Protests in China are silenced by police calls and obscene proposals

The voice of protest continues to sound from different cities in China. People are still eager to demonstrate against the “zero tolerance” policy for COVID, and local police continue to suppress unrest in various ways. According to videos on social media, at least one person has been arrested. According to The Guardian, this happened in the city of Hangzhou late on Monday evening. As can be seen in the footage, hundreds of police officers occupied a large area, preventing people from gathering for the rally. A small number of people managed to get through. However, one of the activists was immediately detained by law enforcement agencies, while the rest of those gathered tried to drag their comrade away.

It seems that the number of detainees is small. But law enforcement officers use not only this opportunity, resorting to less noticeable, but certainly more sophisticated ways to discourage citizens from taking to the streets. It is no coincidence that groups of policemen could be seen in the same Shanghai and Beijing on Tuesday morning.

There were reports that some demonstrators were questioned by officials over the phone after participating in small protests. There was information that the police were asking people to show their phones to check for a VPN and even a Telegram app.

But if everything is still understandable with a VPN, then why did Telegram fall out of favor? The fact is that this particular messenger has become one of the tools for disseminating information about upcoming protests. In the open spaces of this system, enterprising citizens distributed instructions on how to protect data from sudden police checks, including applications for quick data cleaning included in the instructions. And most importantly, Telegram is blocked on the Chinese Internet.

In Shanghai, near the site of the weekend protests, bar staff told the AFP news agency that they were ordered to close at 10 p.m. local time, ostensibly to “combat the disease.” Small groups of law enforcement officers stood at each exit from the subway. During the day, AFP journalists saw police officers detain four people and release one.

The capital did not stand aside either. One focus of attention on Monday was the Xitong Bridge in northern Beijing, where a lone protester hung signs last month calling for freedom instead of lockdown and demanding Mr Xi’s ouster, according to The Wall Street Journal. Dozens of uniformed and undercover police surrounded the bridge on Monday evening after protesters chanted lines from banners the day before.

Officers questioned foreign journalists who had arrived in the area after rumors of a possible protest began circulating on an encrypted messaging app on Monday night. As of 20:00, no actions were observed in this area.

A female protester told AFP that by Monday evening, she and five of her friends who attended the protest received a call from the Beijing police demanding information about their movements.

In one case, a police officer even visited her friend’s house after they refused to return calls. “He gave my name and asked if I went last night to the Liangma River…he was very specific about how many people were there, what time I went, how did I find out about it,” she told AFP, asking to remain anonymous.

“The police stressed that yesterday’s protest was an illegal gathering and if we have demands we can file them through the normal channels.” It was also added that the caller urged her not to attend such events in the future.

It is not clear how the police identified some of the protesters, since the vast majority of the Sunday rally participants were not checked by the police for identity documents, an AFP journalist noted.

Police were also present in Hong Kong, where about 20 young people gathered in the central business district on Monday evening holding blank sheets of paper and flowers in solidarity with protesters on the mainland and mourning those killed in the Urumqi fire. Law enforcement officers here were reserved. They only forced small groups of protesters to disperse, but the audience was able to lay bouquets of flowers, arrange candles and lay out papers with messages near the shops.

Control has also spread to the Internet. As CNN noted, entering the words “mass protests in China” into the Twitter search engine, a stream of spam and obscene pictures pops up in the tape. According to some disinformation researchers, this appears to be a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government or its allies to silence images from the demonstrations.

From late last week through Monday, searches for major Chinese-language protest hotspots, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Guangzhou, resulted in a relentless stream of images of scantily clad women in provocative poses and seemingly random snippets of words and sentences. Many of the tweets seen by CNN on Monday came from accounts that were created months ago with little to no other accounts and no followers of their own.

GreatFire.org, a website that helps Chinese citizens bypass the country’s internet censorship, noted a flood of tweets captioned “acquaintance” that appeared on Friday marked “Urumqi.” The flood of spam tweets is still going on, a spokesperson for the site said on Monday.

He also added that sites offering sex services were the first target for immediate blocking by the Chinese authorities several years ago, at a time when China was just taking its first steps in the global Internet. The appearance of this now is clearly not a random action.

Twitter is officially blocked in China, but estimates of the number of users range from 3 million to 10 million. On Sunday night, Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and disinformation researcher, released the independent researcher’s findings, which Stamos said “indicate that this was a deliberate attack to plant information husks and reduce the outward appearance of the protests in China.”

Assessing the local media, you can believe it. Publications prefer to remain silent about what is happening, and officials continue to insist on the effectiveness of the “zero COVID” policy.

Asked about widespread anger over China’s coronavirus policy, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters, “What you mentioned does not reflect what actually happened. We believe that with the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the cooperation and support of the Chinese people, our fight against COVID-19 will succeed.”

The authorities are in no hurry to ease the restrictive measures. Officials are convinced China’s COVID policy is keeping the death toll at a few thousand while avoiding millions of deaths elsewhere. Many analysts say that easing policies before boosting vaccination rates could lead to widespread illness and death, and overburdened hospitals.

But while they are talking about achievements and activity at the top, ordinary citizens continue to erase their chat history in instant messengers, fearing police checks. However, the fear of people no longer stops. As the woman, whom the police called on the phone and urged “not to participate in the future in such events,” said she “will make every effort to continue” attending the protests.