After spending a couple of nights in a detention center in Shanghai for "violations against public order," young Li was presented with two alternatives: to remain confined at home under strict surveillance for a long period or to voluntarily enter a psychiatric hospital for nine days.
It was his own parents who convinced him to choose the second option. As soon as Li set foot in the hospital, he was locked up for five hours in a small room where psychiatrists took turns interrogating him about the reasons that led him to protest against the government on the streets. The young man is convinced that those supposed doctors were nothing but officials disguised in white coats.
"I began to suspect that those men were not doctors when they asked me if I knew the group of unpatriotic individuals who, according to them, operated from the United Kingdom allied with British spies to organize protests in China. Since I had studied in London and was one of the most active participants in the Shanghai demonstrations, they were sure I had something to do with that story they had invented," he recounts.
Li, whose last name we have changed at his request, has vague memories of the following days. He claims they kept him sedated with anxiolytics and that, on some occasions, he was given olanzapine, an antipsychotic. At the end of the nine days of confinement, without undergoing any psychiatric evaluation beyond the initial interrogation, he was diagnosed with "paranoid personality disorder".
Li was one of the hundreds of angry young people who, in the early hours of November 27, 2022, took Wulumuqi Road, a popular street in Shanghai, to protest against the still ongoing extreme pandemic restrictions. "We want freedom", they chanted while holding blank papers, a symbol of rejection of state censorship. Those scenes quickly made headlines in media worldwide.
When the police began to surround the protesters and the first arrests were made, some dared to go further and direct their criticisms directly at the central power. "No to dictatorship, we want democracy," they shouted. "Down with Xi Jinping, down with the Communist Party", could be heard. Hours later, in the afternoon, Wulumuqi Road once again became the epicenter of peaceful protests that spread to 39 cities in the country. From Beijing, fearing that those mobilizations would jeopardize social stability and lead to a broader and more violent movement, they decided to advance the planned measures for 2023 regarding the lifting of mass confinements and the reopening of borders.
This Thursday, three years after the largest demonstrations recorded in China since Tiananmen, the intersection of Wulumuqi Road with Anfu Road - in the heart of the colorful French concession of Shanghai - woke up with a significantly higher police presence than usual. This reinforced surveillance has become a constant every anniversary of the so-called "blank paper rebellion", an episode erased from official memory but not from the memory of the young people who still bear the consequences of their challenge.
"First, they locked me up in a psychiatric hospital and falsified a report with a nonexistent diagnosis. Then they expelled me from university and revoked my passport. My parents were harassed for months by local officials, and every time I leave Shanghai, I have to report it to the police station in my neighborhood," says Li, now 24, as he shows the document proving his hospitalization and some snapshots of him during the protests in China's economic capital.
Four other testimonies collected by this newspaper, which we will keep anonymous, describe similar repressions by local authorities. "They confiscated my phone, and I was under house arrest for three weeks," one of them denounces. "We spent two days in a police station under administrative detention and have been closely monitored since then. Even after all this time, they still don't understand that the vast majority of us who protested did so solely to demand an end to the confinements and so many controls; we did not attack our leaders," two other young people agree. "They harassed my family, claiming that foreign forces had recruited their son to provoke disturbances; they insisted that if I did not correct my behavior, they would imprison me on charges of endangering national security," affirms a third testimony.
The origin of the protests in Shanghai was a vigil for the victims of a fire that, days earlier, had claimed the lives of a dozen people in a residential building in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region. Several witnesses stated that the barriers installed to reinforce the confinements hindered the evacuation of residents and prevented the prompt intervention of firefighters.
This was captured in a documentary by a filmmaker known as Plato, who also participated in the Shanghai protests. In November 2023, he was arrested after posting the documentary on Western platforms. A year later, Chen Pinlin, who hides behind Plato, was arrested again and formally charged with "provoking fights and causing trouble", a general offense frequently used by authorities to silence dissidents and imprison activists, lawyers, and journalists.
Reports from organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International also documented numerous cases of protesters being detained, subjected to intensive surveillance - both them and their families - expelled from universities, or fired from their jobs.
In January of this year, after a closed-door trial, a Shanghai court sentenced Plato to three and a half years in prison. His documentary, Not the Foreign Force, made with recordings by many of the young people who protested on Wulumuqi Road, shows numerous violent arrests by security forces deployed to quell the demonstrations.
On that intense day, this newspaper witnessed how the police randomly detained young people passing through the area and confiscated their phones to check them. Thanks to these searches, the agents located Telegram and Signal groups - applications blocked in China - where students coordinated the protests. This is how they managed to identify leaders like Li, the young man who ended up confined in a psychiatric center.
Three years after that night on Wulumuqi Road, some of the young people who dared to openly question the pandemic restrictions and their government's policies still live with fabricated diagnoses, truncated university records, revoked passports, and a monitored future.