A WeChat essay detailing the day that China’s “zero-COVID” policy ended has become a rare space for public remembrance of the 2022 White Paper Movement. Originally published as part of a 13-part series on the lockdowns, the essay reflects on the arbitrary imposition of lockdowns and their equally arbitrary removal. The brief essay is laden with the peculiar bureaucratic language of the pandemic, all of which, the author asserts now, “feels like a dream”:
At 5:00 p.m. on December 7, 2022, China lifted its lockdown.
The virus simply “disappeared,” and with it, the “zero-COVID” policy.
Now two years have passed, and it all feels like a dream.
[…] Hopefully such tragedies never happen again… but one can only hope. [Chinese]
In the comment section under the original article, a number of people posted remembrances of the White Paper Movement, the late 2022 anti-lockdown protests that took place in cities across China. The protests, which at times veered into anti-Xi Jinping demonstrations, are extremely politically sensitive. The Chinese government blamed “hostile [foreign] forces” for instigating the protests, a charge protesters scoffed at. Dozens of protesters were arrested, with many reporting mistreatment in police custody. Positive remembrances of the protests are often censored on WeChat. In February 2024, Chen Pinlin, a documentarian who released a film about the protests on Youtube, was arrested by Shanghai police and charged with “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” a "pocket crime" often used to silence dissent.
CDT has translated a selection of the WeChat comments that touched on the protests:
胸口碎大石：If those protesters hadn’t taken to the streets, there’s no telling whether we would’ve “opened up” that soon.
王刚：I hope you keep on writing—and that you remind us not to forget the trials we’ve endured! Thank you.
一叶飘红：Since the end of COVID, university campuses have still not reopened to the public.
流动酒席厨帮哥：If not for those brave college students, the lockdowns would have gone on interminably. [Chinese]
