'It's The First Time I've Seen This in China'

[Valin]

Common Sense News

On the ground in Shanghai, where young people, born after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, are fed up and fighting back against the CCP.
Simon Leplâtre
Dec 1 2022

SHANGHAI — On Saturday night, the center of Shanghai was teeming with young people in bars drinking and watching the World Cup on wide-screen televisions. They were rooting for Argentina, which was facing off against Mexico. (The Chinese love Lionel Messi, Argentina’s star striker.) 

Then, something happened.

The message started to spread—mostly on Wechat, China’s No. 1 chat app—that a few people were gathering and lighting candles on Urumqi Road, in the French Concession, which is full of high-end bakeries and eateries and Shanghai’s famous, three-story lane houses. 

Urumqi Road takes its name from the capital of Xinjiang, where, two days before, at least 10 people had died in a fire in an apartment building. All of the dead were Uyghurs. 

The central government in Beijing would prefer the Chinese people forget the Uyghurs exist. More than a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been confined to so-called re-education camps; there have been forced sterilizations, forced labor, the forced teaching of Mandarin and the forced pledges of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. The fire seemed like an unintended consequence of the central government’s policy, and it had been blamed, in part, on the regime’s zero Covid policy and its overzealous enforcement in Xinjiang. For 48 hours, an outcry had been building online, and now it was threatening to spring into real life.

In China, real-life demonstrations are okay if they’re not explicitly political. Workers protest against unpaid wages. Residents protest pollution coming from nearby power plants. But people don’t protest or march or get angry about whatever the president or party is doing. 

On Saturday night, they did.

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Some demonstrators held up blank sheets of paper. A woman in her late twenties explained to me: “Our country does not let us write anything here, but even if we don’t write anything, people know what we would like to say.” She meant they weren’t allowed to say what they really thought about the important things—the kind of country they wanted to live in—and now they were winking at one another, and it was like they were sharing a secret message that was no longer so secret. She added: “What I feel is that, for a few hours, I am free. Even if it is very short, for once, I can say what I want.” A friend of hers standing nearby suddenly burst into tears. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this in China,” she said.

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