Skip to content
Menu
Subscribe
Log in
China | Chaguan
China’s public is fed up, but not on the brink of revolt
Why Chinese pensioners are protesting, in their own words
Feb 23rd 2023
Share
In china a show of discontent can matter without being a call to revolution. Currently, bold claims are being made for a spate of pensioner protests provoked by changes to a health-insurance scheme for city-dwellers. It is true that the demonstrations have lasted an unusually long time, and have spread countrywide. Since January old people have gathered, from Guangzhou in the south to Dalian in the north, massing near government offices or in public squares to accuse authorities of robbing them. The largest crowds were seen in the central city of Wuhan, where in mid-February hundreds of retirees confronted policemen twice in the space of a week. To some overseas Chinese commentators, this all amounts to a baifa yundong or a “white-haired movement”. That casts the unhappy pensioners as successors to the youngsters who protested against strict pandemic controls last November. Some of them held up blank paper to mock free-speech curbs, earning the label “white-paper movement”. Going further, some overseas Chinese outlets call today’s demonstrations a “white-haired revolution”, equating gatherings in Wuhan and elsewhere to a colour revolution, or anti-government revolt.
It is also true that the Communist Party’s machinery of repression is taking these displays of anger seriously. Censors have laboured to scrub protest videos from the internet. Social-media platforms have deleted comments by netizens that charge the authorities with inflicting austerity on old people, and that blame spending cuts on costly “zero-covid” controls that emptied local-government coffers and battered the broader economy. There are reports of police warning pensioners that their adult children will suffer if they protest again. In Wuhan residents posted screenshots of messages from schools asking parents to urge older relatives to shun demonstrations and to study official explanations of the new insurance rules.
Already have an account? Log in
