As videos of crowds holding up paper sheets and chanting slogans flooded the internet last weekend, Chinese-language social media posts have come to call the demonstrations in more than a dozen cities the "white paper revolution."

Authorities have since moved quickly to squelch the protests, arresting some demonstrators and sending university students home, in a bid to quickly snuff out the most overt challenge to Chinese leadership in decades.

Using blank sheets of paper as a symbol of protest is not new.

They were used during protests in the Soviet Union during the 1990s and in recent years in Russia and Belarus as well, Taiwan-based Chinese blogger Zuola told Radio Free Asia.

"In the current climate in China, you can be told off by the government for saying anything at all," Zuola said. "It's the ultimate kind of performance art protest — by holding up a blank sheet of paper, you are saying that you have something to say, but that you haven't said it yet."

"It's very contagious, so everything started holding up these blank sheets of paper to show dissatisfaction with the social controls imposed by the Chinese government, with their political environment and with [controls on] speech," he said.

Pent-up anger

The protests were sparked by public anger at the delayed response to a deadly fire on Nov. 24 in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, that has been widely blamed on COVID-19 restrictions.

The incident, which left at least 10 people dead, tapped into pent-up frustrations of millions of Chinese who have endured nearly three years of repeated lockdowns, travel bans, quarantines and various other restrictions to their lives.

Videos swirled around the internet showing people in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities holding the white pieces of paper above their heads, demanding an end to the strict "zero-COVID" limits. Protesters also began to call for greater freedom of expression, democratic reforms, and even the removal of President Xi Jinping, who has been closely identified with the rigid policies.

According to an unverified document circulating on social media, officials in major cities were being told to take steps to control the supply of ubiquitous white printer paper, with a major stationery firm suspending online and offline sales.

Compared with the Post-it notes that formed the "Lennon Walls" of Hong Kong's 2019 protest movement, which showcased huge mosaics of diverse messages and creative personal expression, the blank sheets of paper are a more ironic reference to government controls and censorship, analysts said.

Striking a chord

Veteran Taiwan social activist Ho Tsung-hsun said the white paper revolution had quickly spread across the country, indicating it struck a chord with a wide variety of protesters in China.

"Some people pasted blank sheets of paper next to a statue of [late revolutionary Chinese writer] Lu Xu, and under Xi Jinping slogans," Ho told RFA.

"Some students sang the Internationale in their dorms at night, while others took their guitars to sing it on the streets, with blank sheets of paper pasted next to their guitars," he added, referring to the communist anthem.

"In Wuzhen, Zhejiang, some young women sealed their mouths shut, handcuffed themselves and held up blank sheets of paper," he said.

Ho added that people quickly started using other white items following reports that the sale of A4 paper - the typical size of printer paper in China and other countries - was being restricted by the authorities.

"I'm more inclined to call it the white revolution, because people have been very creative about expressing themselves through white objects, since reports emerged online that it was now impossible to buy paper, that sales had been restricted in a lot of places," he said.

"If they restrict sales of white paper, then other white materials and objects can be used, such as white cloth or white paint," Ho said.

Some online accounts have started replacing their avatars or profile photos with white backgrounds, while social media users have used the hashtags #whitepaperrevolution and #A4revolution to show support for the protests, alongside selfies holding blank sheets of paper in the streets or posting them anonymously on bulletin boards and in corridors, cafes and parks.

‘We want dignity and freedom'

A news and commentary account that uses the handle @citizensdailycn across several social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter said the white paper movement was "the revolution of our generation."

"We want to say what they don't want us to say: We want dignity and freedom," it said in an apparent rallying call opposing controls on speech and information, as well as the restrictions of the zero-COVID policy.

The Urumqi fire has coincided with a growing realization that the circumstances in China as it relates to COVID restrictions are unusual compared with other countries, according to Zuola.

"Since the start of the World Cup, the Chinese people have been discovering that no other country is taking [the] Omicron [variant of COVID-19] seriously," Zuola said.

"People are also angry that Sinovac and other [Chinese] vaccine companies won their licenses through bribery, and over the government collusion with business that has made it impossible to roll back pandemic restrictions over the past three years," he said.

Feeling their pain

"Then there was the lone protest by Peng Lifa," he said, in a reference to the Oct. 13 "Bridge Man" protest banners hung from a Beijing traffic flyover. "All of this has been fermenting for some time; it hasn't happened overnight. There has been a sense of long-running grievance over internet censorship in China, too."

When the Uyghur residents of the apartment block died in a fire after screaming to be allowed to leave the locked-down building, everyone in China felt their pain, he said.

"They were shouting that they were all from Urumqi, that everyone was a victim of the disease control measures, and that they couldn't allow those people to be left to die in silence," he said.

Ho believes there is also a mute reference to ballot papers — meaningless in China, where all "election" candidates must be pre-approved by the government — in the use of sheets of printer paper.

The blankness of the sheets also echoes the lack of clear aim or unified leadership during the weekend's protests.

"A movement without a leader is what those in power fear the most," Ho said.

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These groups should prepare for the possibility of censorship and organize effective countermeasures, they said.

"You might not know the hour nor the day you will be censored," Joshua D. Holdenreid, vice president and executive director of the California-based Napa Legal Institute, said at a roundtable on internet censorship.

Holdenreid said those involved in public debates "need to plan ahead and assume that if they are a religious organization or faith-based organization operating in the public square and focused on an issue that's related to pro-life (topics), marriage, sexuality, Christian anthropology, they should just assume that they will eventually run afoul of these vague and arbitrary terms and conditions that exist with these Big Tech platforms."

The Ethics and Public Policy Project (EPPC), a D.C. think tank that aims to apply "the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics," hosted the Aug. 26 roundtable "How Big Tech Censors Religious Voices, and How to Fight Back."

The roundtable follows years of debate and discussion about how major technology and media companies treat some religious voices.

The most likely to suffer, Holdenreid said, aren't necessarily organizations running soup kitchens or homeless shelters, but those who are "weighing in on the most important cultural issues" and "speaking the truth about certain issues that doesn't align with what folks in Silicon Valley think should be appropriate for the digital public square."

His organization, the Napa Legal Institute, provides legal and financial education to faith-based non-profits on corporate, tax, and philanthropic issues.

Another roundtable speaker, EPPC president Ryan T. Anderson, saw one of his books delisted from Amazon in February 2021.

The book, "When Harry Became Sally," offers a philosophical and moral critique of transgender advocates' claims.

Anderson said his book ranked highly on bestseller lists and was listed for sale on Amazon for three years.

In removing his book, he charged, the company did not follow its own procedures, such as contacting the author and publisher first to notify them and attempt to reach a solution.

He also questioned Amazon's claim that the book violated its content policy.

"Well, how did the book not violate the content policy for the first three years?" he asked. "I didn't go back and rewrite anything."

The book's title refers to a popular 1989 movie "When Harry Met Sally," which dramatized an argument that men and women are so different that they can't just be friends.

"Whereas today the argument is that men and women are interchangeable and that the concept of male and female is on a spectrum," said Anderson, who is also the John Paul II teaching fellow in social thought at the University of Dallas.

Those who have not read the book, Anderson suggested, might see him as "some bomb-throwing bigot who wrote a book, making fun of transgender people" which in their view might justify a company like Amazon refusing to sell "hate speech."

Anderson characterized his arguments as measured and careful. He warned that policies that silence the voices of writers like him encourage more radical voices to see moderation as a failure.

"It silences reasonable voices and then it radicalizes more extreme voices, which would have a really, really bad polarizing effect," he said. Continue reading

• Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer with Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.

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• The CDF is notably silent under Pope Francis, reports Josh McElwee.

How do I listen? Continue reading

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• National Catholic Reporter

Bob McCoskrie told Radio NZ this morning that Family First had wanted censors to reinstate the book's R14 rating, which had been removed last month, and require that the book carry a warning sticker. Continue reading

"The Australian Border Force Act, supported by the ALP and opposed only by the Greens, effectively turns the Department of Immigration into a secret security organisation with police powers."

Under the Act, it is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment of up to two years, for any person working directly or indirectly for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to reveal to the media or any other person or organisation anything that happens in detention centres like the one on Manus Island.

Section 42 of the Act is entitled "Secrecy".

It provides that a person who is an "entrusted person" commits an offence if he or she makes a record of, or discloses, what is termed protected information.

An "entrusted person" is defined in the Act to mean not only government employees, but also a consultant or contractor.

"Protected information" means any information that a person comes across while working for, or in, detention centres.

Barns said the effect of these provisions will be to deter individuals such as doctors, counsellors, and others who have voiced publicly their concerns about the conditions endured by asylum seekers in detention centres from collecting information about those conditions and then raising their concerns in the community via the media.

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• probonoaustralia.com.aus
• asopa.typepad.com
• Image: Kerrie Leishman/TheAge

Constitutional lawyer Tiffany Twivey-Nongorr has called the proposed PNG ban an outrageous breach of human rights.

As part of a review of the Censorship Act, PNG's Censorhip Board is considering banning sexting, the act of sending of sexually explicit messages or material by mobile phones.

Someone who sends an explicit message or picture could face up to five years' jail under the proposal.

Ms Twivey-Nongorr said if the ban is implemented, she will consider a constitutional challenge to its legality.

"It's a ridiculous, archaic, draconian piece of legislation that should never see the light of day," she said.

"It's ridiculous because it appears that the same mobile phone can be used to express verbally what is in a sext, but the minute that it's typed into a text, it's going to become illegal," she said.

"It's getting ridiculous - we've got to stop legislating morality from time to time and start focusing on the real issues in Papua New Guinea."

She says there are already current laws to deal with people receiving unwanted sexts.

And police would struggle to enforce the ban, because there is limited documentation and many people use fake names when buying phones in PNG, she added.

Ms Twivey-Nongorr believes the proposed legislation is a combination of advisors not understanding PNG conditions and a growing influence of fundamentalist Christians from overseas.

"The only way it could be policed is by people reporting, and the only people that are going to report about it are those that receive sexts that are unwanted - and they're covered by current legislation," she said.

Ms Twivery-Nongorr said pornography is illegal in PNG, so any concerns on that front are already covered by law too.

Sources

• Yahoo News Singapore
• Image: Radio Australia

Image: Radio Australia

The publication was followed by strong interfaith and government condemnation, a public protest demonstration, and considerable general public opposition.

The Race Relations Commissioner and convenor of the Government and Interfaith Network called for dialogue and convened a meeting of media executives and religious leaders.

The meeting resulted in the following agreement:

Continue reading

Right to Life has applauded the Catholic Bishops for their timely warning and has expressed disappointment that it has not received more publicity. "The Bishops are the spiritual leaders of more than 500,000 baptised Catholics in New Zealand who comprise fifteen per cent of the population of this country", it says.

" The media, by choosing to ignore the Bishops' warning are doing a great disservice to the community. The community has a right to receive warnings from our spiritual leaders of serious threats to the lives of the elderly, the sick and the terminally ill. Why is the media censoring and withholding important information from the Bishops for the community?"

Source

• Scoop Health
• Image: Life Institute

Sergeant Brock Davis said the tops would be sent to the department which would decide, after consulting with police, whether the owners of theImpuls'd store which sells them would be charged with any criminal offences.

In 2008 the Censor banned one of these T Shirts. In his judgement Bill Hastings said:
"The injury to the public good that is likely to be caused by the availability of this T-shirt originates from the manner in which it associates an aggressive and misogynistic meaning of the "harsh, brutal and generally unacceptable" word c### with Jesus Christ, and depicts an image of a chaste woman engaging in sexual activity. A fair interpretation of the messages conveyed by this T-shirt is that Christians should be vilified for their religious beliefs, and that women, including chaste and celibate women, cannot stop themselves engaging in sexual activity…" (OFLC No. 800513)

The censor also said the T shirt:

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