China’s ‘Paper Revolution’ Could Be The Beginning Of The End For Xi

When the Chinese people saw images of maskless fans enjoying the World Cup, they asked why the rest of the world had moved on while they were still cooped up in their tiny apartments like animals, bored and hungry (Chinese censors reportedly stopped showing images of fans during World Cup broadcasts).

This is while something extraordinary is happening in China: Residents in multiple cities, at significant personal risk, took to the streets over the weekend to demand an end to the government’s draconian “zero Covid” policy. These protests have quickly spread nationwide and become venues for the Chinese people to express their dissatisfaction with China’s leader Xi Jinping. Many protesters held blank sheets of paper as a symbol of lacking free speech under Beijing’s censorship (hence, the nickname “Paper Revolution”). Some even openly called for Xi to resign. 

Xi’s most prominent concern has always been that a color revolution (a term that describes anti-government movements) might take place in China and topple his and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule. Since coming to power in late 2012, Xi has built a high-tech surveillance state to monitor 1.4 billion Chinese people’s thoughts and behaviors while ruthlessly suppressing dissenters.

Xi’s intimidation seemed to have worked. While some small and isolated protests, mostly over environmental issues or economic grievances, took place in China during the first 10 years of his rule, China hadn’t experienced any large-scale protests nationwide that directly challenged the CCP and Xi personally until now. Xi has no one but himself to blame for sparking China’s “Paper Revolution” and jeopardizing his third term and beyond. 

Series of Tragedies Under Lockdown

A deadly fire in a high-rise apartment in Xinjiang initially triggered the weekend protests. In the same region, the CCP has been accused of subjecting millions of Uyghur Muslims to genocide. Videos spread of victims desperately crying for help from the apartment building, but people could not escape nor rescuers enter because the entrance was sealed, a common lockdown measure imposed by local authorities. It took fire trucks more than two hours to reach the burning building, again, due to the barriers set up by local authorities to keep people confined inside their apartments. Since the early days of the Covid outbreak in 2020, Chinese authorities have routinely sealed the front entrances of entire apartment buildings or barricaded residential communities to enforce lockdowns.  

The deadly fire in Xinjiang is sadly one of a long string of tragedies caused by the government’s inhumane Covid restrictions. Several other incidents have drawn national outcries this year alone. In January, a woman who was eight months pregnant in Xi’an lost her baby after local hospitals refused to treat her because her Covid test had expired by a few hours. During Shanghai lockdowns between March and April, children as young as newborns were taken away from their parents and committed to poorly run government daycare facilities. Residents also experienced severe food shortages unheard of since the Great Chinese famine (1959-1961).

Last month, a woman in Beijing, the capital of China, who was welded into her apartment for days,