Chinese Protesters Flip Police Car in First Major Anti-Communist Riot of 2023

Chinese policemen face off with protesters holding up blank pieces of paper in defiance in
AP Photo/Ng Han Guan
Frances Martel

Outraged citizens in Henan province, China, attacked cops and overturned a police car on Monday after authorities attempted to enforce a ban on New Year’s fireworks, social media videos and local reports revealed.

Police in Luyi county, Henan, confirmed that the incident occurred on Monday in a public statement and announced six arrests related to what videos appear to show is a riot. The confirmation followed a flood of videos surfacing on Douyin, the Chinese government-approved version of Tiktok, and other regime-controlled social media outlets showing mobs of people setting off fireworks and destroying police property.

In one such video, a man wearing a Balenciaga jacket appears dancing on top of an overturned police car, brandishing the car’s license plate, as fireworks go off in the distance.

The clash is the first of its kind known to the outside world to occur in China in 2023 and follows a tumultuous year of anti-communist protests across the country. While human rights organizations documented hundreds of acts of protest against the regime throughout 2022 in China, the largest single wave of dissent occurred throughout the last weekend of October, when major cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Zhengzhou (the capital of Henan), Guangzhou, and Chengdu saw hundreds take to the streets to demand change.

The Chinese government responded to the protests – many of which were specifically against an end to the country’s brutal lockdown and quarantine policies allegedly meant to contain the Chinese coronavirus – with widespread repression, disappearing protesters and their allies and attacking legal offices of attorneys who the regime feared might represent dissidents.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Tuesday that the videos surfacing on social media this week from Luyi appear to be both authentic and from this Monday. The violence began, the outlet said, after police attempted to stop locals from setting off fireworks.

“The incident was sparked by police trying to enforce a fireworks ban, which led some in the crowd to prevent the police car from leaving and others to throw drinks and start smashing it, before the most visible protesters jumped onto the car and removed its license plates,” RFA narrated.

RFA shared a video of the crowd in the process of flipping over the police car, which already boasted a broken windshield and other damage.

Expecting censorship, many Chinese-language outlets abroad downloaded and saved videos of the incident apparently taken at the scene.

Voice of America’s Chinese language service reported that the local public security bureau confirmed the incident and charged six people with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a catch-all crime for any display of dissent or disrespect towards the government. Police added some details – that the incident appeared to occur at 11 p.m. local time on Monday, for example – and further attempted to claim that much of the crowd present was not attempting to participate in the riot, but simply watching in “confusion.” Authorities referred to the protesters as a “small number of people,” apparently in contradiction to the content of videos circulating of the incident online.

Voice of America noted that, while fireworks have a long and storied tradition of being used in celebrations in China, the Communist Party has imposed a nationwide ban on the private use of fireworks since 2018. Defiance of that edict appears to be a separate public expression of disapproval but connected to a growing lack of respect for the regime and its brutal forces nationwide.

“The Chinese have learned that they can use protest to get what they want, which is a huge improvement on the way things were,” Wang Jian, a public commentator, told RFA. Wang noted that the protests this week appeared to be in the same line as those in November, many of which did not identify a specific grievance but instead consisted of protesters holding up blank pieces of paper – to represent everything the government allowed them to legally say. The “white paper” protests were seen as an expansion of anti-lockdown protests into a more generalized grievance with Communist Party rule.

Henan province is developing into one of the country’s major hotbeds of civil unrest. Its capital, Zhengzhou, is home to the world’s largest iPhone factory, managed by the supplier Foxconn. The iPhone factory endured a state of chaos and rioting for much of the end of 2022 as a result of its onerous coronavirus lockdown policies. After authorities attempted to place the facility in “closed-loop management” (a lockdown) that would require workers to live at the factory, dozens ran away in panic, causing a rush into neighboring areas and leaving the plant without workers. Foxconn announced bonuses for those who stayed and attempted to raise salaries to recruit more workers, which temporarily eased the situation until a riot broke out at the factory in November, led by those who say they never received the bonuses they were promised.

Chinese state media claimed this week that the situation had stabilized but, after three months of chaos, production was back up to only 90 percent of what was previously expected in December. Apple and Foxconn have since reportedly begun planning to move some production to neighboring India and Vietnam.

Henan province was also home to a banking crisis fueled by the government freezing citizens’ assets in April. By midsummer, hundreds of people were storming banks demanding to take their money out, resulting in the regime reportedly sending tanks out into the street to subdue the crowds. Chinese state media denied that any significant public unrest had occurred, despite copious imagery of the bank runs, and criticized Western countries for allegedly “hyping” discord in the country.

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