38．The White Paper Movement: A Generation’s Political Awakening

Those questions about power eventually returned me to something immediate: what happens when ordinary people recognise that fear itself has become a form of control? In November 2022, I watched an answer take public form in China as young people began raising blank sheets of A4 paper.

The pages carried no slogans, yet under censorship their emptiness became a language everyone could read. The movement began in grief after the Urumqi fire and quickly became something larger: a moment when fear remained real, but obedience no longer felt morally neutral.

Two Countries Moving in Opposite Directions

By 2022, Australia was dismantling the restrictions that had governed daily life for so long. Shopping centres filled again, restaurants reopened, and conversations turned to flights and holidays. The return of ordinary freedom felt almost physical, even as inflation and exhaustion followed us out of lockdown.

Beaches, parks, and coastal paths filled with runners, walkers, and sunbathers. Conversations turned to flights, holidays, and the next place to escape to. Public life seemed to be recovering its old momentum.

Back at the office, inflation was rivalled only by weight gain as a subject of conversation. One colleague announced that she could finally shop for clothes that actually fitted. We laughed, though the joke carried a small truth: confinement had changed our bodies and our sense of normal life.

Around that time, I told a friend in China that I was preparing for my first overseas trip since the pandemic. To me, it felt like release. Her reply came from another reality.

“Shao, have a wonderful time,” she wrote. “I’m still locked at home. Shanghai has another outbreak, and they’re imposing dynamic zero-COVID measures everywhere. We never meet the targets, so they keep sealing us in. We’re going out of our minds.”

At the time, I heard it as another complaint from a friend worn down by the pandemic. Only later did I understand that Australia and China were moving through the same historical moment in opposite directions. I was planning a holiday after reopening; in China, prolonged confinement was approaching its breaking point. The White Paper Movement was only weeks away.

The Urumqi Fire: The Spark of the White Paper Movement

Soon after I returned from my overseas holiday and slipped back into ordinary life, one name began appearing everywhere on my screen: Urumqi. At first, the story was reported as a residential fire. Within days, it had ignited the nationwide protests that became known as the White Paper Movement.

On 24 November 2022, fire swept through the Jixiangyuan residential complex in Urumqi, Xinjiang. Videos and eyewitness accounts soon raised disturbing questions about whether lockdown barriers had obstructed the rescue. Metal fencing, sealed entrances, police cordons, and fire engines kept at a distance came to embody a system in which control had hardened into instinct, even as lives were burning.

Officials denied that pandemic restrictions had contributed to the deaths. Anger intensified after a press conference criticised residents for lacking sufficient “self-rescue ability,” language that appeared to shift responsibility back onto people who had been trapped.

By then, China had endured nearly three years of dynamic zero-COVID. Lockdowns could extend without clear limits, health codes governed movement, and the memory of Shanghai’s shortages remained raw. What had begun as a public-health policy had become, for many, a profound breach of trust.

The Urumqi fire exposed that rupture with unbearable clarity. Across the country, people recognised their own confinement in the images from Xinjiang. Grief became anger, and anger entered the streets.

On 26 and 27 November, young people gathered beneath the Urumqi Middle Road street sign in Shanghai. They called for freedom and an end to lockdowns; some went further and demanded that Xi Jinping and the Communist Party step down. Such an open challenge to China’s highest political authority had scarcely been heard on the streets of a major Chinese city since 1989.

The protests were spontaneous and leaderless. Their clearest symbol was a blank sheet of A4 paper held aloft in the winter air.

An old Soviet joke began circulating again. A man distributing blank leaflets in Red Square is arrested by the KGB. When he points out that nothing is written on them, the officer replies, “Do you think I don’t know what you mean?”

Under absolute censorship, blankness becomes speech. The empty page held everything that could not safely be written and exposed the logic of repression: the authorities could seize the paper, though there was no sentence to prosecute and no slogan to erase. It became both accusation and witness—evidence that speech had been forbidden, and that the human need to speak had survived.

Six weeks earlier, Peng Lifa—widely known as Peng Zaizhou—had unfurled banners from Beijing’s Sitong Bridge calling for food instead of COVID tests and freedom instead of lockdowns. Standing alone above a busy road, he had given visible form to words millions had learned to suppress.

The White Paper Movement Spreads Across China

Within days, protests appeared in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing and other cities. The immediate demands differed, but the same pressure ran beneath them: people who had been isolated from one another were discovering that their frustration was shared.

One message circulating online captured the movement’s moral appeal: those unable to march could still bear witness, speak online, or at least refuse contempt.

“There is nothing written on the paper,” one student called out, “yet it says everything.”  “Only do not turn away,” it urged. “Do not answer courage with contempt. The light we are fighting for will fall on you as surely as it falls on me.”

At Beijing’s Liangma River, young people sang and called for freedom. In Guangzhou, residents worn down by prolonged lockdowns tore down barricades and demanded the right to work and obtain food. The movement had no central command; it travelled through recognition.

A quieter current moved through our WeChat groups. Jiajia, whom we half-jokingly called “timid but kind-hearted,” began forwarding protest footage almost constantly. Others shared songs from university demonstrations or posted their own recordings in cautious, coded forms. Open declarations were rare, yet the sympathy was unmistakable. Even among people accustomed to speaking of UFOs and spiritual awakening, the courage on the streets had struck a nerve.

Of all the people who emerged from those days, I could not forget the young woman at the Communication University of China, Nanjing, widely identified online—though never officially confirmed—as Li Kangmeng.

She stood alone before a flight of steps, holding a blank sheet above her head. A man who appeared to be a university official approached and snatched it from her hands. She stayed where she was, silent and steady.

Her stillness changed the scene. Other students began stepping forward with blank pages of their own.

Cao Guosheng, then a senior university official, arrived and warned the students that they would “one day pay for everything you have done today.” The crowd answered him.

“You will pay for what you have done too,” someone shouted.

Another voice asked whether he had been among those who died on the Guizhou quarantine bus.

Then came the question that seemed to expose the whole scene: “What threat can a blank sheet of paper possibly pose?”

That evening, students gathered to mourn those who had died in Xinjiang. When the lights were switched off, they raised their phones, and small points of light appeared across the crowd. The image travelled quickly online.

On other campuses, students began raising blank sheets in solidarity. A solitary act had become collective courage.

Reports circulated at the time that the young woman who first raised the paper could no longer be reached.

The Human Cost: Detained, Disappeared, Driven into Exile

The White Paper Movement had no recognised leaders, yet many who joined it paid a lasting price. Public reporting and participants’ accounts have described protesters in Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities being forced to sign statements of “repentance,” disciplined by universities or employers, repeatedly summoned for questioning, or removed from public view. Some disappeared from contact for long periods. Others eventually left China and entered the precarious world of exile and asylum.

Among the figures who haunted me was a young woman in Shanghai known online as Xingxing. As police took her away, she cried, “I love this country. Don’t smear me.” The words exposed a contradiction the state preferred to erase: love of country did not require obedience to power. Soon afterwards, information about her became scarce.

Peng Lifa also disappeared into the machinery of punishment after his Sitong Bridge protest. For more than two years, his whereabouts and legal status remained undisclosed; in 2025, human-rights groups reported that he had been secretly sentenced to nine years in prison.

Many others remain unknown. Their traces survive in fragments—a deleted account, a blurred recording, a voice from a police vehicle, a family waiting for news.

Remembering them matters because repression has a second stage: after punishment comes erasure. The human history of the White Paper Movement survives only when people continue to speak the names and preserve the fragments.

Students at Peking University and other campuses reportedly faced official warnings, visits to their families, and threats to their academic and professional futures. Overseas, Chinese students raised blank sheets of A4 paper at vigils and demonstrations at Harvard and Oxford, and in Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Vancouver, and other cities. Some participants said they had been photographed by Chinese embassy personnel; others reported that police in their hometowns later questioned their families. The movement had crossed borders, and the reach of state intimidation had crossed with it.

The response to the young woman in Nanjing showed why even small acts of solidarity mattered. One comment circulating online captured the effect: “Courage is contagious.”

That was exactly what the footage revealed. Years of repression had taught people to doubt whether anyone else still felt as they did. One person stepped forward, and others discovered they were no longer alone.

Social Impact: A Generation’s Political Coming of Age

Many of the movement’s most visible participants were born in the 1990s or early 2000s. For some, raising a blank sheet of paper was their first direct entry into political life. They had grown up in a China where large-scale dissent was largely absent from public view, which made the sight of their own generation gathering in the streets unusually powerful.

Their generation carried a different historical burden from the students of 1989. They had inherited the knowledge of Tiananmen and had watched later civic movements meet sustained repression. The tightening of public space, the suppression of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement, and three years of coercive zero-COVID rule had made the risks of dissent difficult to romanticise.

By 2022, such illusions were harder to sustain. China had lived through the Tiananmen crackdown, Charter 08, the New Citizens Movement, the 709 arrests of human-rights lawyers, the prosecution of the Feminist Five, the suppression of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement, and three years of coercive zero-COVID rule and years of expanding surveillance and political repression. The young people who raised blank paper understood that dissent could bring detention, retaliation, or consequences that followed them long after the crowds disappeared.

That gave the movement its particular gravity. Earlier generations had also faced immense danger, but the White Paper protesters acted after decades of evidence showing how the state treated organised dissent. Their gesture was small in physical terms and enormous in psychological terms: they crossed a boundary that fear had taught their generation to regard as fixed.

For me, this was the movement’s deepest historical meaning. A generation raised under expanding surveillance discovered that fear could be disobeyed, and that one person’s courage could make another person less alone.

The Meaning of the White Paper Movement

The White Paper Movement became the most significant nationwide wave of civil protest in China since 1989. Within days, the government began dismantling the zero-COVID system. Many pressures had already made the policy difficult to sustain, but the protests changed something less measurable: private anger had become public memory.

When protesters called for an end to dictatorship and, in some places, for the Communist Party and Xi Jinping to step down, they crossed boundaries that had long seemed almost unimaginable inside mainland China. They were challenging the political order that had made three years of coercive confinement possible.

The movement’s central symbol carried no words. The blank sheet of paper expressed precisely what censorship had made impossible to say. Its whiteness also carried historical echoes of earlier mourning and protest in Tiananmen Square. Now another generation stood beneath surveillance cameras with nothing written in their hands. Silence itself had become an accusation.

The state could erase videos and detain participants. It could reshape the official memory of what had happened. It could not make the event unhappen. In the winter cold, young people held up blank pages knowing that the consequences might follow them long after the crowds dispersed. China did not suddenly become free, yet for a brief moment the boundaries of what seemed possible shifted.

The movement affected me more deeply than I had expected. It reignited something I had felt during Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-extradition movement, though this time it reached closer to home. My political awakening became more personal. I began to understand that recognising authoritarianism from a distance was relatively easy. The harder question was what responsibility followed once I understood how deeply political power could enter ordinary life.

I had grown up under a system that constantly invoked the language of serving the people. Over time, I watched the distance widen between that promise and lived reality. As independent civic space narrowed, political control increasingly seemed to take precedence over the people in whose name it was exercised.

The White Paper Movement therefore came to represent far more than opposition to zero-COVID. It showed people in mainland China that resistance had not disappeared altogether. Even under intense surveillance, fear did not possess absolute authority over the human conscience.

That recognition reached directly into another world I knew well: China’s UFO and spiritual communities.

For years, people in China’s UFO and spiritual communities had spoken about awakening. We used the word for discovering concealed realities, questioning accepted narratives, or exploring dimensions of consciousness beyond conventional understanding. I had used it myself.

The White Paper protesters brought the idea back to earth.

It was easy to speak about hidden truths while those truths remained metaphysical. A person could regard herself as awakened without allowing that awakening to disturb the arrangements of ordinary life. The White Paper protesters brought the idea back to earth.

Their political struggle was very different from spiritual inquiry, yet it exposed a question relevant to both: once we believe we have seen something others cannot or will not see, what responsibility follows from seeing it?

Recognition is only the beginning. Awakening becomes more demanding when knowledge enters the conscience and begins to shape the way we live. At times, what we have understood asks us to move beyond private conviction and embody it through our choices.

This was why the White Paper Movement became, for me, a lesson for the spiritual community as well as a political event.

I had long heard people call themselves lightworkers. The word gradually acquired a heavier meaning. If greater awareness leaves us untouched by the suffering directly in front of us, awakening can become another form of spiritual self-absorption.

The young protesters did not call themselves spiritual teachers. Many would probably have had little interest in such language. Yet standing in the winter cold with blank paper in their hands, they demonstrated something I had come to associate with genuine awakening: they allowed conscience to enter action.

I also began to understand political awakening as part of spiritual awakening. When power reaches into what people are permitted to say and remember, even what they are allowed to question, preserving inner freedom becomes a spiritual matter. The condition of consciousness cannot be entirely separated from the conditions under which human beings are forced to live. For a community that spoke so often about awakening, the White Paper Movement offered a practical standard: what we see should eventually matter in what we are willing to do.

For those of us who had spent years looking toward the skies, the White Paper Movement offered a difficult reminder: awakening also asks us to look directly at the world beneath our feet.

It left me with a question harder to evade than any metaphysical mystery:

What does awakening ask of us once silence is no longer innocent?

History had opened only a narrow fracture. Through it, I began to understand light differently: as awareness that enters the conscience and, when the moment demands it, finds expression in the way we live.