They’re probably hidden in Chinese TikTok, but I’ve seen a lot of Shanghai protests on TikTok since like mid November. You’re definitely right though, I recall I had to search for it myself before algo started showing it to me automatically. Could be because of TikTok’s default behaviour of hiding violence-adjacent behaviour, which I find quite awful as it hides the current events.
Anecdata: I have seen what appears to be a couple on my Tiktok, but not a large number. Edit: Seems searching "China lockdown 2022" brings some up I think.
The actual amount of protests in China were laughably small in comparison to how the state depart... I mean 'free press' in the US portrayed it. Yes, there were reasonable protests against zero-Covid measures, no there was no revolution in progress.
They were not laughably small in comparison to other protests in China, which as I'm sure you know are extremely rare ever since the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989.
there was also a labor protest at a foxconn factory last week, but it seems to have failed to capture the liberal imagination in the same way as these “white paper” protests, gee I wonder why
"The government’s response, though, does not, of course, address the larger yearning for an end to autocracy."
"Those brave protesters have changed China’s national policy, and their broader yearning for rights can no more be extinguished than a virus; someday the Chinese Communist leadership will have to respond to that very human aspiration."
It is hard to know really. Nobody is incentivised to report the true scale of the protests.
If the scale of the protests were laughably small and of no concern to the CCP, it could just be a coincidence that China announced their scientists have determined Omicron has ‘reduced pathogenicity’ [1], as a pretext to relaxing restrictions.
This is not your usual "'free press'" fare and it is noteworthy for the both the designation of China under Xi as "totalitarian" and also its optimistic prediction of a new wave of democratization globally.
What excited the press (...and those whom you imply) was probably that anything happened in Xi's China, and that it happened in multiple places, and that CPC was not entirely successful in suppressing it even while having near total control.
So what is extraordinary about these protests -- something apparently very new in China -- is that they are directed at the cult of personality directly. I just did a google search to see if there ever were demonstrations in China against Mao during his reign. Xi's political game is role-playing some sort of Maoist / Stalinist state with him as maximum leader. He even publicly dismisses former grandees in front of foreign press. How did these Chinese dare to directly call for his removal in protests?
> Yes, there were reasonable protests against zero-Covid measures, no there was no revolution in progress.
"Finally, to borrow an image from Liu Cixin's novel The Three Body Problem, we should be psychologically prepared for Xi's totalitarian rule to enter a dark forest. Xi will rule China for at least another five years. But we should not be too pessimistic. No matter how long Xi stays in power, as I argued above, it is unlikely that another Xi Jinping will emerge after Xi steps down. The good news is that the hassle of fighting the pandemic with the zero-tolerance policy has awakened even more people. When social discontent reaches a tipping point and everyone believes in regime change, then change will come soon."
The recent protests in China have been suppressed by the CCP.
No doubt there are close to zero protest videos on TikTok.
There are protest videos on YouTube - though anecdotally YouTube management is attempting to suppress them because Google is tightly bound to China.
The question is, does it matter if protest videos are shown or hidden on social media? Can the videos shown on social media influence world affairs?