The Chinese Communist Party hates this video
But Chinese netizens are fighting back
Against the censorship
Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m Shelley Zhang, filling in for Chris Chappell, who’s climbing the Great Firewall.
This episode is sponsored by Incogni.
You probably know that companies are collecting your personal data.
But you may not realize just how many.
Dozens, maybe hundreds—most of which you’ve never heard of.
And you have no idea what they’re doing with it.
Incogni helps you stop them.
I’ll explain more at the end.
Living in China means living with censorship.
China has the world’s most sophisticated online censorship system, known as the Great
Firewall.
Everyone knows it.
Everyone deals with it.
Sometimes people try to ignore the things they’re not allowed to see.
Sometimes they try to jump the firewall with a VPN to get to the rest of the internet.
Sometimes they try to get around government censorship with code words and in-jokes, a
new language of resistance.
And sometimes, the entire Chinese internet rises up and fights back against the censors.
That’s what happened late last week with an online video about the Shanghai lockdown
called the Voices of April.
The version of the video I’ll be showing you has been translated by China Digital Times
and posted on YouTube.
I’ll put a link in the description below to the full six-minute video.
The video was first posted on WeChat on April 22.
Over footage of Shanghai, you hear a series of audio clips from the Shanghai lockdown.
You hear people calling for food.
“Send us food!
Send us food!
Send us food!”
“Send us food!
Send us food!
Send us food!”
People getting locked in their housing complex.
“How can you lock us up?
What if there’s a fire?”
“What if a fire breaks out?
Answer me that!”
A mother begging her neighbors for medicine for her child.
“My child has a fever.
Ma’am, are you home?
I’m sorry to disturb you …”
The awful conditions in the quarantine camps.
“Look, this building doesn’t even have a roof.
When we got here, people fought over blankets and beds.”
The frustration of local officials.
“We need better policies from the higher-ups, so that we can better help our residents.
Right now we don’t have that.
Do you realize that?
We don’t have that.
This job is wearing me out …”
Not everything is terrible.
There’s the voices of neighbors sharing food.
A truck driver thanking a police officer for giving him the first meal he’s had in days.
“In this building, we’re all good friends.”
“Thank you!”
“It can’t be easy for you, being so far from home.”
“Who says folks in Shanghai aren’t friendly to outsiders?”
“I rustled up a bit of pickled cabbage.
Eat up!”
“The police brought me food.
Shanghai cops are nice.
I haven’t eaten in days.”
You hear people helping each other.
The entire video tries to end on a hopeful note, with a message for Shanghai to get well
soon.
But overall, Voices of April gives you a sense of the helplessness, the anger, the desperation
of people in Shanghai.
Voices of April touched people.
It spoke for them.
And they wanted to share it.
The video immediately went viral.
And was immediately censored.
Here’s a leaked censorship directive, instructing all Chinese internet platforms to do a comprehensive
cleanup of the Voices of April video.
All videos were to be removed, without exception.
But Chinese internet users weren’t about to let it be memoryholed that easily.
I’ll tell you what they did after the break.
Welcome back.
Voices of April was a viral video seen by millions of people on Chinese social media
like WeChat and Weibo.
The Chinese Communist Party’s censorship apparatus quickly flagged it for deletion.
And then the Chinese internet erupted in protest.
People posted it over and over again, as soon as it got deleted, they would put it back
up.
This is an image shared on Weibo showing how many WeChat accounts were posting the video.
There were…a lot.
The fact that so many videos were still getting censored seconds after they went up, showed
how invested the authorities were in stopping this.
So people got creative.
They posted it sideways.
Or upside down.
They posted it through QR codes.
And when those QR codes got censored, they started hiding the video in other ways.
Here it is playing inside an image of a fridge.
Here it is as a t-shirt.
Here it is Inception-style.
Look, someone just wanted to share all of their negative Covid tests.
Others are just big Spongebob fans.
When the videos were too easily censored, people got creative with the audio.
“People put the original audio under footage of party propaganda or popular anime, hoping
to trick algorithmic censors.”
People also started to make memes referring to the video.
Here’s an interesting one.
The character shen is an old word for Shanghai, and is a homonym for “voice.”
Here it’s pictured as tape over the Chinese character for mouth, the voice of Shanghai,
literally being silenced.
Of course, the entire time this was happening, the censors were still going at it.
Things got so crazy that even the word April was restricted on Weibo.
That’s when people started to get into next-level meme-age.
Where they refer to the censored thing without mentioning the censored thing.
You just assume that everyone else knows what censored thing you’re referring to.
For example, Chinese state-run TV posted about playing the movie A Quiet Place.
And people started using the post to refer to the silencing of Voices of April.
And then that post was censored.
But speaking of using Western pop culture to make a point, people also started posting
the song Do You Hear the People Sing from the musical Les Miserables.
Ok, the lyrics of that song are not exactly subtle.
But I’ve got to give it to this guy in Shanghai who decided to bring the protest from the
internet back into meatspace…using his trombone.
I’m just surprised a drone didn’t fly by and tell him to stop playing because brass
instruments can spread Covid.
But this isn’t the first time Do You Hear the People Sing has been used in a protest
against Chinese authorities.
It was widely used in the Hong Kong protests back in 2019.
And not just that.
It spread widely on WeChat back on February 6, 2020, the night that coronavirus whistleblower
Dr. Li Wenliang died after getting Covid.
He was the doctor who was reprimanded by police after he warned other doctors about the coronavirus
in a private WeChat group at the beginning of the Wuhan outbreak.
At the time, authorities claimed Dr. Li and others were spreading rumors.
Many felt that Dr. Li had been unjustly targeted.
So his death from the coronavirus led to an outpouring of anger at the state.
In fact, many people are comparing this Shanghai censorship battle to the one that happened
the night Dr. Li died.
“On Weibo…two hashtags -- ‘The Wuhan government owes Dr. Li Wenliang an apology’
and ‘We want freedom of speech’ -- attracted tens of thousands of views, before being deleted.”
“Another hashtag, ‘I want freedom of speech,’ drew more than 1.8 million views in the early
hours of Friday morning, before it too was censored.”
For one night, there was an online outpouring of grief and anger over Dr. Li’s death.
But it did not lead to protests in the streets.
In fact, the online protests acted as a release of a pressure valve.
People got it out of their system.
The same thing might be happening with the Voices of Shanghai video.
People spent a night furiously fighting back against censorship.
But in the end, censorship still won.
At least on the surface.
And people stopped fighting.
At least on the surface.
The thing is, the Voices of April video wasn’t even that provocative.
Here’s what the creator of the video said he was trying to do: "A month into the outbreak
in Shanghai, I saw many people speaking out online, but most of them disappeared after
a short while…However, some things should not have happened, and they should not be
forgotten."
He was trying to remember the reality of what had happened in Shanghai.
His video didn’t directly criticize the Chinese regime.
And he tried to keep a hopeful message about how things were getting better.
But even that was too much.
The maker of the video eventually asked people to stop reposting it, because his family was
worried.
He eventually took down the original video himself.
Because he didn’t want there to be any “misunderstandings.”
Of course, there are a million copies of it floating around now, including ones in fridges.
Last week, we did an episode about whether the Shanghai Covid lockdowns could bring down
the Chinese Communist Party.
Not immediately, but as one more domino that falls for the Chinese regime, if, and only
if, people are willing to remember what happened in the lockdown.
Voices of April tried to preserve the truth of the Shanghai lockdown in the collective
memory.
Which is why it had to be censored by the Party.
I often think about our interview with Tiananmen Square Massacre survivor Fang Zheng.
He talked about the Chinese regime waging a memory war against the people.
Fang Zheng: This has been one of the most difficult problems in China, under the Chinese
Communist Party's rule, this type of memory war.
The Chinese Communist Party has continuously committed crimes against the Chinese people
during different periods of history, over and over again, from when it first started
to rule to the present day, almost 70 years now.
But why is it still successful?
The biggest reason is that through propaganda, brainwashing, and thought control, they've
made people unaware of what happened in the past.
The only way to fight this war, is to remember.
Things in Shanghai show no signs of loosening.
Under a new “hard quarantine” policy, they’ve literally started fencing parts
of the city shut.
I’m not sure exactly what they’re trying to accomplish with this.
In any case, people are not happy about the fences.
But with even stricter lockdown policies, it looks like Shanghai’s Voices of April
may be silenced well into May.
But when this is all over, when the fences finally come down, will the people of Shanghai
remember?
And this episode has been sponsored by Incogni.
Wherever you do anything online, there’s a lot of companies that collect your personal
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And it can get worse.
In 2020, there was a huge breach at Microsoft where data for 250 million customers was exposed.
When that sort of thing happens, hackers can potentially get your personal information
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Once again, I’m Shelley Zhang.
Thanks for watching China Uncensored.