Reports: China Continues Mass Arrests Against Suspected Protesters

The left-wing outlet NPR reported on Wednesday that the Chinese Communist Party is quietly, but relentlessly, rounding up and imprisoning people it sees as ringleaders in the huge nationwide protests against dictator Xi Jinping’s coronavirus lockdowns.

Unrest had been simmering for quite some time as Xi imprisoned Chinese citizens in their homes, quarantined neighborhoods, and locked down entire cities — always imposing the orders by surprise so no one could escape and frequently not bothering to check if the millions placed under house arrest had enough food or medicine.

China kept experiencing coronavirus outbreaks anyway, and no matter how assiduously the regime worked to conceal the true number of infections and deaths, the public grew increasingly unhappy with having both endless lockdowns and an endless pandemic while the rest of the world moved on from Chinese coronavirus.

In late November, a spark finally ignited this dry tinder of unrest: a deadly apartment fire raged through an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkistan, home of the oppressed Uyghur Muslims. The Uyghurs had long suspected Xi’s lockdown policies were applied to them with exceptional cruelty, and now they watched families scream for help from the windows of a quarantine-sealed building while a fire truck ineffectually sprayed water from beyond lockdown street barricades, unable to get close enough to do any good.

As usual with even the largest outpourings of public anger, the Chinese Communist Party claimed the gigantic anti-lockdown protests were all the work of foreign instigators. According to NPR, at least eight people have been snapped up by Chinese security agencies in a frantic hunt for scapegoats, including a young Beijing editor who managed to record a farewell video before she was hauled away.

The editor, who was snatched from her family home in the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha on Christmas Eve, apparently caught the eye of Chinese police by organizing a vigil of remembrance in Beijing for the victims of the Urumqi fire. 

A similar vigil in Shanghai on November 26 blew up into an angry demonstration with calls for Xi to resign, so the police seem to be targeting anyone they can portray as a vigil organizer for arrest as a subversive, even though the Beijing woman did nothing more than leave some flowers and poetry at an improvised shrine for the dead. NPR’s sources said the woman was identified with cell phone data and targeted because she was the administrator of a chat group on the secure messaging platform Telegram. 

“If we are arrested for expressing our sympathy, then how much space do our opinions have in this society?” she asked in her farewell video, correctly suspecting the Chinese Communist Party’s thugs would be along shortly to give her a dismaying answer.

Human rights advocates said some of the detainees have been charged with extremely vague offenses like “gathering a crowd to disrupt public order,” while the regime did not bother charging others at all — the space on their arrest paperwork where the charges would go was literally left blank.

The Beijing editor who was arrested wondered why the authorities were coming after “young, largely female professionals” like herself. The answer seems to be that the Chinese Communist Party wants to portray “feminists influenced by Western ideas” as the subversive threat behind the protests.

“If even ordinary people like my friends who peacefully participated in a vigil can be arrested, anyone can be taken,” mused an associate of one detainee. That sounds like a feature of the regime’s plan, not a bug.

The Washington Post last week described Beijing cranking up “the powerful surveillance state built over the past decade and fine-tuned during the pandemic” to target alleged leaders of the lockdown protests, in a crusade that has subjected far more people than the eight described by NPR to harassment, detention, and interrogation.

A tech worker calling herself “Doa” — another of those young female professionals hounded by the regime with such enthusiasm — said she was somehow tagged and identified by the police even though she spent barely half an hour near a protest on November 28 and was careful not to use her cell phone during that time.

Within two days, Doa was brought to a police station, forced to strip to her underwear, and interrogated for nine hours without access to a restroom. Other detainees were forced into stressful positions, threatened with long prison sentences, deprived of sleep, verbally abused — men with long hair were taunted for being gay — and forced to perform soul-crushing tasks such as copying Communist political documents by hand.

“I know how those things can be used by police. They still found me. I’m still wondering how that is possible,” said Doa, a savvy electronics user with experience working in social media. 

The Washington Post cited experts who thought Chinese police might have simply harvested the number of every cell phone pinging a tower near the protests and manually sifted through the data to find possible dissidents. China’s smartphone scanning technology can dive into hundreds of apps on anyone’s phone to harvest data, including popular social media apps, even those which are forbidden to Chinese users.

Those experts also noted that Chinese cities are littered with tens of thousands of surveillance cameras hooked up to advanced facial recognition systems, which can identify people through masks.

The Washington Post noted that Chinese “Little Pink” nationalists are running wild on tightly-controlled social media platforms with accusations of treason and they are blaming the anti-lockdown protesters for causing the current coronavirus tidal wave by sabotaging Xi’s supposedly perfect “zero Covid” strategy. Meanwhile, lawyers are being pressured to stay away from protester defendants, sending an unsubtle signal that none of them should expect a fair trial.