Shanghai protestors calling for the end of Xi Jinping's rule | Hacker News Reader

Shanghai protestors calling for the end of Xi Jinping's rule

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93 pointsdonsupreme85 comments

Not just Shanghainese are protesting.

People in numerous cities (Beijing, Chongqing, Nanjing, Nanzhou, etc) are holding memorials of the 10 people killed in a fire while being presumably locked in their apartments in Xinjiang. [0]

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/end-the-lockdown-protests-in-chin...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/z5cux2/%E5%...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/z5tpby/%E6%...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/z55byg/%E5%...

>killed in a fire while being presumably locked in their apartments

Horrifying. Is locking the apt still the norm in China?

A widely circulated video of the presumed victims showed them yelling “Help, (we are on the) 16th Floor. We are out of oxygen. Our child is going to die. We are so out of oxygen.” The victims were said to be calling for help on WeChat. Another video claimed that firetrucks couldn’t get close to the district of the fire due to (presumably Covid) blockage. [0]

[0] https://www.i-cable.com/%E6%96%B0%E8%81%9E%E8%B3%87%E8%A8%8A...

That link doesn't seem to point to a video.

I see a lot of enthusiasm for these protests, but I think the caveat here is that we in the west get to see these protests, footage, and headlines, but truth is the majority of Chinese people do not see this. I think the biggest problem for people in China is access to information like this.

According to people in China it's all over state approved social media, not just Western sources. Edit: Posted there, presumably seen by many, then taken down later.

https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15966826381311713...

(Note that this journo appears to be threatened downthread, in Chinese on Twitter)

At least one journo, maybe it was this one, says they've seen nothing like it in their 10 years there.

Edit: 51 universities have also seen protests. Seemingly includes students holding signs of a formula...?

https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15967562737305026...

Context: Total lockdown circumstances leading to e.g. deaths in lockdown fires. China simultaneously reporting record highs in COVID cases; Chinese vaccine apparently seen/known to be less effective than others.

This is curious as China has strict control over the internet. If they didn't want to allow these posts to be up in China then they wouldn't be up (any western archives will of course stick around). Either Xi is losing control of the government or he's letting this happen for some purpose.

Or he's not really aware of it, or at least the scale of it, because he surrounded himself with people who wouldn't dare tell him something he may dislike.

That is Friedmann Equation. Homophone of "freedom".

This is the sort of thing that is while easily understandable in principle, can be remarkably hard to keep up with. I’m aware of the general trend with how Chinese dissent is often done by pun like manipulation to avoid censorship, but it can be completely inscrutable at times when it’s something like a Chinese regional dialect specific homophone. They often frequently mutate as they spread, forcing the censorship efforts to play catch up on a massive scale… often the only good link for the censors will be proximity and volume, which is why you get some downright Orwellian sorts of things from time to time like the recent events leading to brief periods where the word “Bridge” was seeing people in certain locations getting flagged by the censors.

So thank you so much for providing the necessary context!

The twitter account mentioned here appears to be based in New York and is from western media. Her bias seems to be obvious? How can she have a legit read on what Chinese locals are seeing on television, social media, and media?

It's in her bio:

> Media studio co-founder. has worked as Head of BBC Hong Kong Bureau & BBC Chinese News Editor. China Editor @initiumnews. Legal reporter @scmpnews and others

SCMP is a Hong Hong-based news outlet. I'm assuming she has her sources, since all you need is someone in china with a VPN or someone in Hong Kong in mainland with WeChat/Weibo account that has access to community groups

Chinese do see them. It is very interesting actually. I saw the pretext in DouYin, some people was saying something big was going to happen "tonight" on DouYin, so apparently there are organizations. Today, some friends in China shared with me some video clips. I am only connecting the dots now. It would be interesting to learn the full picture.

DouYin’s algo is heavily monitored and manipulated by the state.

Big events gets posted on PRC social media faster than censors can censor. Much of Chinese with mobile will see this, the biggest problem is people in west thinking they know better, overindexing on a bunch of students stuck in shitty dorms protesting because lockdown in these facilities are genuinely terrible, while the protestors use some dead Uyghurs and libral values as pretense (yes many are genuine too) for international attention to pressure gov response.

This is just one of the thousands of "small" scale protests that happen every year in PRC, except young students are better coordinated and tech savvy (i.e. Shanghai protest organized on Telegram with western reporters in group), same with Henan bank who got some money back. Or Urumqi finally relaxing lockdown because 1000s of commoners got on the streets - imagine that CCP even listens to Uyghur pressure. I expect there's going to be some concessions for campus lockdowns (and organizers getting fucked), but until their parents get on the street enmass, this is western media who got kicked out or left PRC during covid getting overzealous on breadcrumbs of access they occasionally get through oblique channels from mainland.

E: over limit, @powerapple

Yeah, it's coordinated. Cabin fever lockdown students learned from HK protestors / Henan. I was peeping at @actionshanghai on telegram leading up. I think campus concessions will get attention or some priority. And should - lock down in Chinese dorms would suck. I'm sure organizers are going to get crushed, especially for inviting / appealing to foreign jouralists and rags like RFA or epochetimes is going to ruin some lives accordign to how HK NSL prosecutions are going.

This may not result in anything, but these are synchronised acts, I watched the clip predicted it, and a few guys announced this before it happened on DouYin (Chinese TikTok).

What do you think the average response was in the West to covid protests last year?

Here in Australia the public and media overwhelmingly despised anyone protesting despite having some of the harshest covid restrictions on Earth.

Even worse would be the media not convering the protests at all, and actively suppressing any mentions.

This period is going to be studied as one of history’s bizarre moments, that people in the future will have trouble understanding. The fact that no major western country, or major political party, strongly condemned those lockdown measures at the time is astounding.

But even crazier is the fact that now that everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response, not a single major country i know of has performed any serious commission work to established what things went wrong and why. It’s like nothing has happened.

> the fact that now that everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response

Your hindsight is missing a lot of nuance.

In the first few months, there was a fog of war. How transmissable is it? How deadly? What is the most effective course of treatment? How does the disease affect our internal systems?

In hindsight, we now know the facts.

We also developed a vaccine which reduces the severity of symptoms if not outright prevents infection in some individuals.

The initial reaction to lock down saved lives. Your own might never have been at risk, but there are many higher risk folks who benefited from the time we bought with lockdowns early on.

Lockdowns now do not make sense. We understand the disease. We have courses of treatment. We have functional vaccines. We have some level of population immunity.

I’m not sure what you’re saying is true. We spent way too much money not to take a very, very close look at what was achieved. I don’t see that happening.

That's completely false to my understanding. It reminds me of people saying that people got all worked up about y2k and then nothing happened. Nothing happened because everyone fixed their shit. In the beginning of covid hospitals were overwhelmed and the variants were more dangerous. Now large percentages of people are vaccinated and new variants are less dangerous.

I am sure some lock down rules and some implementations of them were not good. But "live with it" was not the same back then as now.

most people (in france at least) haven’t got their 2022 shot, and we’re completely fine. The virus evolution is what changed things.

Live with it is ok now because effective vaccines are available. A lot of lockdown measures went overboard but that was hard to tell at the time, when NYC had overflowing hospitals that required mobile morgues due to the overwhelming number of deaths it was more understandable.

I think part of the issue that appears to be glossed over is that the lockdown measures as such faced a real legal challenge in US. Reasonable people may agree that there was a lot of initial risk due to lack of knowledge of the nature of the risk ( transmissibility and so on ), but, even for a full blown lockdown, the US system does have a solution in place for that ( it was not utilized however ). If there was a time to use that solution ( martial law ), it was at the very beginning, but needless to say, politically it was not a palatable move. That, however, unlike what followed, at least would have been in line with our supposed form of government.

But since that happened and life does go on, states started doing things that clearly stepped over the line for some people without appropriate authority unleashing legal challenges in the process[1].

[1]https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/10/legal-challenges-cd...

People completely stopped vaccinating in france, and ICUs aren’t overloaded at all anymore. What changed isn’t the vaccination rates but the nature of the virus itself. Omicron completely changed the nature of the epidemic (that plus the fact that after 2 years and with super-contagious variant like omicron, almost 100% of the population have been in contact with the virus, either symptomatic or not).

EDIT : as for lockdowns, they were understandable in 202O when the virus was new. But locking down 20 yo students in 2021 made absolutely no sense, and all the evidence pointed to that. Note that in france at least, the most serious measures against non vaccinated people were taken in early 2022 (aka: not even allowed to take the train), despite omicron being the only variant remaining, and casualties becoming super super low.

I agree that this time will be keeping public policy academics and epidemiologists busy for decades to come, and that it's a very interesting question what the right calls were in retrospect.

However, I want to point out that you've moved the goalposts in your arguments. You started with

> everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response

But you're now saying that because of the mutation to Omicron and the prior exposure of "almost 100% of the population", just living with it is the appropriate policy move. Neither of these were true throughout 2020 or most of 2021, so cannot be useful in determining what the correct course was in the early pandemic.

Furthermore, I think you are vastly discounting the value of a single vaccination. Just because few people have taken the bivalent shot does not negate the value that their original shots in 2021 still provide against serious/spreading cases today.

For the record, my own low-confidence prediction is that future historians will bear out the early (first two months, say) phase of lockdown, and will agree with the utility of many of the later policies but take issue with the hubris of states thinking they could impose them on an unwilling population with no blowback. There will also be an endless list of easy-to-condemn overreactions to the virus or silly policies continuing way too late (e.g. a large park near where I used to live was shut down until late 2021, well after vaccination and after we were very confident that it basically didn't spread outdoors)

Whilst it is not good the first respond is to isolate is right. In fact by not doing it earlier and let the wu han people running cause the outbreak of the world (and I am not talking about the origin of virus but how the first wave started). And the first wave is not as tame as the current one.

Over time the virus tame and solution appeared hence measure should be relaxed.

If you just let it goes as Boris would want it would have killed a lot more.

How would the situation have evolved if we have had no lockdown at all is an interesting question, and assessing the quality of the models that were used to predict casualties is, IMHO, one of the main things governments should do asap.

All the projections i’ve seen during the pandemic were off by at least 50% (in their most generous intepretation), and countries like sweden that locked people down the least didn’t see any difference in the number of casualties.

There were plenty of mass protests in the West in 2020/2021/2022 that the mass media simply refused to cover since they were standing with the government and didn't even tried to hide the allegiance. Though they have no issue cheering on protests that align with their masters interest.

This isn’t true. COViD protests got a ton of coverage.

What is wrong with playing on your own team? West can be critical of China just as China can be critical of the west.

And B, I lived in or visited cities where protest were happening (in France, Switzerland, Czechia) and they were covered as one would expect them to be. Could you back your claim?

The media should not be on the same team as the government.

I see plenty of mentions by Chinese expats on social media as well.

I'm not saying there are no protests in China. I've seen plenty of mentions myself and reports of the draconian measures implemented there. I'm just pointing out the double standards in the West's media.

They're a double standard you invented. Your claims are simply false and yet more of the example of false equivalence we see tarried out so often by sympathizers to these horrific regimes.

For those not following this, it has been a powder keg. Deaths keep happening under the quarantine, and China keeps rushing to censor them.

Another recent event was 27 people dying in a bus crash, en route to be quarantined: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/18/asia/china-guizhou-quarantine...

https://i.imgur.com/fTE2wi3.jpg

Tsinghua students being cheeky protesting with the Friedmann Equation i.e. expansion of space / open up.

Do you have the source for this image? (Not doubting you or anything, just interested in more context about where it was originally posted.)

I feel so bad for the people there, what they have had to put up with for the last couple of years, and what they still have to endure. It's all so pointless.

I lost hope. Even though hope sometimes meant faith and sometimes meant believe in something which offer no hope.

2 years hk, 20 years of trying to get them in and be part of but turn out it use its power to suppress internal and external fire (and even offer totalitarianism as alternative to human existence), not to mention 20 years of Beijing protest …

2000 years of ok with imperialism (from qin to now) and even colonialism (qing dynasty).

Not sure it can be changed. Just another one bite the dust. Or should we keep on hoping.

Multiple people on this thread saying that Chinese people do see these protests and that it is all over state media. I’d welcome the data and evidence for that.

music to my ears

More footage: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/z5s107/protesto...

Is there a good rundown of current Covid science? I want to understand “what we should have done, if we had known.”

Protesting lockdowns in China == pro-democracy

Protesting lockdowns in USA == "fascism"

That's the pattern here. Anything that goes farther than what the US govt is doing is authoritarian. Anything critical of what the US govt is doing is "fascism"

Sorry, no room for double standards here

Inb4 a bunch of people who feel the need to shill for the US govt start "explaining" to me why I'm "mistaken" about this

I think a lot of people in the US (and maybe most democratic countries) want China to become a democracy. So, when we see these protests, we feel like they're headed in that direction.

The lockdowns in China are entirely different from what took place in the US. People in the US were just asked to stay home if at all possible. Some businesses and schools were forced to close. Grocery stores stayed open; public transit kept running; people moved freely in and out of cities.

Not denying this because it's obvious, but I wrote the above comment bc the US and western countries (and Australia especially) could have handled this without censorship or the authoritarian tendencies demonstrated

We see the same thing with war. When the US invades other countries it's "to spread freedom and democracy".

Kind of rare to see conspiracy nuts of this level on HN.

Kind of rare to see someone respond to something so dismissively and non-constructively on hn

Well you said something that is obviously ridiculous and you said you won't listen to anything anyone says so I didn't think there was much point trying to be constructive.

FWIW, ridiculousness is in the eye of the beholder. Parent did indicate the inflation of the word 'fascism' and uneven application of the term to same type of event ( "lockdown" ) under two different systems with one of the overlapping values being media portrayal.

In other words, it may be worthwhile to prove poster wrong with facts.

> FWIW, ridiculousness is in the eye of the beholder

Only sometimes. Implying that the American lockdown is the same as the Chinese one is obviously untrue.

If I call you ridiculous for thinking that Sweden is just as oppressive as North Korea you wouldn't say "well that's a matter of opinion" would you?(assuming you're not an idiot)

I don't disagree in an abstract, but the issue I have is with an argument that relies on 'obvious' as a flag. Not everything is obvious ( and most things could be argued ). In fact, some things may appear obvious only to be lost in the sea of nuance. This is the reason I object to arguing along the lines of obviousness. North Korea and Sweden are very different countries in just about every way I can think of. It would take a tremendous stretch of language ( and rather ignorant audience ) to convincingly argue that Sweden is just as oppressive. With America and China it is not as straightforward a comparison, because those countries do share some interesting characteristics so less of a stretch is needed.

The issue gets muddled, however because the word lockdown is discussed without any nuance attached to it. In US, it was challenged in courts and people ( clearly ) mostly did what they wanted to do ( that said, some businesses got fined heavily ) despite heavy media shaming, whereas in China lockdowns included stories ( among others ) of sealing off entire buildings without allowing their denizens for any way out. Despite the same word, those two approaches are very different in application ( edit: and results ).

Ok maybe I should have said "obvious if you have read anything at all about China's covid lockdowns". I think it was fair to assume that he had read at least something about them given his strong opinions on the matter.

> Implying that the American lockdown is the same as the Chinese one

Wasn't what was said in my comment. It was about protests of the lockdowns and the govt/media response to said protests

Did you only skim read my comment before posting a one sentence reply?

Your comment relied on the premise that the lockdowns are equivalent. If they are not, why on earth would you expect the same reaction to protests about them??!

> you said you won't listen to anything anyone says

wasn't the intended meaning

Are you suggesting that any country that has a prison is actually a fascism camp? Use your brain before talking plz.

??? No idea how you got that out of my comment

Will anything come out of this

I hope not. The alternative is going to be rubbish. It is like every single worker in a company think their CEO is shit, and they can take his job with comfort. In reality, it is only going to be worse. Xi's not great, also alternative is not great either. I just hope they can find a solution to current problem, and move on.

Are the protests in any way related to what happened at the latest party convention?

I don't have any inside knowledge unfortunately. The clip I watched was someone shouting about covid policy, but it may not be the theme for others. Foxconn workers happened a few days ago was mainly about compensation, of course covid policy can be one factor, but it was not correctly portrayed in media.

I accidentally watched a clip on Chinese TikTok, this multi-city protests were announced vaguely by some random guy, so I believe this is at least organized. I would think there are supporters in government. My understanding is that politicians are always politicians, people may be protest something, politicians can support/oppose it for totally different reasons. So yes and no. I sense there is a lot going on. The government is now at a very awkward position.

> Will anything come out of this

I sincerely hope so, this was the only way that the Yellow movement would have any meaningful impact after the fall of HK: inspire mainlanders to start taking the necessary actions towards the CCP after what has been a totally disillusion period of prosperity financed entirely on their own eventual oppression and abject compliance.

Exceptionalism is what allows for these travesties to occur in the first place, once the harm is turned inward as a result covid policy and economic downturns would they be open to hear any of this: how soon did they forget about the efforts of Dr. Li Wenliang [0] who was censored by the CCP and ultimately died of COVID after the initial outcry?

0: https://archive.ph/tS3pw

“Of Covid” needs some enormous scare quotes there.

> “Of Covid” needs some enormous scare quotes there.

Granted, but his untimely death was in part due to a positive COVID diagnosis and the organ failure that following his vocal appeal to the public about the dangers of this emerging danger:

> By the morning of Feb. 6, doctors wrote in the progress notes that Dr. Li was at risk of multiple organ failure. Several physicians we spoke to said that Dr. Li’s condition was so serious that his medical team should have at this point, or before it, considered intubating him and placed him on a ventilator — a higher level of oxygen support.

Urumqi ones, yes already relaxed covid measures because frankly XJ lockdown past 3 months was stupid excessive and protest by actual commoners. CCP listens to these, even Uyghurs in XJ.

These "rest of China" protests which are mostly coordinated student protesters - not commoners - many of whom admittly have very shitty dorm situations to be locked down in, probably not. I'd expect opposite, academic punishments, being expelled etc, especially Shanghai or other "libtard" schools. Like Shanghai protest being coordinated on telegram with RFA and Epoche Times reporters, those that get associated are going to be fucked. The TLDR is until their parents get on the streets, enmass, this will pass.

Libtard schools?

He might have meant instead, either the Nanjing, or Xi’an libtard schools. Two colleges known for the recent protests are the Xi’An Fine Arts School and also the Nanjing Media School. These two majors are coindicated with libtardation in the West are they not? The equivalent term in Chinese is, I think,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baizuo

>The term has been referenced approvingly by American conservatives, including Tucker Carlson and Rod Dreher.[12]

If there will be another mysterious leak of virus, as it was in late 2019 when there was huge protests in Hong Kong, probably not.

While I hope yes, no.

Apologies upfront if I am misinformed/out of the loop:

Why does the Chinese government want to hinder their economic output by forcing their population to need to stay indoors?

Are they genuinely afraid of COVID still or is there a different reason? What's the "truth" if you will?

Chinese olders refuse to have vaccines, they don't like anything to be injected into their body. They use herbs when they are sick. My dad refused my mom to take a MRI scan. Now you want them to have boosters every 6 months, no way.

This is very insightful. I feel that there is a communist cultural connection here that I find familiar. Elders today who came up in communist systems have a deeply rooted mistrust of anything that is served up into the body not because of suspicion of conspiracy, but because of a long experience with systemic incompetence and low quality. I’ve seen it here in Eastern Europe as well - people (grandparent age) trusted that Western vaccines are just fine - they just didn’t trust that the ones we obtained locally weren’t ruined or tampered with. They didn’t believe we’d get the “better” stuff.

I think this mentality can be difficult for Westerners of all ages to comprehend. Or it is easier for Westerners to just superimpose their own similar, albeit different ideas/problems around conspiracy and mistrust.

It is not really about communists roots or anything. Old Chinese people believe in herbs, and believe anything unnatural is bad for your body. Especially old people, they believe doing less to your body is best for you, just let the nature take care of it.

As for your grandparents, I don't think anything should be trusted blindly. It is very personal thing. For an Asian to take something 1/10000 of death/or other rate, it is not worth it. That's why many Asian still wear masks.

The best way to understand developing world is to compress 4 generations or even more into two generations, like comparing the thoughts of your great great granddad to yourself, that's how fast developing world has developed, and the gap between generations can be so big.

There is also little natural immunity with what they have done.

I don't know if they can really just let it rip through a 1 billion people without it being a major health crisis when so many do not have previous exposure.

The optics on the government of a COVID health crisis while everyone else has moved on is not going to be an option for them. This is scary where this goes from here.

I've found this video rather illustrative on why. https://nebula.tv/videos/polymatter-why-china-wont-abandon-z...

The Chinese government refuses to deploy non-Chinese vaccines. The concern has been that the Chinese vaccine is harmful or ineffective with the elders, so not having lockdowns causes a surge in the elderly being hospitalized or dying.

I am pretty sure the reasons are different. It does not make sense to make such a hard lockdown in my eyes.

Is the ruling Communist Party government wanting one third of one half of all the windfall gains in the global supply chain since 2012 for the little people workers/subcontractors and not the Wall Street wolves Xi Jinping's Communist Party insider political enemies leak to as if Wikileaks?

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