Videos surfaced on Sunday night of a rare protest in Shanghai, the largest city in China, orchestrated by what appeared to be only two people, marching through the streets with a banner apparently honoring an anti-communist display illicitly hung in Beijing last week.
The protest bookends the Chinese Communist Party Congress, an event that occurs once every five years to choose which Party elites get coveted seats on the Politburo and its Steering Committee. The Congress began this year with a man later identified as physicist Peng Lifa hanging a banner over Beijing’s Sitong Bridge calling the totalitarian leader of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, a “dictator” and “traitor.” Shanghai’s display appears to be the latest in a string of copycat incidents supporting Peng that has hit at least eight cities, mostly consisting of bathroom graffiti, as the Chinese government has installed cameras in nearly every other corner of the populated areas of the country.
Peng reportedly disguised himself as a construction worker to get on the bridge and started a small fire to attract attention to his banners before police apprehended him. His banners read, in part: “Don’t want PCR tests, want food; don’t want lockdowns, want freedom; don’t want lies, want respect; don’t want Cultural Revolution, want reform; don’t want dictator, want vote; don’t want [to be] slaves, but want we the people.”
The first line of the Chinese national anthem, which Beijing itself has censored when used against the regime online, translates to “Stand up! Those who refuse to be slaves!”
Police rapidly whisked Peng away from the scene; his status remains unknown at press time.
Chinese dissidents have begun referring to Peng as “Bridge Man,” a reference to “Tank Man,” an unknown Chinese citizen who famously stared down a row of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The two individuals who staged the Shanghai protest, believed to have happened on Sunday, created a banner that read, simply, “Don’t Want ____ ; Want ____,” in the same format of Peng’s banners. They omitted what they were protesting, but the emulation of Peng’s writing made clear to observers – and, apparently, the government – the intent of the message.
Mixed reports indicate that the protesters were young people, and at least one was a woman. The incident occurred along Xiangyang North Road and appeared to attract supporters; a male voice off-camera can be heard in one of the videos saying, “I’ve always wanted to do this.”
The Singapore website Asia Markets translated part of the audio of the videos, noting that the protesters were singing the communist anthem “The Internationale.”
“Yesterday in Shanghai, video of another public demonstration was shared thousands of times on WeChat and Weibo before, like the Sitong Bridge protest, it disappearing within hours,” Asia Markets noted. “However, it too made it onto international social media platforms, where China’s Government has no control.”
Many of the videos were republished on Twitter – a social media network the Chinese government prohibits regular citizens from using – raising questions as to the status of those sharing it. Among the most prominent accounts republishing videos is the user @Soraky77, which appears to have created their account in May 2022 and had not posted anything to Twitter since. The video of the protest the user posted is tagged “Shanghai, People’s Republic of China” and claims to have been uploaded to Twitter from an iPhone.
None of the videos showing the protest show any police activity. Another anonymous user who shared alleged videos of the protest, @whyyoutouzhele, wrote, “at present, there is no picture of the police intervening in the video, so I do not know whether the two girls and these young people left the scene safely in the end.”
No reports have yet identified the protesters and the Chinese Communist Party’s media arms have not acknowledged that it occurred. Breitbart News could not independently authenticate the videos.
Shanghai, the country’s largest and wealthiest city, has become an unexpected source of civil unrest since Xi Jinping ordered a full lockdown of the city, allegedly to prevent the spread of Chinese coronavirus, on April 5. The Communist Party failed to secure enough food or medicine for people trapped in their homes and refused to let them out as they starved, resulting in instances of violence against government food distributors, a wave of suicides and needless deaths of those losing access to critical medication, child abuse as infants were stolen from parents and forced into cramped quarantines with little supervision; and police brutality against hungry residents and owners of homes “expropriated” to build quarantine camps.
The nation’s biggest city was not alone in hosting protests in the past week. After Peng Lifa’s display in Beijing – the home of China’s political elite and largely immune to protests of the sort since the Tiananmen Square Massacre – the message on his banner began appearing scribbled in the bathroom walls of at least eight cities, according to the anonymous dissident social media account “VoiceofCN.” Regime opponents began sharing photos of the messages as they found them on Weibo, the government’s heavily-monitored alternative to Twitter, but censors moved rapidly to delete them, so now most versions of those images appear on Western social media outlets.
The dissident site China Change reported that censors were disappearing messages even suspected of referring to the bridge protest, such as “I’ve seen it.”