CNN was able to find the remaining Uyghur family members of the victims whose picture we presented in our last newsletter. They are two adult children who now reside in Turkey. They told CNN that their mother and four siblings died in the fire, while their father and a brother were imprisoned in concentration camp. They could not return home to bury their family. Compared to the sufferings of Uyghurs, Han Chinese are actually very privileged.
On Nov. 30th, the big brother went to the Chinese embassy in Turkey to protest, he explained to the guard outside the embassy (Video with English subtitle):
“My mother and my brothers were burned to death in China.”
“If I can’t make my voice heard here and today, what should I do, beautiful brother?”
“I saw the photo of my mother’s burnt body, which I had not seen for 7 years, brother…”
People also discovered that back in July this year, Xi Jinping paid a visit to the residential area where the fire broke out. There is a video of Xi Jinping talking to the residents in this People’s Daily report.
Whenever and wherever people take to the street to protest, Chinese people are told that they are being used as pawns. It must be that when CCP was a small underground party, they used students and citizens as pawns a lot. Now, the police is asking people who showed up at protesting sites if any foreigners have paid them. The government blamed “foreign forces” intrusion on the protests.
This backfired on the street of Beijing on Sunday night. The video in the link has English subtitle. What is interesting to me is that the one that warned people of “foreign forces” spoke with southern accent, while all the excited voiced shouting back spoke with Beijing local accents.
Washington Post is among the first US newspaper to note that Twitter has no one to take care of the Chinese twitter community:
Sunday’s campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” the ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”
Observers have noticed:
Search for Beijing/Shanghai/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you’ll mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.
Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets.
Some GEO/OSINT expert even made impressive graphs to show lone twitter accounts active and not interacting with anyone else.
Teacher Li also got tips that his account could be suspended, but luckily it did not happen. He had more than 700,000 followers, up from 200,000 before the weekend.
In my opinion, the current protests will not impact the ruling of the government. They just are raw emotional expression that people felt that they needed to express. Current news is that college students are being sent home for winter holiday, which normally starts in January. Some local government just announced building of new huge quarantine centres. Meanwhile, the government is urging people over 80 to get (chinese) vaccine shots. The newest direction from the central government seemed to have dropped the term “Dynamic zero” policy. Some cities have announced some ending of the harshest lockdown.
But, is it really the end of COVID-Zero?
I found two insightful analysis by two Chinese American writers/scholars. I am pasting their tweets, since I think they gave very good overview.
The CCP is expert at deflecting blame.The 1st heads to roll will likely be local officials who’ll be faulted for failing to correctly implement the signal from Beijing,even tho the signal is always so conveniently vague that the local admin were always lined up to be the fall guy
the gov is also refining its strategy of victim-blaming: “some residents’ ability to rescue themselves was too weak”,Urumqi’s fire brigade said.Wont be surprised if same logic is applied to nation writ large.“If ur dying from COVID or unhappy w our management,its your own fault!”
Always,this is the internal logic of autocracy. During peacetime, maintaining the welfare of the ppl is a means of ensuring the survival of regime. During chaos,the welfare of the ppl is inevitably subordinated to the survival of the regime while being gaslit by the regime.
As a social movement scholar, I think the current discussion on the multi-site protests in China has misplaced its focus on whether it would lead to regime change. It is not the point. Let’s celebrate PEOPLE and their participation. My preliminary observations.
1, The swirl of passion from anger and indignation is a driving force. The outburst of emotions on display is a cognitive cue signifying to Chinese people that their grievance is widely shared. Such cognitive liberation implies the possibility of civil disobedience and change.
2, Critics talk about how sadness and disgust on the street are irrational and useless. WRONG. Immediate reflex emotions such as the righteous anger put fire in the belly and iron in the soul. They create longer-term new moral understandings and commitments against dictatorship
3, The mobilization process is far more important than outcomes. The majority of social movements do not lead to immediate changes. But the participation itself means a hopeful future for China.
4, Connecting these protests with previous labor, peasant, environment, etc. movements is unhelpful. Government has curbed the inter-generational activist learning. Civilians on the street are not activists. Unaware of the previous strategies allows them to be freer of constraints
6, No action ends up in vain. This wave of protests showcases the accumulative power of previous action. The Bridge Man and his slogans appear repeatedly. The car accident in Guizhou galvanized expression on WeChat, the strategy of which is used again this time.
7, Women are leading forces. Women’s acts to cook for children dead in fire on Weibo sustained grieving and fueled emotions. In the first protest in Shanghai, a pregnant lady stood up and distracted the police. Young women are leading the charge in and outside China at rallies.
The car accident in 6 refers to the accident of a bus in September in Guizhou province. The bus was taking people to be quarantined in the middle of the night. The bus fell over to the side of the road, 27 people died.
And we talked of the Man on the Bridge in newsletter 98.
Jiang Zemin was chosen to be the supreme leader of China after the 1989 student movement, because he proved himself to be a trustworthy communist and he had good connections to the Americans to get China back in good graces with the West. He was 96 this year and in the last ten years Chinese social media has a rumour that he died every month. But today, he truly died.
During his reign, he famously prosecuted Falungong, resumed Chinese economic reform under pressure from Deng Xiaoping, oversaw the return of Hong Kong to China, and joined the WTO. When Hu took over this job, Jiang was actually quite hated because his economic reform resulted in millions of workers from state owned enterprises losing their jobs and being plunged into poverty. Economic development trumped anything else, as a result, the society became very materialistic.
But when Xi Jinping took power, Jiang started to be popular among young people, simply because compared to Xi (who many people think he has only primary school education), Jiang graduated from an elite university in Shanghai in 1947 and can speak good enough English. He has the charm of a well educated man from the “old society”. (China refers itself as “new society” after CCP took power in 1949.)
Here is a video when Jiang was visiting Hong Kong chief executive and was asked a question by Hong Kong reporters. Somehow he started a lecture to the reporters, the video has English subtitle. Many memes were created from this video: “Too Young, too simple, sometimes naive”, “Stay quiet and make money” are the two most famous memes.
Not too surprisingly, many Chinese people expressed sadness over his death, because the current supreme leader is making everyone’s life too hard, somehow Jiang seemed to be a much better leader.