timmermans, may he never become Prime Minister) to talk in soundbites for their own faction rather than have the open and largely amicable debates they used to have when I started following Dutch politics 12 years ago.
What about non-citizens?
For them there’s the Migracard. Works like a Get Out of Jail Free card with the added benefit of getting £200 on a regular basis without passing Go
They aren’t concerned with those… as long as they keep voting the right way (by post, naturally)
I support this campaign and add: there are “less tech-savvy people” and also people who don’t want tech, but most of all, the 3.45 million people who CANNOT use smart tech. as they have electromagnetic hypersensitivity. This means being near smart devices, Wifi or phone masts makes them ill immediately. The rest of us are affected, but don’t know it because there are gradual changes to the DNA and mitochondria, leading to dementia, cancer, infertility and DNA damage in the long term. On EHS read: https://icbe-emf.org/activities/electrohypersensitivity/ and for thousands of studies showing healh harm go here: bioinitiative.org/
It is possible to use tech safely by wired connections. We don’t need smartphones to do most things. I am living proof. I agree with Alan’s article, but there is also the health angle and the Equality Act. Millions of people are already excluded from normal life and discriminated against. Gillian Jamieson
Bill of Rights requires a proper Constitution, which does not exist. A sort of digital Magna Carta, which serves not just the Knights of the Realm but also all its citizens. In other words, the voluntary overthrow of a thousand-year old type of government. This will not happen, and such as this articles only expose romantic authors’ wishful thinking. On the positive side, they offer group therapy to the commenters.
I agree – we need less laws, not more of them…
I have written a response to the consultation. It is a ‘no’ from me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/myrauk/p/digital-id-system-the-uk-governments?r=ylgqf&utm_medium=ios
Your consultation response had a lovely perspective lifting the issue above the utilitarian level
I think we’ve just had a very clear demonstration of how safe your Data will be in the Government’s hands.
They might just as well scrap the Data Protection Act since they don’t comply with it themselves; no-one gets punished and they use the law to hide their incompetence from the electorate.