Shanghai's vanishing protest is a study in modern repression

Comparisons with 1989 are inevitable, but they also illustrate how China’s methods have evolved. Where Tiananmen relied on overwhelming military force, Shanghai's 2022 November protest was extinguished with algorithms, phone data, and targeted detentions.

- MAJ GEN R.P.S. BHADAURIA (RETD)

The A4 revolution. Picture courtesy: imhojournal.org

(imhojournal.org)

In late November 2022, for a brief moment, Shanghai appeared to loosen the grip thathad defined its pandemic years.On Wulumugi Road—normally an unremarkable thoroughfare—residents gathered with candles to mourn ten people who died ina firein far-off Urumqi. Local accounts later described how the victims, trapped behind locked exits during aCOVID lockdown, became symbols ofa policy that had exhausted the country long before the flames claimed their lives.

What beganasa quiet vigil on.6 November evolved into the most overt public challenge to the Chinese leadership since the Tiananmen demonstrations more than three decades earlier. The crowdsswelled, some chanting slogans that would have been unthinkable only weeks before. Yet the opening proved fleeting. By the morning of 28 November, the street was deserted. The sudden silence was not organic—it was engineered.

The speed with which authorities restored control demonstrated not only the strength of China's policing apparatus but the degree to which three years of pandemic management had equipped the state with an unusually detailed map of its citizens’ movements, networks, and vulnerabilities, ‘Thecrackdown that followed was nota spontaneous reaction todissent. Itwas the culmination ofa system refined through data, surveillance, and the routinisation of extraordinary powers.

The turning point came in the early hours of 27 November. As more demonstrators assembled—some holding blank A4 sheets as understated rebuttals to censorship—plainclothes officers blended into the crowd. Witnesses later described people being pulled into police vans at around 4:30am. Among those seized was Ed Lawrence, a BBC journalist detained and beaten while covering the protest. Beijing later insisted he had “failed toidentify himself”, a claim rejected by the broadcaster.