What China’s Protesters Are Calling For

As he crossed a small road in Shanghai, the man held up a bundle of flowers and issued a rallying call to a crowd of excited onlookers. Within minutes, he was surrounded by security officials and wrestled into a police car.

It was one of the more dramatic moments in several days of protests in China that captured the boldness of young Chinese demonstrators as well as the risks they face in challenging the country’s authoritarian leadership.

The protests have been fueled by anger over an apartment building fire in the far western city of Urumqi that killed 10 people. Many attributed the tragedy to Covid restrictions that confined people to their homes, a suspicion that officials have denied. The protesters’ calls for an end to lockdowns have morphed into demands for official accountability and even for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to step down.

In Shanghai on Sunday, protesters had gathered at Urumqi Road, named after the city, when the man stepped onto the road. “I’m holding flowers — is that a crime?” the man asked loudly, as dozens of police officers drew closer. The crowd responded: “No!”

The crowd applauded.

As more protesters and police officers gathered at the intersection, many wondered what would happen next, witnesses said. “You could feel the intensity in the air,” said one protester who asked to be identified only by the surname Liu for fear of official reprisals.

During the man’s speech, another officer in plainclothes is spotted standing at the intersection.

The man with the flowers continued: “How did the people in Urumqi die? We all know the truth right?”

Then the authorities pounced.

Two men in plainclothes grab him first. One person in a navy blue jacket grasps his left hand. The other plainclothes officer then tackles him from behind.

The police try to block other bystanders from helping or filming the encounter.

The man is wrenched into the car by the officers. He resists long enough to crane his neck to let out an indiscernible message. All the while, people in the stunned crowd shout at the officers, “Let him go!” At least four others in the crowd were taken away by police that afternoon, according to witnesses.

The protests that erupted across China’s streets and campuses this past weekend were among the broadest and boldest challenges to China’s leadership since the student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Many protesters used blank sheets of paper as a creative gesture of defiance against heightened censorship.

As a generation of young Chinese rushed streets and campuses, many captured videos and shared them widely, including outside China. This is what they had to say.

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At a university in the eastern city of Nanjing, protesters turned their cellphone flashlights on and raised the devices into the air in a tribute to the victims of the Urumqi fire.

In Beijing, people who gathered at the banks of the Liangma River chanted slogans popularized by a lone protester who had boldly denounced China’s leader last month. The man had displayed banners on Sitong Bridge in the city’s north, days ahead of an all-important Communist Party congress at which Mr. Xi cemented a new term in power.

A slogan on one of the banners referred to the Cultural Revolution, a decade of mass political upheaval unleashed by Mao Zedong. It was a time of fanaticism and radicalism that demonstrated the risks of autocratic rule.

Sometimes, the crowd’s chants were sarcastic. When the police ordered the same group of protesters not to shout slogans protesting Covid controls, they switched to chants supporting them:

Some protesters said they were unsure how political or bold their calls should be. But no chant was bolder than one in Shanghai, where a crowd went so far as to call on Xi Jinping to step down.

The protesters in Shanghai also turned a Communist Party slogan popularized by Mao Zedong, “Serve the people,” into a pointed reminder to the police of who they were meant to protect.

In Beijing, demonstrators were seen rebutting the claim that dissent in China is instigated by foreign agitators – an assertion officials routinely make to undercut protesters and challenge their loyalty. When a man with a megaphone warns a crowd that there are “foreign anti-Chinese forces in our midst,” protesters erupted with a series of clever retorts.

“We are all patriots,” one replies.

“By foreign forces, are you referring to Marx and Engels?” another asks, referring to the Communist Party’s own roots in the ideas of the two German philosophers.

“Was the Guizhou bus flipped over by foreign forces too?” (In September, a bus headed to quarantine in the province of Guizhou crashed and killed 27 people, fueling nationwide anger over China’s zero-Covid policy.)

“Were we all called here by foreign forces?” one man asks the crowd. “No!” they reply.

In a remarkable display of dissent coupled with patriotism, protesters in Shanghai chanted “Arise, arise!” a line from “March of the Volunteers,” the Chinese national anthem once used to galvanize Chinese against Japanese troops during the Sino-Japanese war.

The subversive use of a patriotic symbol captured a unique dimension of the protests. For years, the Communist Party insisted that patriotism — loving one’s country — was synonymous with loving the Party.

But after a year of missed travel, lost income, and restricted movement, younger Chinese are wondering whether the two are truly the same.