The Night of the White Paper Sheets

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Wulumuqi Lu is a street in an affluent Shanghai neighbourhood, in the former French Concession. Plane trees line the sidewalks, where before the Covid crisis numerous expats used to stroll or drink wine. Yet on November 26, 2022, this very street became the center of nationwide protests, the largest since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. Hundreds of Shanghai residents stood silently at a vigil holding blank sheets of white paper. They were demanding not only an end to the lockdowns, some were even calling for President Xi Jinping to step down. The next day the crowd had grown larger still. Foreign journalists were also on site, documenting the mostly young demonstrators holding white A4 sheets in their hands.

The protests were no longer confined to Shanghai. In cities across the country, in Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan and Guangzhou, people took to the streets carrying blank white sheets. For the first time since 1989, citizens were once again openly calling for the government to resign. What had happened? And why did such protests occur at all, given that the Communist Party controls every form of public expression?

Deadly lockdown

After the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan in early 2020, China closed its borders. Only a very small number of people were still allowed to enter, and anyone granted a visa first had to undergo a strict two-week hotel quarantine. Less privileged arrivals ended up in gymnasiums, packed together with thousands of others. Within the country, the government established a rigorous PCR testing regime. By the logic of the time, the system initially worked. The People’s Republic wanted to keep the virus entirely out of the country. For the first few months, that objective was achieved with some success. But once newer variants emerged, less dangerous yet far more contagious, the goal became increasingly unattainable.

While much of the world outside China was already speaking of the end of the pandemic, authorities in Shanghai imposed a severe lockdown at the end of March 2022, one that would last 65 days. For most residents, leaving their apartments was forbidden. In the city of Urumqi, capital of the autonomous region of Xinjiang, residents had already been confined to their homes for more than two months. When a fire broke out in an apartment building there on November 26, 2022, at least ten people died. They burned because they were not allowed to leave the building. The following day, protests began in Shanghai against the lockdown policy, and against restricted freedom of expression in China. That, precisely, was what the blank white sheet symbolized.

Active citizen journalists

In the West, there is a tendency to imagine China as a drab censorship regime of an Orwellian kind. The reality, however, is more layered and more colorful. Foreigners are sometimes astonished by how much criticism is possible within the loosely drawn boundaries set by the Party. In May 2023, for instance, the business magazine Caixin uncovered a far-reaching corruption scandal in the Chinese tobacco industry. Ling Chengxing, the former head of the state tobacco monopoly administration, was expelled from the Party and removed from office because of the reporting, then arrested in 2024. Charges followed for bribery and abuse of power. In 2025, Ling was sentenced to a long prison term.

Citizen journalists also regularly expose environmental scandals. In July 2025, residents of Hangzhou reported over several days that their tap water was heavily discoloured and smelled foul. These reports were accompanied by accounts of health complaints such as itching and nausea. Local authorities initially claimed the cause was a natural chemical reaction involving algae and denied any outside contamination. Although the incident was never fully clarified, the authorities switched to an alternative water source, compensated affected residents, and suspended several officials.

Journalists censor themselves

At the same time, the phenomenon known in German as the Schere im Kopf, self-censorship born of internalized fear, has grown noticeably stronger. I worked twice as a correspondent in China. During the first period, between 2011 and 2015, critical interviews were still possible. When I returned to the country at the end of 2019, interview partners no longer wanted to be quoted by name even on harmless topics such as urban traffic. In Chinese publications, censors often did not even need to use the red pen. Out of anticipatory obedience, journalists simply no longer crossed certain deliberately vague boundaries.

Freedom of speech is indeed guaranteed in China’s constitution. In practice, however, that right applies only so long as it does not call into question the Party’s leading role. Criticism is not forbidden as such, it is tightly channelled. It is expected to be voiced internally, constructively, technocratically, and above all loyally. Public, unplanned, or morally charged criticism, by contrast, is treated as a threat to political stability.

The toolbox with which the Communist Party enforces this claim has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. And unfortunately one cannot help noticing that many elites in the West seem to have taken notes. Central to this is the battle term «fake news». The authorities claim they must act against false information and online rumors. «Foreign actors» are invoked almost reflexively as the culprits, for example during the Hong Kong protests of 2019. It cannot in fact be denied that those largely organic protests also received support from American NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy. At the same time, bots and paid social media accounts are used deliberately to shape the mood or steer public discourse in a desired direction.

Free opinion on the Party line

In this understanding, freedom of speech is not an inalienable value, nor a human right by birth. It is granted by the Party, when it is useful. That includes investigative reporting on corrupt officials, especially when those officials are political rivals. Freedom of speech can also serve as a pressure valve, a way of letting steam out of the kettle, a kind of early warning system.

Around the 2010s, for example, air pollution in Chinese cities had become an urgent problem. The growing middle class in particular worried about the health of their children. Discontent was rising. But before frustration could turn against the political leadership itself, the authorities changed course. In fact, air quality today is substantially better than it was ten years ago.

At the same time, since 1989 the leadership has paid very close attention to ensuring that protests remain local. Citizens may be allowed to take to the streets against polluted wastewater from a chemical plant in Guangdong province. What must not happen, from the Party’s perspective, are nationwide protests against overly lax environmental standards set by the central government. Likewise, in the official narrative, provincial officials may enrich themselves illegally. The only infallible authority is the top leadership in Beijing, which means criticism of Xi Jinping is out of bounds.

And the bái zhǐ kàngyì, the White Paper Protests of November 2022? For a brief moment, the spark of freedom slipped past the censors. The surprised police, however, shut down the demonstrations within a matter of days. All participants were identified through surveillance cameras and cell phone data and then prosecuted. The charges usually involved «picking quarrels and provoking trouble» or «advocating extremism», even when those affected had merely shared videos of the protests. Images of blank sheets of paper and related hashtags disappeared completely from the Chinese internet. At the same time, censors flooded the internet with banal everyday content in order to divert public attention.

And yet perhaps the most surprising development came on December 7, less than two weeks after the nationwide protests. President Xi Jinping declared the lockdown policy at an end. Officially, of course, the abrupt reversal was not presented as a response to pressure from the streets, but as a scientifically grounded and carefully planned «optimization».