Blank sheets of paper have become a symbol of protest in China, where thousands of people, including university students in Beijing and Shanghai, are protesting. Chinese protestors have taken to the streets and top universities to vent their outrage at the country's extensive Covid-19 restrictions, in a rare, widespread outpouring of public dissent that has transcended social media.
In recent days, China has witnessed an alarming increase in cases, including a 24-hour high of nearly 40,000 on Saturday, forcing authorities to enforce stringent restrictions in accordance with the country's contentious zero-Covid policy, even as the rest of the world seeks to coexist with the coronavirus.
Images and videos spread online depicting students at colleges silently protesting, a method used in part to avoid censorship or imprisonment.
The latest outpouring of rage was sparked by an apartment fire that killed ten people on Thursday in Urumqi, a far western city where some inhabitants had been imprisoned for up to 100 days, fuelling speculation that Covid lockdown procedures hampered residents' escape.
According to witnesses and videos, a crowd gathered in Shanghai late Saturday to hold a candlelight vigil for the Urumqi victims held aloft blank sheets of paper.
Other photographs showed scores of people later walking to the university's stairs with blank sheets of paper, illuminated against the night sky by flashlights on their phones.
A Beijing resident who joined his neighbours in Saturday's protests told news agency Reuters that news of calamities like the Urumqi apartment fire made him unhappy. He also mentioned a pregnant woman who miscarried because she was denied entrance to a hospital in Xian, and a bus that collapsed in Guizhou while quarantined people were on board.
"Any of that could have happened to me or my wife," he said, according to Reuters.
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That vigil soon erupted into a raucous demonstration - and the blank sheets became a symbol - with people shouting slogans like "down with Xi Jinping" and "lift lockdown for Urumqi... lift lockdown for Xinjiang, lift lockdown for all of China."
In a video obtained by Reuters, a man is seen lecturing the throng, saying, "One day you'll pay for all you did today." "The state will also have to pay the price for what it has done," the crowd replies.
According to reports, Chinese authorities have moved swiftly to restrict online discussion of these agitations. Protest-related phrases were removed from the Twitter-like microblogging platform Weibo when footage of the demonstrations surfaced.
Widespread in-person protests are uncommon in China, where dissent has been mostly suppressed under President Xi Jinping, forcing individuals to vent on social media, where they play cat-and-mouse with censors.
(With Inputs From Agencies)