The clash in China is also tech. The means of the square and those of Xi

At least three of the people who had participated in the protest against the anti-Covid restrictions held in Beijing in recent days, and in many other Chinese cities, were taken directly from their homes last Monday. Others received calls from the police and were questioned. Something like this, second The Straits Times, it would also have happened in Shanghai, where some protesters were stopped on Sunday evening. What made these demonstrations important was the great popular participation and their geographical diffusion, which seems to demonstrate a capacity for organization capable of bypassing the Great Firewall that monitors and censors the Chinese web.

In the same way, however, the repression of the regime has been able to quickly identify some of the demonstrators, tracing them to their homes, confirming how much the Beijing government is able to police dissent through digital surveillance. “We are all desperately deleting our chat history,” an anonymous protester told Reutersafter the protests also spread for a few days through the creation and sharing of memes, such as the idea of ​​demonstrating by showing blank sheets of paper.

Communications on WeChat, the main Chinese social network, are reduced to a minimum: VPNs are preferred (a type of software that protects and hides the online presence of those who use it) and applications such as Telegram, which have already been of enormous importance to the Hong Kong protests. Chinese police have made it a habit to check suspects’ devices to see if these apps are installed on them. Also for this reason, according to some witnesses, the censorship pushed many demonstrators to use local services for meetings, such as Momo, Tantan and Soul, where controls appear to be less severe. Despite the recent squeeze against the tech giants, the dating industry has been getting some special treatment in China. According to a recent article by the New York Timesthe reasons that would have saved it from the strong Chinese censorship concern the decline in fertility and the number of marriages in the country, but also the same anti-Covid isolation measures, made more sustainable by similar apps.

A series of risks and restrictions that led to the creation of a decentralized communication model, in which information spreads among small groups of acquaintances using different channels, to make themselves less traceable. An indispensable tool during the Hong Kong protests, for example, was Apple’s AirDop, with which users can exchange files and information from one phone to another, free of charge. It is also possible to set Airdop to receive data from any nearby device, creating a localized exchange network. In early November, however, Apple presented a new version of iOS, the iPhone operating system, which included an update for devices sold in mainland China which restricted the use of Airdrop to ten minutes at a time. The company has specified that it will bring the same novelty to the global market next year, but there is no doubt that the change has had repercussions for protesters.

Apple’s interests in China are numerous and have been known for some time, but they are not the only ones. The Beijing government has also used its influence to confuse and pollute the discussion of the demonstrations on Twitter, using hundreds of profiles that for days have published pornographic content and links to escort sites associating them with the names of the cities involved in the protests. In this way, those looking for news on the events of these days found themselves immersed in spam: “Fifty percent porn, fifty percent protests,” as a government source told the Washington Post.