In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear protesters as “foreign forces”:
In English it was called “Not the Foreign Force.” Chen previously said that he wanted to use the documentary to counter the government’s attempt to discredit the protests and blame “foreign forces” for orchestrating dissent – a tactic often deployed by China’s ruling Communist Party to explain away moments of genuine public anger.
Like many young people who took part in the protests, it was Chen’s first time voicing his political demands in China when he took to the streets of Shanghai on November 26, 2022, according to a post he published when releasing the documentary.
He said he produced the documentary to convey his personal experience and reflections.
“I hope to explore why, whenever internal conflicts arise in China, foreign forces are always made the scapegoat. The answer is clear to everyone: the more the government misleads, forgets, and censors, the more we must speak up, remind others, and remember,” he wrote. “Only by remembering the ugliness can we strive toward the light. I also hope that China will one day embrace its own light and future.” [Source]
The 77-minute film includes footage that Chen took while attending some of the protests in Shanghai, along with video clips published by other netizens. It was uploaded to YouTube, X, Telegram, and Reddit under Chen’s pseudonym, Plato, and received hundreds of thousands of likes on X. Some users managed to reproduce the film before his social media accounts disappeared. Last September, the Chinese Human Rights Defenders organization provided an overview and timeline of Chen’s detention:
Chen was detained on 28 November 2023, the day after he posted the video online, on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen’s loved ones were only able to find a lawyer to take on his case till mid-December 2023 due to the sensitivity around his case. On 5 January 2024, Chen was formally arrested on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” On 18 February 2024, his case was transferred to the procuratorate’s office for prosecution. On 3 April 2024, he was indicted by Shanghai Baoshan District Procuratorate. [Source]
Chen’s lawyer Daniel Fang shared a short commentary about the sentencing in which he stated that the prosecutor had recommended a two-year sentence when Chen pleaded guilty, but the judge ultimately decided on a much longer sentence. Like Fang, other human-rights figures criticized the sentencing. Advocacy manager at Reporters Without Borders Aleksandra Bielakowska stated that Chen “was only serving the public interest by documenting an historic episode of protest against censorship,” and she called on the international community to increase pressure on the Chinese government to release Chen and the 123 other press-freedom figures currently detained in China. This includes citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan, who served four years for her hard-hitting video reporting from Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic. There are also an unknown number of protesters who were tracked down and detained shortly after the White Paper movement.
The latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary China, published this week, contains a series of articles exploring the effects of the COVID pandemic on state mobilization and social resistance. One article by Yue Guan, Lei Guang, Lianjiang Li, and Yanchuan Liu describes how the White Paper movement punctured the rally effect generated by the government’s initially-popular pandemic control policies. The authors argue that while authoritarian regimes can use crises to extend measures of state control, their attempts to prolong such measures may ultimately lead to public protests and declining trust in government:
The COVID-19 pandemic had an exceptionally long and consequential rally effect in China. Drawing on an eight-wave nationwide survey, this article shows that the Wuhan lockdown boosted public confidence in the central government. The persistence of the pandemic and the initial success of the zero-COVID policy sustained the enhanced trust in the central government for over two years. However, the rally effect did not dissipate as quietly as usual. As trust in the central government returned to the pre-pandemic level following the Shanghai lockdown, defiant protests collectively known as the White Paper Movement broke out. Angry protesters demanded the termination of the zero-COVID policy and called for accountability from the ruling party and its top leader. This article argues that while the rally effect lasted exceptionally long in the authoritarian country, it could not be prolonged indefinitely. Ultimately, the dissonance between the declining trust in the central government and the persisting restrictive measures provoked the protests. [Source]
Remembrances of the White Paper movement have been censored, but Chinese netizens continue to pursue ways of reflecting upon their experiences during the pandemic. In addition to continuing to document posts from Dr. Li Wenliang’s “Wailing Wall,” CDT has begun its Minitrue Plus Five series, highlighting propaganda and censorship directives—many related to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China—on the fifth anniversary of the days on which they were issued.
