白纸运动White Paper Movement
Background: By November 2022, zero-COVID was in its third year and exhaustion with lockdowns had reached its limit. Residents of Guangzhou's Haizhu district broke through lockdown fencing into the streets; workers at Foxconn in Zhengzhou clashed with epidemic-control personnel; in a Chongqing housing compound, residents ringed a young man giving a speech — “There is only one sickness in this world: being unfree and poor,” he shouted, in a clip that went viral — and neighbors shielded him from the police who came for him. The sparks preceded the fire. On the night of November 24, a fire broke out in a residential compound in Urumqi, Xinjiang; the official toll was 10 dead. Images of unit doors wired shut and fences at the compound gates spread one judgment across the country overnight: the lockdown had killed them. On the evening of November 25, Urumqi residents marched through the streets toward the city government, demanding an end to the lockdown.
Before the spark: The Urumqi fire was not an isolated fuse. In the early hours of September 18, 2022, a bus transferring epidemic-affected people overnight in Guizhou overturned on a highway, killing 27 — they died not of the virus but of the transfer. In late October, workers at Foxconn in Zhengzhou, fearing lockdown and infection, fled on foot in groups along the expressways toward their hometowns, while villagers along the road left water and food for them; the images spread nationwide. On November 1, a three-year-old boy in Lanzhou died of gas poisoning after epidemic checkpoints delayed his trip to hospital, and his father's public grief ignited outrage. Stacked together, these events brought many previously apolitical people to one conclusion: the lockdowns themselves were killing people. By late November, students at many universities were already shouting protests from dormitory blocks over sealed campuses and endless testing. The Urumqi fire simply ignited, all at once, what three years had piled up.
Course of events: On November 26, a student at Communication University of China, Nanjing, stood alone on campus steps holding a blank sheet of paper, saying nothing. A teacher came forward and took the paper from her hands; she kept standing there, empty-handed. The video spread, and the blank page became the movement's emblem. That night and into November 27, Shanghai residents gathered on Urumqi Middle Road — a street named for the stricken city — to lay flowers in mourning. When police moved in, the crowd chanted “No more COVID tests, we want freedom,” and calls of “Xi Jinping, step down” and “Communist Party, step down” rang out. When people gathered again that afternoon, police sealed the intersections and made arrests; as detainees were dragged to police vehicles, the surrounding crowd chanted “Let them go.” Footage of a young woman screaming as several officers carried her away became one of the movement's most widely seen images. That evening, Beijing residents gathered along both banks of the Liangma River, holding blank paper and phone flashlights, chanting “We want freedom” and “Lift the lockdown,” and singing the Internationale. Over the same weekend, by incomplete counts, students at at least 50 universities nationwide raised blank paper in canteens, sports grounds and dormitory areas; at Tsinghua University, students shouted “Democracy and rule of law, freedom of expression.” People took to the streets in Chengdu's Wangping Street, Wuhan, Xi'an, Lanzhou, Kunming, Guangzhou and elsewhere. The protesters did not know one another and had no organizers; the relay ran on short videos that were deleted, reposted, and deleted again.
Shanghai's two days: The center of the Shanghai protests was Urumqi Middle Road around Anfu Road and Changle Road. Late on November 26, the first mourners brought flowers and candles, and police cordoned the intersection; as the crowd grew it began chanting in unison, “No more COVID tests, we want freedom,” and then “Xi Jinping, step down” and “Communist Party, step down” — the first time since 1989 that a major Chinese city's streets heard public calls for the top leader's removal. On the 27th, crowds gathered again and police sealed the streets and cleared them section by section: on-site video shows plainclothes officers suddenly seizing protesters from within the crowd and dragging them to police vehicles, whereupon the crowd surged forward, pulling back and chanting “Let them go.” BBC journalist Ed Lawrence was forced to the ground, handcuffed and taken away at the scene, released hours later; the British government summoned the Chinese ambassador over the incident. That evening, residents crowded around the Urumqi Middle Road street sign to take photographs with it — a blue sign with white characters that had overnight become the symbol of the city's defiance.
The second day: The protests did not end with the weekend. On November 27, a wall of poster-style slogans appeared outside Peking University's Jiayuan canteen and students gathered in solidarity with Shanghai. In the early hours of November 28, gatherings continued in Guangzhou's Haizhu district, Wuhan and elsewhere; in Chengdu, the Wangping Street crowd marched along the river chanting “No more COVID tests, we want freedom.” Many universities moved overnight to disperse their students by sending them home: Tsinghua arranged buses to airports and railway stations, beginning a winter-break-style exodus ahead of schedule. The official response showed two faces at once: arrests and clearances on the streets, and a rapidly loosening epidemic line — on November 29 and 30, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Beijing and other cities announced adjusted controls, and long-sealed compounds began to open.
The universities: The campus protests had a shape of their own. On the evening of November 26, Peking University students posted slogans and gathered outside a canteen. On the 27th, several hundred Tsinghua students assembled near the Zijing dormitories, holding blank paper and shouting “Democracy and rule of law, freedom of expression,” while university staff with loudspeakers urged them to disperse and students questioned administrators to their faces. That night at Wuhan University, students gathered in the rain before the administration building, demanding the university publish its epidemic decision-making and let students return home voluntarily. At universities in Nanjing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Guangzhou and elsewhere, students shouted from dormitory blocks or sat in silent paper-holding vigils before canteens and libraries. Many universities promised overnight — voluntary return home, no punishment — and arranged vehicles to take students away. For many of them it was the first discovery of their adult lives: that standing together in one place, unmoving, could actually change how something ended.
The people: Most of those who held up blank paper left no names — which is exactly what this movement looked like. The Nanjing student was taken away for a talk and returned to her school. Among those seized in Shanghai were editors, journalists and ordinary office workers. After the streets quieted, the arrests continued in the dark: from December 2022 into January 2023, participants in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere were taken away in secret. According to human rights organizations and foreign media, they included publishing-house editors, reporters and NGO staff; some were released on bail pending trial for “picking quarrels,” others were held for months. Most, once released, kept silent and deleted their social-media accounts. Others lost jobs, had leases terminated, or were summoned by their employers — costs paid without fanfare, but paid all the same. Meanwhile, Chinese students abroad raised blank paper on campuses and streets in New York, London, Tokyo and other cities; foreign media named the movement the “A4 Revolution.”
Those who were taken: In January 2023, Beijing's arrests fell on participants in the Liangma River gathering; several young women taken away — editors, journalists and publishing-house staff — became known outside as the “four women of Liangma River.” One of them, publishing editor Cao Zhixin, had recorded a video before her detention, instructing friends to publish it if she was out of contact for more than 24 hours. After she disappeared, the video surfaced: facing the camera, she calmly itemized what she had done and what she hoped for. Foreign reporting on the case drew wide attention. There is still no authoritative count of those taken; human rights organizations have documented several dozen. For most, the outcome was release on bail pending trial — and long silence afterward.
Where the blank paper came from: Protesting with blank paper was not invented in 2022. It is usually traced to a Soviet-era joke: a man handing out blank leaflets in Red Square is seized by police, who object that nothing is written on them; he answers, “Why write anything? Everyone understands.” After Hong Kong's National Security Law in 2020, Hong Kong protesters raised blank paper in place of slogans they could no longer shout; in early 2022, Russian anti-war protesters did the same. In China in November 2022, people at the scene stated its meaning plainly: it was not that there was nothing to say — it was that saying was forbidden. The blank page thus protected in both directions: for the censor, there were no words to delete; for the camera, the meaning was unmistakable. Afterward, “white paper” entered several countries' words-of-the-year reviews, and the name “A4 Revolution” has stuck.
Original demands (sourced): The blank paper was itself the demand — censorship protested through wordlessness. Slogans heard on site included “No COVID tests, we want freedom,” “Lift the lockdown,” “Freedom of speech” and “Freedom of the press”; in Shanghai and elsewhere, crowds also chanted “Xi Jinping, step down” and “Communist Party, step down” (recorded in videos from multiple cities). On the Tsinghua campus, someone held up a page bearing the Friedmann equation from physics, read by fellow students as a homophone riddle for “free man.” The movement had no unified written manifesto. (Sources: on-site videos; Public Television Service news reports, November 2022)
Timeline of the policy turn: The loosening in fact predated the protests, but the turn came after them. On November 11, the “Twenty Measures” were issued, forbidding arbitrary lockdowns, yet implementation was chaotic, with tightening and relaxing side by side. After the protests erupted, the tempo abruptly quickened: from November 29, Guangzhou, Chongqing and other cities announced adjustments; on December 1, Sun Chunlan told a health-commission symposium that China's epidemic work “faced new circumstances and new tasks,” without once mentioning “dynamic zero”; her December 5 remarks likewise avoided the word zero; on December 7 the “New Ten Measures” appeared — no more testing or health-code checks except in special venues, no more compulsory centralized quarantine, no checks on interregional travel; on December 13 the itinerary code went offline; on December 26 it was announced that from January 8, 2023, COVID would be managed as a Class B disease and inbound quarantine abolished. From the first protest to the end of zero-COVID was just over forty days; in the official narrative it was all “optimization in light of the times,” and the word protest never appeared.
Aftermath: On December 5, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan's public remarks on epidemic policy no longer mentioned “dynamic zero-COVID.” On December 7, the “New Ten Measures” were issued: mass testing, centralized quarantine and health-code checks were rapidly dismantled, and the itinerary code went offline on December 13 — the zero-COVID policy enforced for three years effectively ended within two weeks of the protests. The authorities never acknowledged any connection between the policy reversal and the protests, and never published a count of those arrested. See: White Paper Movement
The cost of reopening, and the disputed figures: The end of zero-COVID was not a cost-free full stop. As policy spun around, fever medicine and test kits vanished from pharmacy shelves nationwide; from December into January 2023, a tsunami of infection swept the big cities, and fever clinics and crematoria filled with queues. The death toll of that wave is disputed across a wide gap: the official figures for COVID-related deaths in hospitals, released in stages, total under one hundred thousand, while excess-mortality studies by several academic institutions, published in international journals, estimate excess deaths in the same period at over one million. Between the two figures lie vast differences of statistical scope, cause-of-death attribution and data openness, and there is still no agreed conclusion. This site treats the question as it treats the June Fourth toll: figures side by side, sources stated, no conclusion imposed on the reader.
Solidarity abroad: As news of the domestic protests spread, solidarity took shape first among overseas Chinese students. From November 27, 2022, gatherings appeared on campuses and in public spaces in dozens of cities — New York's Columbia University, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo and more — attended mostly by Chinese students holding blank paper, flowers and candles, some carrying replicas of the Sitong Bridge banners. Attendees generally faced the pressure of being photographed and reported: some came in masks and sunglasses; some found their own photos circulating on domestic platforms afterward. The gatherings ranged from dozens to over a thousand people and continued for weeks. The wave is regarded as the largest synchronized political action by Chinese students abroad since 1989. Many participants later recalled that it was the first time they had said in public the things that cannot be said at home — the place was foreign soil, but the words were addressed to home.
What became of the detained: By the continuing tracking of human rights organizations and legal circles, most participants secretly taken between December 2022 and January 2023 were released during 2023 on bail pending trial, barred from leaving the country for a year and required to keep silent. Cao Zhixin and the three other Beijing women, according to multiple media reports, ended their residential surveillance and returned home around the autumn of 2023; public news of them has since nearly vanished. Whether anyone was formally prosecuted and sentenced remains unverified. Researchers have since summed up the method as “silent punishment”: no public arrest, no public trial, no judgment left behind — only the detainee's self-censorship. For many ordinary participants, the punishment was not a cell but a life in which, at every form that must be filled in, one now hesitates first.
What it left behind: The White Paper Movement left, first of all, a blank sheet of paper: nothing written on it, understood by everyone — the most widely traveled protest symbol of the censorship era. Second, it left a result: for the first time since 1989, street protest compelled the authorities to abandon a major policy within two weeks. And it left countless ordinary people whose names were never recorded: every late November, at commemorative gatherings overseas, blank paper is still raised. The question and the answer it handed to those who come after are the same: when every word can be deleted, standing up is itself a sentence.
The street sign and the anniversaries: After the movement, the Urumqi Middle Road street sign became a peculiar memorial object. Reports said that not long after the protests the sign was taken down; when word spread, still more residents made special trips to photograph themselves with the bare pole, and the sign was put back. Since then, every late November, flowers appear at its base — and are always quickly cleared away. In November 2023 and 2024, commemorative gatherings were held as expected in London, New York, Sydney, Taipei and other cities, most under the theme “We have not forgotten”; some of the blank sheets raised there bear, in small characters on the back, the name of a city where the bearer had stood in 2022. For those who took part, the way of commemorating the White Paper Movement matches the way it happened: no center, no organizers — when the day comes, you come yourself.
Voices in Shanghai's streets: Among the White Paper Movement's most widely circulated images, alongside the blank sheets, are several clips of ordinary people shouting. In one video, a middle-aged woman in a Shanghai street calls out to a line of police: you have children too, you have parents too — and the crowd around her applauds. In another, a young man beside a police vehicle shouts “Let them go” and keeps shouting as he is pinned down. What these clips share is that the speakers have no organizational identity; having shouted, they vanish into the crowd and the silence that followed. The movement's slogan history can be heard in these videos: from “lift the lockdown” and “no more tests, we want freedom,” to demanding on what legal basis the police were arresting people, to “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” — in three days the demands traveled from the concrete to the principled. That trajectory is the key that distinguishes the White Paper Movement from an ordinary anti-lockdown disturbance: it began with livelihood, but it did not stop there.
Sources for this entry: Materials behind this entry include on-site video and photographs from Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan and other cities during the protests (verified by multiple outlets); reporting on the November 26–28 protests by Public Television Service, Reuters, AP, the BBC and others; tracking records of the subsequent arrests by CHRD and other organizations; the State Council's December 2022 press conferences and the text of the “New Ten Measures”; and excess-mortality research on the reopening period published in journals including The Lancet. A complete count and roster of the detained cannot be obtained; this site uses only cases with names and sources corroborated by two or more independent reports, and handles figures as it does in the June Fourth entry: side by side, sources stated, no single conclusion imposed.
The man who filmed it: One more name belongs in the White Paper Movement's archive: Chen Pinlin, known online as Plato, a documentary worker in Shanghai. In November 2022 he filmed the protests on Urumqi Middle Road, along the Liangma River and elsewhere, and edited the footage into a short film, Urumqi Road, released abroad at the movement's first anniversary — ordinary people's faces, slogans and candlelight. At the end of November 2023, Chen was taken by Shanghai police; in January 2025 he was sentenced to three and a half years for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” By report, the core of the prosecution's case was precisely the film's circulation. He is, to date, the only person known to have been sentenced for documenting the White Paper Movement. His fate completes the movement's archival loop: those who held the paper were handled quietly; the man who filmed the paper was sentenced in the open — the first a warning, the second a specimen.
Chengdu's Wangping Street: Among inland cities, Chengdu's protest left a different flavor. On the evening of November 27, crowds around Wangping Street moved along both banks of the Jin River holding up phone flashlights, and someone played — and others sang — the Cantonese oldie “Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies”: “Forgive me, for this life of unbridled love of freedom.” The video traveled extremely widely. Crowds and police kept a distance from each other most of the time, and the march went on until deep into the night. The Wangping Street footage became an emblematic slice of the movement: no banners, no leaders, only a river, a song and a crowd unwilling to go home. Together with Shanghai's confrontations, Beijing's standoffs and Nanjing's silence, it forms the movement's four faces. This site records such details because that is where an archive's value lies: forty years from now, anyone wanting to understand what happened in November 2022 will rely not on conclusions, but on these faces.
Urumqi's press conference: The day after the fire, on November 25, Urumqi held a COVID press conference. The fire-services official explaining the blaze said the compound's unit doors had not been bound shut with wire, and remarked that some residents' ability to protect and rescue themselves was weak. The phrase spread across social media that night and became another fuse for the national mood: what many people remembered was not the death toll in the briefing, but those few words about self-rescue. That evening, Urumqi residents took to the streets, gathering from residential districts toward the city government, chanting for the lockdown to be lifted, facing police into the night; in the early hours the city announced it had basically achieved zero COVID at the community level and would restore daily life in low-risk areas in stages. Protesters elsewhere later said they dared to go out only after seeing Urumqi go first — this movement did not begin in Shanghai or Beijing, but in the city where the fire burned.
What became of Brother Chao: The Chongqing speaker mentioned above was nicknamed Brother Chao by internet users. On the night of November 24, 2022, he told the crowd in his compound that there is only one sickness in this world — being unfree and poor; when police moved in to take him, his neighbors surrounded him and held them off, and the video was shared tens of millions of times that night. He was later taken in for questioning; after his release he appeared briefly online to thank those who had shielded him and say he was fine, and then his account went quiet. His speech was transcribed and passed around as text. Nobody knows his full name with certainty; he has only a nickname and a piece of footage: a face, a voice, no name — the standard portrait of an ordinary Chinese protester in November 2022. Beside him, still more people who shouted at their compound gates left not even a nickname behind; their voices survive only in neighbors' memories and in deleted videos.