Wulumuqi Road

Source: Made in China (12/8/22)
Wulumuqi Road
By Christopher Connery

It was the middle section of a north–south road in the pre-war French Concession and was originally named Route Magy (Maiqi Road, 麦琪路) for Alfred Magy, a French officer in World War I. Planted with dense rows of the French plane trees (法国梧桐树) that line the area, it ran through a neighbourhood of villas, consulates, and Shanghai-modern apartment buildings, notably the 1936 Art Deco Magy Apartments, designed by local architect Alexander Léonard.

This map shows the scene on Sunday, 27 November. Streets marked blue represent the prohibited zone; no cars or bicycles allowed to pass; pedestrians could move somewhat more freely, depending on the time of day, though they were not allowed to gather. White lined red circles represent police barricades across the width of the street. Streets outside the prohibited zone were lined with police cars, vans, and buses. Orange and red dots represent entrances to the Changshu Road subway station. The thin black line between Wulumuqi Road and Yongfu Road is a small alley that gave access to the prohibited zone. It was neither blocked nor used; police and crowds were likely unaware of its existence.

Those who came on Sunday found a different scene from the day before. There was a much heavier police presence, of course, and barricades preventing passage, as indicated in the map. There was no entry into the Anfu Road/Urumqi Road triangle, and Anfu Road was closed, as marked above, though it was possible for some in the crowd to cross the street. Limited pedestrian traffic was allowed on Wulumuqi Road and was largely confined to the sidewalks. A widely circulated video from Sunday’s events showed a young man holding a bunch of flowers, walking back and forth across Wulumuqi Road at the Anfu Road intersection, taunting the police. After a few passes, he too was arrested in the usual rough way, and several who sought to go to his aid were subdued as well. His arrest showed the presence of plainclothes police, who were likely there in large numbers. Special operations police, with distinctive uniforms, were on the scene as well.

In the evening, crowds had grown in number, but were more dispersed. As Sunday evening wore on, news of protests in Ürümqi, Korla, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Lanzhou, Guangzhou, and other cities had spread through the crowds and elsewhere in the country. At around 9pm, there was a small group around the US consulate, marked on the map, and further up on Wulumuqi Road there were calls to join them there. One group on the sidewalk trying to reach the consulate was prevented from doing so. Another fairly large crowd had been kettled into the area in front of the subway entrance at the intersection of Wuyuan Road and Changshu Road. Other crowds gathered at two spots on Wuyuan Road. Even further to the east, a crowd gathered on Huating Road, north of the intersection with Yanqing Road. South of the Yanqing Road intersection, all the way to the subway entrance on Huaihai Road, stood a group of about one hundred police, presumably there to block access from the subway station. Another crowd, around two-hundred strong, had gathered at the point nearest the prohibited zone, on Changle Road near its intersection with Wulumuqi Road, not far from the police barricades. There were far fewer people holding white papers than on Saturday, and sporadic chanting. Arrests continued into the night, and by early Monday morning the greater area was wholly cleared.

By Sunday night, bars, cafés, and most restaurants and cafés in the area on the map north of Huaihai Road and south of Huashan Road, from Fumin Road to Wukang Road, had been ordered closed. Most fruit and vegetable stores remained open. The area around the intersection of Fumin Road, Changle Road, Yanqing Road, and Donghu Road, at the far right of the map above, has long been one of the liveliest nightlife spots in the city. A small group of people sat on a bench in front of one of the closed bars, discussing events of the past two nights. A smartly dressed couple, out for a night on the town, approached them and asked why everything was closed. Though the police barrier at Changle Road and Changshu Road was visible to the west, the uneven distribution of information—it all depended on which Weixin or Weibo feeds one read—made it possible to be quite near the scene yet unaware that anything was happening.

The weather turned cold and rainy on Monday. The area had been cleared, but municipal workers worked into the night lining Anfu Road and other nearby streets with the blue barriers familiar to all from the lockdown days. The blockades marked on the map above remained, but bicycles and pedestrians were allowed through. Police presence had been greatly reduced; officers gathered at the subway stops and were stationed at all intersections approaching the area. There were no crowds. If anyone was seen taking a photo, police would ask to see it. If resisted—such checks are illegal—they would not press the matter. There had been an announcement on social media—its provenance was unknown, and many questioned it—announcing a gathering Monday night at People’s Square, a few miles to the east, which had in many years past been the usual spot for protests in Shanghai. There were indeed more police around the Square than around Wulumuqi Road on Monday night, but even there the numbers were not overwhelming. Officers stationed at subway exits near the Square occasionally stopped passers-by and asked to inspect their mobile phones, checking for Twitter, Telegram, or other forbidden apps. Word had spread that these checks were taking place, and those in the know could download a fake home screen, on which all apps were either anodyne or patriotic.

Over the course of the week following the protests, some attendees whose presence had been identified through facial recognition software or other means were asked to report to the police. Their names and other information were recorded, but it is as yet unclear whether any were arrested. Although to date there have been no large-scale gatherings in the city after Sunday, beginning on Monday 28 November there have been reports of small incidents all over the city, mostly protests over threatened lockdowns of buildings or communities. Some of these protests may have been successful. A lockdown of an apartment complex on Huaihai Road on 5 December ended after a few hours; such speed had previously been rare. There are also reports of sporadic vandalism of PCR testing stations, a tactic also used elsewhere in the country.

Countrywide Protest

The Ürümqi demonstrations touched off the events. Shanghai’s Saturday events further opened up a space of action that spread throughout the country. The major demonstrations elsewhere in the country, mostly on Sunday 27 November, showed considerable social, spatial, and tactical variety. The Ürümqi demonstration and vigil beginning on 25 November, the earliest in the country, was the first political action in the People’s Republic where Han Chinese and the Uyghur people marched together. In Chengdu, a vigil gathering on Sunday night grew rapidly in size, turning into a two-mile long march through the centre of the city that included thousands of people. On 11 May, at a protest over a Chengdu high school student’s death under mysterious circumstances, a large group of high school students, along with some of their parents, had gathered at the school in a protest vigil, many carrying white chrysanthemums. The flowers reappeared on the night of the 27^th in Chengdu. Following the many arrests, demonstrators gathered outside police stations to demand arrestees’ release.

The Wuhan demonstration on the 27^th was one of the biggest in the country. It centred on Hanzheng Road in the Hankou part of town, a district far from the universities, and more blue collar in character. It took place in a neighbourhood dominated by redistribution centres and small shops catering to traders from small towns and villages in Hubei and elsewhere in central China. Deprived of their livelihoods due to the forced closure of their shops, thousands of shopkeepers, workers, and residents marched down Hanzheng Road, methodically smashing down the blue barriers that lined the street.[2] In Guangzhou, many workers, deprived of their livelihoods, also participated, and their demonstrations lasted into the week.

The scene at Wulumuqi Rd. had a prominent place in the social media ecology, and the massive and rapid uploading of photos and videos proved too much for the Weixin and Weibo censors to handle. Nearly every confrontation played out in real time on phone screens around the country and throughout the world. At the Liangma River protests in Beijing on Sunday night, another one of the larger demonstrations, mixed with the cries for freedom, the end of PCR testing and lockdowns, and other demands, there were cries and placards exhorting the crowd to ‘stand with Shanghai’. Pictures of foreign media coverage were widely reproduced as well. The Twitter feed 李老师不是你老师 (Professor Li is not your professor)—@whyyoutouzhele—has the most complete compendium of videos, photos, and short descriptions of events, and has also posted instructions on how to contact and interact with journalists. ‘We’re going to be in The New York Times!’ was a phrase that came up more than once among the Shanghai crowd.

One participant described in an interview with The New York Times reporter Yuan Li that prior to the protests she felt she had lived in a ‘liberal bubble’ (Yuan 2022). The two-month spring lockdown in Shanghai had been traumatic for nearly everyone in the city, especially for migrant workers who were often last to get food and other supplies, and recovery had been slow (L.G. 2022). For the cosmopolitan young bourgeoisie, the type to be found on a typical Saturday on Anfu Road, the lockdown had been a particularly jarring wake-up call, forcing them to face full on the nature of the state in which they lived and the precarity of their perceived state of exception. This realisation occasioned no small amount of schadenfreude among non-Shanghainese, whether residents of the city or not, who had long resented Shanghai’s particular brand of superiority. Some among the left-communist, Marxist-Leninist milieu—an anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP), anti-capitalist workerist orientation[3]—hold that China has long been characterised by ‘internal imperialism’: the prosperity of the southern coastal cities and Beijing had been based on the exploitation of the interior; inter-regional inequality was a direct consequence of Chinese capital’s spatial fix. This imperial relationship extended, in this analysis, to the discourse around the protests. What the Wulumuqi Road protesters wanted, in this view, was a restoration of their pre-pandemic life in their liberal bubble: a cosmopolitan life of consumption, foreign travel, and relatively unfettered access to books, media, and information from around the world.

Worker suffering and worker militancy have been constant throughout the pandemic. In Zhengzhou, long a site of worker activism, political mobilisation, and analyses, the Foxconn workers’ actions in October 2022 reached a level of militancy unseen in many years; videos of hundreds of workers escaping the ‘closed-loop’ system, requiring workers to work, eat, and sleep in the workplace circulated widely, and were probably known to most demonstrators around the country (Friedman 2022a; 2022b). Though not prominently featured in the recent protests, one can still find news, on the alternate media channels, of workers facing death, starvation, and isolation for pandemic-related reasons. Workers traveling home after factory closures frequently find themselves unable to take transportation due to pandemic measures and can be stuck far from home with little to live on. As one would expect, worker militancy over the last two decades has included critical analyses, investigative reporting, and political work carried on by workers and their allies. These efforts have of course been met with state suppression, including crackdowns, intensified under the Xi Jinping regime, on workers’ organisations and sympathetic nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). Nonetheless, a number of social media and alternative media channels, in and out of China, have continued to draw attention to workers’ plights during the pandemic. To the extent that the Sunday demonstrations were perceived, despite their varied character, as one single struggle, they contributed much to popular awareness of and sympathy with workers’ struggles.

A Critical Void

In several analyses over the past week, much has been made of the more universal character of the recent nationwide protests, which have involved a broad spectrum of the population, including significant numbers of university students, suggesting a civil-society wide display of popular discontent in the most significant outbreak of the political since 1989. The construction of its meaning will be an ongoing process. But November’s uprisings take place within a distinctive political and ideological void. Critique, in its broadest sense, apart from the important work taking place in worker and feminist activist milieus, is probably at a lower ebb in China than at any time in the last 130 years. Critical left intellectual voices, which flourished from the 1990s through the 2010s, scarcely exist. A depressingly large number of former leftists have cast their lot with the state, and the last few years have seen some of them extolling the Chinese Dream, the Belt and Road project, and the strengthening of state capacity. During the lockdown, one Shanghai intellectual, once identified with the nationalist populist left, dismissed complaints against the lockdown, writing that he quite enjoyed drinking tea in his studio. At a conference this fall in Shanghai, two prominent ‘critical media studies’ scholars stated, echoing state discourse to the letter, that the task of critical media studies in the present period was to ‘tell the China Story well.’ Many other critics once associated with the left have retreated into a narrower professionalism or have turned their attention to matters of less contemporary concern. The increasing rationalisation of the universities, where academics are required to publish in state approved venues and to participate in national-sponsored research projects, and where teaching is closely monitored by administrators and zealous nationalist students, has of course been an important factor in the narrowing of critical intellectual possibilities. Yet it is still possible to write and informally publish work of critical analytical depth, and such pieces are rare.

The state has greatly reduced the capacity for artistic, literary, and theatrical engagement with contemporary events, yet some exist. These include recent productions in the ‘Theatre of Contagion’ series by Shanghai-based Grass Stage Theatre Company: ‘Clam Island’ (蛤蜊岛, 2021; the word ‘clam’ is a homonym for ‘quarantine’) and ‘Home’ (家园, 2021) (Gullota 2022); and ‘Quarantine’ (隔离, 2022) written by Li Jianming, an intimate, more mainstream family drama centred during the lockdown. ‘Quarantine’ was staged in 2022 in Beijing, Shanghai, and at the Daliangshan International Theatre festival in western Sichuan. For the Daliangshan production, authorities asked for certain terms, such as ‘lockdown’, to be replaced by their more anodyne official equivalents.

Many readers have read the concluding scene of Wang Anyi’s recently published novella, The Five Lakes and the Four Seas (五湖四海), a rags-to-riches chronicle of Xiu Guomei and Zhang Jianshe, a couple born in the 1950s who rose to wealth during the reform period, as a reflection on the lockdown. Its final scene begins with a reflection: ‘Xiu Guomei believed that all things had an ending but hadn’t imagined an ending like this.’ As her husband Zhang Jianshe dies in a freakish workplace accident,

[H]e saw a large dark cloud bearing down on him, but he couldn’t move. ‘What’s happening?’, he wondered, as all became shrouded in darkness.

The colophon, immediately following this last sentence and giving the date of the novella’s completion, reads ’24 April 2022, Shanghai’, one month into the city’s lockdown (Wang 2022: 155, translations mine).

Such feelings of dread and foreboding had quickened as Dynamic Zero Covid stretched into the autumn. The Twentieth Congress of the CCP in mid-October was a clear confirmation of Xi Jinping’s consolidation of absolute power. When the ‘20 Points’ announcing a more relaxed anti-Covid policy were released on 11 November, there was widespread anticipation that the loosening had begun. This exacerbated the gloom that descended when initial official policy relaxations, such as in Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province, were almost immediately reversed. The last few days have seen new policy relaxations in Shanghai and elsewhere in the country; as of 3 December, proof of PCR tests is no longer required to ride the Shanghai subway. On Sunday 4 December, there were announcements from several areas in the country promising significant changes in anti-Covid policy, but these seemed to be restricted to areas controlled by Xi Jinping’s closest associates. Policy relaxation will be understood by many as a response to the protests, but experience has shown that such relaxation can be tentative. Some feel that these concessions might be matched by a more intensive crackdown on political dissidence. We will see.

Many at Wulumuqi Road, as well as at similar protests around the country, are new to political life, and many have doubtless experienced that euphoria that comes from standing together in defiance of a repressive authority, especially after so many years of social quiescence and months of relative social isolation. The heady feeling of being part of an historical turning point will create resources of affect, reflection, and will to action that could take many and varied forms in years to come, whatever the character of state repression or conciliation. Such awakenings should not be dismissed, even when initially expressed in calls for liberal and not radical reforms. The near total absence of a substantial body of critical reflection, analysis, and theorisation, however, will make more difficult the formation of new political subjectivity, even for those who desire it. This void contrasts sharply with the analytical resources that existed in 1989, as well as during the high tide of worker activism earlier in this century (Franceschini and Sorace 2021). Debates within civil society across the political spectrum were quite common from the early 2000s through 2016 or so, during what I have referred to elsewhere as the ‘WTO years’ (Connery 2020), and their absence, in the Xi Jinping era, has been striking.

Social media has been indispensable in giving the movement its nation-wide, even world-wide character. Yet the nature of the medium—image-saturated, brief in exposition, affect-heavy, and engineered for low attention spans—has its limitations.

This photograph of two workers carrying off a blue and white road sign—乌鲁木齐中路 (Middle Wulumuqi Road), date unknown—quickly became one of the movement’s dominant memes. Behold the state, engaged in a clumsy and futile act of erasure! The photo was disseminated on social media all over the world, and demonstrators in China and elsewhere have been photographed holding up reproductions of the street sign, as if to say: Wulumuqi Road lives; We are all on Wulumuqi Road, etc. One video posted on social media—and so far there has been little or no comment on its fakeness—shows a new street sign, with a new street name: 乌中路 (Wuzhong Road), the first and last characters of the street’s full name, and goes on to ridicule the state for thinking that a changed street name can erase history. There was in fact a Wulumuqi Road sign taken down during the construction that has pervaded the neighbourhood over the last couple of weeks. But from Sunday 27 November until today, all of the many Wulumuqi Road signs are intact and in place. We all know that memes need no basis in reality. This one made for a good image and a good story: a sign taken for wonders. But it will take time and work to understand what has happened, and likely even more time to see, in the seeds of time, which grains will grow and which will not.

5 December 2022, Shanghai

In a world without fear of the consequences of guilt by association, this would be a long and detailed paragraph expressing my deep gratitude to the many people who took considerable time and effort to help with information gathering and analysis, provided additional useful material, and who reviewed and critiqued earlier drafts. You know who you are; I am very deeply grateful. I’m also very grateful for Yuan Li’s recordings of her interviews with participants in the Shanghai events, as cited in the text (see Yuan 2022). My apologies for any errors and omissions; one can only do one’s best in media res.

[1] See also Shu Haolun’s 2011 documentary Nostalgia (乡愁), about life in Dazhongli, the community in which he grew up, a film he made just before the community was razed for redevelopment.

[2] Several days after the Wuhan protests, the government announced that shops could re-open, subject to further closure in the event of positive Covid tests.

[3] For an example of this discourse, see Chuang 2019.

References 

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Chuang. 2019. ‘A State Adequate to the Task: Conversations with Lao Xie.’ Chuang Journal 2. chuangcn.org/journal/two/an-adequate-state.

Connery, Christopher. 2020. ‘World Factory.’ Made in China Journal 5(1): 136–45.

Dai, Wei 戴维 and Tian Qilin 田启林. 2005. ‘上海纵火逼迁案黑幕 开发商为牟利烧死两老人 [The Scandalous Story of Arson and Forced Relocation in Which a Development Company Incinerated Two Elderly Residents for Profit].’ 财经 [Caixin], 20 September. finance.sina.com.cn/g/20050920/16151984193.shtml.

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Friedman, Eli. 2022. ‘Escape from the Closed Loop.’ Boston Review, 28 November. www.bostonreview.net/articles/escape-from-the-closed-loop.

Friedman, Eli. 2022. ‘Foxconn’s Great Escape.’ Asian Labour Review, 8 November. labourreview.org/foxconns-great-escape.

Gullotta, Diego. 2022. Teatro sociale in Cina: L’esperienza della compagnia teatrale Caotaiban [Social Theatre in China: The Experience of the Caotaiban Theatre Group]. Rome: L’Incisiva.

L.G. 2022. ‘The Shanghai Lockdown as a Chronotope: The Biopolitics of Zero Covid, Auto-Immunisation, and the Security Discourse.’ Made in China Journal 7(1): 134–50.

Lu, Hanchao. 2014. Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Schmitz, Rob. 2016. Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road. New York, NY: Broadway Books

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Christopher Connery

Christopher Connery teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California Santa Cruz and in the graduate programme in Cultural Studies at Shanghai University. He has been a member of the Grass Stage theater troupe since 2010, participating as writer, actor, political consultant, brick carrier, and other roles. He has also worked as a psychogeographer in Shanghai, on projects that included The Alley Plays (巷子戏, 2012) and the ongoing Suzhou Creek Project (走河, 2015–). He has published on early imperial Chinese culture, the figure of the ocean in capitalist geo-mythology, the global 1960s, and contemporary China. Recent essays have appeared in boundary 2, Historical Materialism, 热风学术, and the New Left Review.