Just days before China’s most significant event of its five-year political cycle, giant banners were unfurled over a flyover in Beijing on Thursday, calling for boycotts and the resignation of Xi Jinping. Discussion of this unusual protest has been rigorously restricted by Chinese officials.
On Thursday afternoon, images and videos of the demonstration on the Sitong bridge appeared on social media. These images and videos also showed smoke plumes rising from the bridge, which spans a busy street in the capital’s Haidian area.
“PCR tests are not what we want. We prefer liberty over lockdowns. We seek respect, not deception. We don’t want a Cultural Revolution; we want reform. Not a leader, but a vote, please. One banner read, “We want to be citizens, not slaves,” and another called for a strike, a school boycott, and the ouster of Xi.
The images soon went viral on western social media, but they were quickly taken down from sites blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” of the internet.
According to the Associated Press, posts with the terms “Beijing,” “bridge,” or “Haidian” were rigorously prohibited, and a song with the same name as the bridge was removed from streaming platforms.
On Twitter, some individuals said that after sharing images of the protest on WeChat, a significant Chinese social media network, their accounts had been temporarily suspended.
However, at a period of great political sensitivity, such an unusual demonstration attracted notice. Before it was also banned on Friday morning, the Weibo hashtag “I saw it,” which allowed users to mention the occurrence without actually mentioning it, had been viewed more than 180,000 times. Some posters also had their Weibo accounts terminated for breaking the site’s rules.
