Chinese use creativity to circumvent censorship even in dating apps

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Protesting is an act that demands political will and a willingness to face possible friction with authorities. In China, it still demands creativity. In the country where the internet is watched by censors, and demonstrations are quickly repressed, acts like those that spread last weekend until being controlled by Beijing this Tuesday (29) require participants to create strategies ranging from sheets of blank paper to mathematical equations, dating apps and walks with alpacas.

The most common symbol of the current wave of protests – the biggest in China under leader Xi Jinping – is the blank slate. Its meaning mixes a series of cultural and historical references. The idea is said to have come from a Soviet-era anecdote. A man approached by police officers for distributing pamphlets in a public square reveals to the agents that, in fact, he is distributing blank papers. He also says that there is no need for words because everyone knows what he means.

It is possible to see other meanings for blank paper in China, since white is a color associated with funerals. In the current context, it dialogues with the mourning for the death of ten people in a fire in Urumqi, a city in the province of Xinjiang. The tragedy was the trigger for the wave of protests, in part because the deaths were related to restrictions imposed to contain the coronavirus infection – isolated in their apartments, the victims were unable to escape the flames.

The blank sheet also symbolizes silence itself, as the Chinese regime, in practice, silences dissident voices and curbs freedom of expression. The papers were used in protests in Hong Kong when Beijing enacted the National Security Law which, among other provisions, prohibits the use of posters and flags with pro-democracy slogans. It was also the first act of a demonstration at Tsinghua University, the academic home of several members of China’s political elite.

Variations of the empty sheet have also appeared in other acts. Some demonstrators displayed a mathematical equation developed by Alexander Friedmann. The pronunciation of the Russian physicist’s last name is similar in China to “free man” (free man) — therefore, a claim to freedom.

Other protesters held up a blank sheet of paper with an exclamation point inside a red circle, the symbol shown on the WeChat app, the Chinese version of WhatsApp that has been powered up, when a message cannot be sent to the recipient due to some technical failure.

WeChat users managed, albeit temporarily, to bypass censorship to share information about the time and place of protests over the weekend. To access platforms blocked in China, such as Telegram and Twitter, the solution has been the use of VPN, which masks the user’s location.

Even dating apps have become communication tools for protesters, in the hope that they are under more lenient control by the authorities. On the other hand, according to reports to the Reuters news agency, the Chinese police have been searching the cell phones of detained demonstrators to look for applications considered illegal – which increases the risk in digital media.

Some WeChat users have also evaded censorship by posting extracts without context of statements by leaders such as Xi and Mao Tse-Tung, so that the speeches appear to be expressions of support for the demonstrations.

“Now the Chinese people have organized themselves, and nobody should mess with them. If you’re on the wrong side, it won’t be easy to deal with,” Xi said in a widely publicized speech on Monday (28), but originally delivered in 2020 on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of China’s entry into the Korean War.

Another possible demonstration in Urumqi drew attention on social media, although it is unclear whether it was in fact a protest. A woman walked with three alpacas on leashes down a main street in the city.

The reference is subtle. The alpaca looks like an animal that only exists in Chinese memes, the grass-mud horse. The Mandarin pronunciation of the fictional animal’s name, however, is very similar to that of a swear word (“son of a bitch”), so that it has become a symbol of the Communist Party’s defiance of censorship.

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