Beijing Must End Punishment of “Blank Paper” Protesters

November 25, 2024 Comments Off

(Chinese Human Rights Defenders – November 25, 2024) On the two-year anniversary of Chinese authorities’ crackdown on the peaceful “Blank Paper” demonstrations, Chinese Human Rights Defenders calls on Beijing to release all wrongfully detained protesters. We urge the international human rights community to press the Chinese government to fulfill its human rights obligations to protect freedom of peaceful assembly, expression, and the right to fair trials.

In late November 2022, people across China, outraged by a deadly fire in Urumqi and frustrated by strict COVID-19 lockdown measures, took to the streets in cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Wuhan. Demonstrators held up blank sheets of paper, symbolizing censorship and their inability to express dissent openly. They chanted various slogans, including “End zero-COVID.” Some even chanted the slogans “Down with Xi Jinping” and “Down with the Communist Party!”

The protests represented a rare instance of spontaneous demonstrations across multiple Chinese cities since the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests in 1989, with citizens openly expressing dissent in public space. Authorities responded with widespread detentions of students, journalists and other citizens across the country. Two years ago, Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) tracked the names of more than 30 people who were taken into custody and estimated that at least 100 people had been detained. No official figures of arrests have been released. Some people were released shortly after their arrests. However, others faced harsher punishments, including imprisonment and enforced disappearances

“Beijing’s mass arrests and widespread use of police violence exposed its profound fear and deep mistrust of peaceful protest. The transnational suppression of overseas Chinese communities who showed support to the protests further revealed the regime’s intention to spread fear and enforce censorship globally,” said Rei Xia, Chinese activist who participated in the protests and was detained in solitary confinement for 37 days for speaking out against police brutality toward protesters.

Ongoing Persecution: Cases of Concern

Fang Yirong, a university student at the time of Blank Paper protests, identified himself as a participant in a video three days after he unfurled a banner on a Hunan bridge on July 30, 2024. The banner read “Equality, not privilege. Freedom, not control. Dignity not lies,” echoing slogans crafted by a well-known protester Peng Lifa, who displayed a banner with similar demands on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge in October 2022, one month before the Blank Paper protests. Peng has since vanished into police custody, effectively in enforced disappearance by Chinese authorities for over two years.

Fang, 22, had reportedly been arrested after his protest on the bridge. In the accompanying note to his video, he exposed the surveillance and harassment he endured since July 2023, after police discovered his pro-democracy views expressed in online chat groups. Nearly six months after his arrest, Fang remains in detention with no known charges, nor any information about his access to legal counsel or family visits.

On 27 November 2023, filmmaker Chen Pinlin released his documentary “Urumqi Middle Road” on YouTube, capturing scenes from the Blank Paper protests. Shanghai police detained him the next day and have held him since. He faces the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” pending trial.

In November 2022, 19-year-old university student Kamile Wayit shared a Blank Paper protest video on social media. Her father in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) received a warning phone call from the police, after which she deleted the video. The following month, during a visit home, police in Atush arrested her on December 12, 2022. In March 2023, the court sentenced her to three years on a charge of “advocating extremism.” She is serving her sentence in Kashgar Women’s Prison, which according to Shahit.biz also accommodates Kashgar Yuxin Industry and Commerce LLC, raising concerns about her being subjected to forced labor.

Yashar Shohret, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter was detained by Chengdu police on November 27, 2022 after performing an elegy in Uyghur at a public mourning service for the Urumqi fire victims. Initially detained by plainclothes police for 21 days under charges of “disturbing public order,” he was released on bail but placed under surveillance. On August 9, 2023, police from his hometown Bortala in the XUAR traveled some 1,300 kilometers to arrest him in Chengdu and transported him back to Bortala. A lawyer who visited him in November 2023 learned that the Bortala City Procuratorate had indicted him for “advocating extremism” and “illegal possession of items advocating extremism.” In July 2024, a rights group reported his three-year sentence.

Zeng Yuxuan, a 22-year-old PhD law student, supported the Blank Paper protests by holding a piece of white paper at Victoria Park in Hong Kong, where she had arrived to study in autumn 2022. Hong Kong police arrested her on June 2, 2023, after discovering her plans to unfurl a 9-meter poster of the Pillar of Shame sculpture commemorating the Tiananmen massacre. The court sentenced her to six months in jail under “sedition” charges, marking the first conviction of a mainland Chinese citizen under such a charge in HK. Hong Kong authorities deported Zeng to mainland Chinese authorities on October 12, 2023, upon completion of her sentence. Her whereabouts have remained unknown ever since, in a state of de facto enforced disappearance.

Rights on Paper: Violation in Reality

The rights to free expression and peaceful assembly are written into the Chinese constitution under Article 35. These rights are enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which the Chinese government pledged to uphold as a member state of the UN. China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) on October 5, 1998. Though it has yet to ratify the treaty, as a signatory, it is obliged to refrain from actions that would defeat the object and purpose of the ICCPR, in accordance with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969, Article 18).

In reality, however, Chinese authorities continue to criminalize citizens who exercise these fundamental rights, prosecuting peaceful expression as a threat to national security. The cases of “Blank Paper” protest participants Fang, Chen, Zeng, Kamile Wayit, and Yashar Shohret illustrate this pattern—all were arrested and imprisoned simply for exercising their rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. According to UN special procedures, when deprivation of liberty results from exercising rights guaranteed by the UDHR, such detention or imprisonment may be deemed arbitrary.

Of particular concern is the prosecution of the two Uyghur youth protesters, Kamile and Yashar. Both have been criminally prosecuted for “advocating extremism.” They seem to have been singled out for punishment for such a serious crime because of their Uyghur identity. Since 2015, Beijing has implemented stringent legislative controls over Xinjiang residents. Charges such as “advocating extremism” and “illegal possession of items promoting extremism” were introduced under Article 120 in the ninth amendment to the Criminal Law, effective November 1, 2015. Shortly after this major revision, on December 27 of the same year, the National People’s Congress passed the “Counter-Terrorism Law,” which took effect on January 1, 2016 and amended in 2018. This legislation imposed unprecedented criminalization of religious, cultural, and daily life practices among non-Han ethnic communities.

“The international human rights community must stand with rights defenders in China, demanding the unconditional release of political prisoners detained during the Blank Paper Movement and take effective measures to halt Chinese authorities’ expanding violations of human rights,” Rei Xia added. She now lives in exile in Europe.

Breaking the Cycle of Impunity: Call for Action

The ongoing prosecution of participants and supporters of the Blank Paper protests underscores the urgent need to hold the Chinese government accountable and to put an end to its impunity for repeated and ongoing violations of its obligations to protect human rights.

CHRD calls on the international community, especially governments concerned about human rights, the United Nations human rights bodies and the European Union, to press Beijing to:

Immediately and unconditionally release all individuals detained solely for their peaceful participation in the Blank Paper Protests, and provide full transparency about the whereabouts, wellbeing, and status of all detained protesters;
Allow visits by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and several other Special Procedures, whose requests for visits remain ungranted;
Legislatures in concerned democratic countries could adopt or push for implementation of legislation that sanctions Chinese state actors, based on evidence, for perpetrating grave human rights violations, investigating widespread and systematic abuses under the universal jurisdiction statutes;
The Human Rights Council should take action to implement the recommendation of over 50 UN independent human rights experts to hold a Human Rights Council special session on China, and establish an impartial and independent UN mechanism, such as a Special Rapporteur, to monitor the human rights situation in China.

Contact for this press release:

Renee Xia, Executive Director, CHRD, at reneexia@nchrd.org

Shane Yi, Researcher, CHRD, at shaneyi@nchrd.org