IT IS EXTRAORDINARY to have seen citizens of the world’s second biggest economy, crippled though it is by crude and brutal methods to stamp out Covid, rise up in mass protest.

The methods adopted by these astonishingly brave protestors have displayed a subtlety and inventiveness that must stir our awe and admiration, even as the ruling Chinese Communist Party cracks down hard.     

The Party’s determination to crush Covid into a ‘zero’ status is enforced with a ruthlessness that would beggar belief if we didn’t already know its long-standing, irredeemable commitment to cruelty. It is wantonly destroying its own followers’ livelihoods and their very lives as well.

The deaths by fire of innocent people in a Xinjiang apartment building, trapped in their own homes by official isolation orders, were the immediate trigger for these latest outbursts of popular outrage. While they began as a revolt against severe Covid-related constraints, the outrage soon mushroomed into unprecedented street demonstrations against the regime’s entire apparatus of despotism.

The singular and clever means by which the mass outrage was expressed were little short of breathtaking.  In hugely growing numbers protestors brandished a remarkable symbolic weapon: unmarked white sheets of paper. Since in Chinese culture white is a funereal color, the sheets served to highlight the unforgivable, callously-caused deaths in a simple statement of mourning. At the same time they also silently proclaimed the citizenry’s condemnation of censorship, one of the regime’s most essential tools.

Whenever actual writing was occasionally seen, it reinforced that same refusal to be cowed, that same insistence on voicing what supposedly cannot be voiced. One valiant man walked in a Shanghai mall holding high a sign that said, “You know what I want to say.”

New York Times reporters heard (anonymously of course) that such cryptic messaging was a deliberate, allusive echo of the well-known Soviet-era Russian joke: a dissident gets arrested for distributing pamphlets in the street, which turn out to be blank. “There’s no need for words,” says the dissident, “Everybody knows.”

The rapid spread, eventually forming a deluge, of white paper and other forms of wordless but eloquent protest was rightly summed up in the NYT‘s extensive report as “elusive, creative and often ironic“

This is not to say that some protests haven’t been very direct, even boldly (or even recklessly) outspoken. A resounding chant actually called for the removal of President Xi (left) by name. “Step down, Xi Jinping!” the crowds were chanting, or at least the younger element of them was.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Xi’s massive cranking-up of police control in the streets has had its effect in considerably limiting the protests. But as one veteran China-watcher, normally always very cautious, told me: “We have not seen the end of this.”

I WRITE THIS REFLECTION from Dublin, Ireland, where I’ve been given insight into some everyday truths of Beijing life thanks to The Irish Times. It may not have the global resources of the New York Times, but the doughty Dublin paper boasts an intrepid and individually resourceful China Correspondent in Denis Staunton, previously the paper’s deputy editor and a onetime bureau chief in London.

In one of those side-angled dispatches that can sometimes tell us far more than any formal piece of straight-on reportage from the usual sources, Staunton simply drew on his recent prosaic experience of trying to buy bed-linen. He presented telling evidence of the regime’s heavy iron hand as it clamps down on everyday human activity in the name of beating the pandemic.

Staunton walked through stores in Wangfujing, the capital’s historic shopping street, where sales staff “had probably not opened the till all week.” His photo of a store completely empty of shoppers, when he sent it to a local contact, prompted the recipient to say (quoted anonymously, of course): “If they keep this up, the economy is going to collapse.“