The tide of protests and other acts of dissent — including posting banners, distributing petitions, or individual protest posts that grew tremendously in China throughout 2022 — has yet to ebb, the Freedom House China Dissent Monitor revealed in its latest update this week.
The China Dissent Monitor — a project that documents, verifies, and analyzes instances of protest in the country — confirmed 2,230 “dissent events” in the totalitarian communist country between June 2022 and last April, stating that “at least 29,000 people” have participated in protests in that timeframe. That number, the analysts noted, represents only those people engaging in events that the organization has coded into its system, 1,432 of the 2,230 dissent events, meaning the true number is likely significantly higher.
“78 percent were demonstrations and marches, 10 percent were sign protests, 4 percent involved obstruction and occupation, 3 percent were collective petitioning and 3 percent were labor strikes,” the report detailed.
China’s communist regime brutally punishes public expressions of dissent against the regime using Orwellian laws such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” to silence dissatisfaction with the regime. Known anti-communist activists — and, often, the attorneys who dare to represent them — often disappear into the penal system and die there, with little access to their families and no legitimate due process. Also in the Communist Party’s crosshairs are people of faith, particularly Christians, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners. Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam are legal only under the direct control of the Party — meaning those who pray without government supervision break the law — while the government considers the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which prioritizes forbearance, health, and individuality, an “evil cult” worthy of extermination.
Despite the high probability of government persecution, thousands of Chinese people have consistently participated in protests in the past year. Anti-government dissent appeared to peak last year amid the horror of the “zero-Covid” policy, which mandated city-wide lockdowns causing starvation and needless deaths from lack of basic medicine. Beijing also used the policy to imprison untold numbers in dirty, repressive quarantine camps in the name of allegedly preventing the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.
Freedom House declared dissent a “daily occurrence in China” last year, citing its research.
The “zero-Covid” policy has come and gone, but dissent persists — and, even during that protest movement, the participants used their stance to object to communism generally, not just public health provisions. A common form of protest in China last year became known as the “blank paper” protests, in which protesters held up blank sheets of paper to protest the government’s censorship, defying police to arrest them for saying nothing.
Watch — China: Hundreds Protest Communist Censorship by Holding Up Papers Saying…Nothing