The White Paper Rebellion

When a fire starts to burn...

Alexander Campbell

Nov 27, 2022

It started with a bad power strip in Xinjiang.

A spark from the strip starts a fire.

They next day, 10 people are dead and a country is left wondering…

“Were they actually locked in their homes?“

“Why couldn’t the fire trucks get there?”

“How long will lockdown last?”

When the government failed to answer these questions, those questions morphed into a demand.

“Let us out.”

This time with a symbol.

A blank piece of paper…

Documentation on these protests included in appendix.

To a certain extent, this is a self-imposed quandary for the regime.

These protests were not sparked by foreign intelligence ops, they didn’t come about because of a political opposition pushing a western liberal agenda.

For all the government bots spewing spam about color revolutions, the symbol here is incredibly effective.

A simple piece of white paper.

A blank piece of paper representing the answer to the inevitable question from the regime of ‘what do you want?”

Because in reality, this isn’t a movement organized around a single focal point, or at least it wasn’t, until the regime gave the people one…

Alexander Campbell @abcampbell

@ZhangTaisu In the past, the protests had no focal point other than “human rights.” Now the ask is simple & objective: “Let us out of our homes.”

Depending on your politics, we’ve known for months (or years) that it wasn’t possible to get the covid genie back in the bottle.

Lockdowns may have made sense while the world scrambled to develop and distribute vaccines, but in a world where

a) vaccines aren’t getting better,

b) the virus continues to evolve into more infectious variants, and

c) it’s basically everywhere now.

your utilitarian calculus begins to change…

Data from JHopkins, WHO and Our World in Data. Note the Chinese line is ~0 still.

What once looked like something to brag about, now looks like a relic from a by-gone era.

“Wait you are still wearing masks all the time?”

“How long will this last?”

Alexander Campbell @abcampbell

~35% of Taiwan has already caught Covid. <0.1% of China has already caught Covid. The rate which people in China catch Covid is low (0.0022% of pop/m). Thanks to lockdown. At this rate, it will take 159.5 years of lockdown for China to catch up to Taiwanese levels of Covid.

Then you find yourself doing strange things in defense of a policy with no end date.

Like editing the World Cup feed to avoid showing maskless fans…

Mark Dreyer @DreyerChina

This is amazing. Due to the backlash from Chinese fans seeing unmasked crowds in Qatar, Chinese TV is now replacing live crowds shots during games and instead cutting to close-ups of players and coaches.

Or having (masked) handlers carry out the (maskless) old President, in front of billions.

Alexander Campbell @abcampbell

Strong Lehman trading floor vibes

And the fire in Urumqi kind of brought this stuff into context.

Historians, politicians and internet social media agents will debate for years whether the people in Urumqi were actually locked in their homes. Just like they debate whether it’s called ‘dynamic covid zero’ or ‘zero covid policy’ or ‘lockdown.’

At this point, doesn’t matter.

What matters is what was once a policy founded on ‘good utilitarian calculus’ of ‘stop the spread’, has now mutated into a tool of opaque and ambiguous state control, with no terminal date, and no way for the people of China to disagree, without being deemed as enemies of the state.

Health apps designed to protect have been used to prevent dissenters from accessing transportation, or even getting their money back from failed banks.

This was always unsustainable.

Chinese history is filled rebellions. Usually some distinct ethnic group or conclave that rebels against the central authority. Unsuccessful revolts are called rebellions and know by their colorful names. Successful revolts upend the mandate of heaven, and China enters a period of chaos before the rise of the new regime. We’ve provided a non-comprehensive list of some of these rebellions below.

At this point, there is little reason to believe that what we are seeing today is even a Rebellion, let alone an attempt at Revolution.

Recall, with the snap of a finger, Xi can renounce lockdown and open up, consequences be what they may.

The will of the people fulfilled.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

If he doesn’t though, we might just know this weekend as the start of the White Paper Rebellion.

For those left wondering ‘what’s the investment conclusion’, we say the same thing we always say.

Gold in China looks cheap.

Chinese Protest Tracker

Here’s the run down of protests, according to Twitter. It’s entirely possible some of these are false info (as always), but the overwhelming amount of video evidence is now overwhelming.

Shanghai