BEIJING, 29 Nov (Reuters) – The opponents of China’s anti-COVID measures are turning to dating apps as well as social media platforms which are not available in mainland China to avoid authorities, and spreading the word about their strategy and defiance playing a high-tech version with a mouse and cat played with police.

Images, videos and posts of protests against China’s COVID-19 curbs have been flooding onto China’s tightly censored online space following the weekend protests which saw activists transferring the videos to platforms outside of China before the censors remove the content, social media users claim.

Protesters took to the streets in many Chinese cities over the course of three days beginning on Friday, in a display of protests that were unprecedented since the presidency of President Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago.

There has been a growing sense of frustration in the wake of the stringent zero-COVID rule almost three years since the coronavirus erupted in the city center of Wuhan however the catalyst for the uprising was a devastating apartment that caught fire within the city’s western part of Urumqi.

Authorities denied reports via social networks that the lockdown stopped people from escaping the fire but it didn’t stop protests from taking place on Urumqi streets, footage of which were shared via social media platforms like Weibo as well as Douyin social media platforms.

Censors attempted to clean them off quickly, however they ended up being downloaded, and shared not just on Chinese social media, but as well in Twitter and Instagram that are both banned in China.

Other cities’ residents and students at campuses across China later organized their own gatherings. they then recorded and shared on the internet.

“People have been watching, and playing one the other,” said Kevin Slaten who is the director of research for China Dissent Monitor, a database operated by U.S.-based non-profit Freedom House.

State media have not even spoken about the protests, as well as the authorities have also said only a few words.

The foreign ministry stated on Tuesday, when questioned about the protests in China, that China is a nation that has the rule of law, and that all liberties and rights of citizens in China are guaranteed however they should remain within the confines of the law.

A top health official stated that public complaints regarding COVID controls were a result of overzealous implementation, and not from the procedures themselves.

CRYPTIC COORDINATES

Protesters who communicate via the popular , but highly blocked WeChat application keep their messages to a minimum according to online discussions about the strategy that were viewed by Reuters.

The location of planned gatherings is provided without explanation or are communicated by maps, or an ill-defined map that appears within the background of a sign.

“It happened in the early morning of the 27th when I discovered this information: 11.27, 9:30, Urumqi office,” said one person who participated in the Beijing protest scheduled for that date and time in front of the Urumqi municipal government office in Beijing.

Many are relying on virtual private networks (VPN) programs to bypass the China’s Great Firewall and on to encrypted messaging applications.

Friendship networks that are tight knit also exchange information using an “decentralised” model that , according to some, was inspired by the protests of Hong Kong 2019.

Many have created Telegram groups to communicate details about their towns according to social media users that dating apps are also being utilized to try and get less scrutiny, as per one Beijing-based protester who refused to be identified due to the security aspect.

Just a few hours before protesters rallied in cities like Shanghai and Chengdu online, flyers and pins of locations were widely distributed via Telegram communities, Instagram and Twitter, social media users claimed.

Social media is also used to provide tips on how to proceed if they’re arrested, for example, how to delete data off phones.

Police have been scouring phones for VPNs, as well as they have also been checking the where can get telegram acc app, which residents as well as social media users reported. VPNs are banned for the majority of users in China.

PARODY

One Twitter account that has nearly 700,000 followers that reads “Teacher Li is not your teacher” is getting a lot of attention after posting protest videos from all over China.

In one instance on Sunday the account read: “At present, there are more than a dozen requests every minute.”

Users of the internet are trying to get around the censors using humorous posts about patriotic themes or those that feature an empty square, which is a reference to the blank piece of paper as a symbol of protest Chinese users have adopted.

A viral message about China’s one-stop WeChat app, which is used by over a billion users and recited”good “good” for lines after lines, evidently mocking the tendency of media and the authorities to portray everything positively.

This post went viral and was shared prior to disappearing.

Certain WeChat users have uploaded videos of speeches by powerful the leaders like Mao Zedong and Xi voicing their support for freedom of speech or popular demonstrations in speeches that were made under various circumstances . These speeches now appear to be a good fit to critics of zero-COVID.

“Now the Chinese have arranged themselves and should not be taken lightly,” Xi says in the clip of a 2020 speech marking an anniversary marking the 70th year since China’s entry into Korean War that was widely posted on Monday.