Opinion: The sign that says nothing — and everything

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CNN
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“We were the people who were not in the papers,” says the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom,” the book’s central character Offred adds, remembering what her life was like before she fell under the control of an authoritarian regime.

The blank page – and the infinite possibilities it offers – is now a powerful emblem in the real-life fight for freedom. After fears that democracy was in retreat, autocratic regimes around the world are running up against the elemental human desire for self-determination.

As Christopher Rea and Jeffrey Wasserstrom noted, “the defining symbol of the protests” last weekend in Shanghai and other cities against China’s rigid zero-Covid policy “has been the holding up of a blank sheet of paper, a fill-in-your-own-punchline to the absurd joke that is Chinese state repression.” In China’s social media, it’s called the “Blank Page Movement.” The technique was also used to protest the national security law in Hong Kong two years ago.

“A blank sheet, too, speaks volumes,” Rea and Wasserstrom wrote. “It makes fun of a censorship regime in which virtually any word can become taboo. It makes the individual illegible to a mass surveillance state, denying that state its invasive prerogative. When an individual says nothing, their words cannot be taken away.”

Another creative form of protest: “Last week, students at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University were seen holding up sheets of paper printed with a physics equation dating to the 1920s. If you’re so smart, it seemed to say, decode this! Chinese netizens were up to the task, tracing the allusion to Alexander Friedmann, who not only has a surname suggesting liberation, but who theorized that the universe was – at least for people not on lockdown, presumably – expanding.”

A year ago, as John Avlon observed, democracy was considered to be threatened in many parts of the world, as authoritarian leaders gained strength. But the protests in China and Iran, along with the spectacular failure of Russian…