In this thought-provoking blog post, we examine the current state of free speech in China and the challenges faced by those who dare to speak out. Learn about the individuals and movements working towards a more open society, and find out how you can contribute to the fight for freedom.

Ban Great Firewall

In China, the ‘Great Firewall’ Is Changing a Generation

Yaqiu Wang

Former Senior China Researcher

In May 2020, Wuhan Diary, the Chinese writer Fang Fang’s account of the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, was released in English by HarperCollins.

Fang is no radical. She’s the former chairwoman of the Hubei Provincial Writers Association, a government-linked group. She did criticize the initial coverup of the virus by local officials in Wuhan, but didn’t raise any questions about the response of the central government in Beijing, or about the authoritarian political system that encouraged the cover-up. Fang also generously praised low-level Communist Party cadres, front-line health workers and volunteers.

The book, adapted from a series of posts on Chinese social media, was published at a time when many across China were enraged by the death of Li Wenliang, a young Wuhan doctor who was punished for circulating an early report of the virus and then died of Covid-19. So one would think that Fang’s book would have been welcome—a very moderate assessment of the crisis, at a moment when many in China were already reflecting on the political system’s strengths and weaknesses in handling the virus.

That’s not what happened. Instead, Fang’s decision to have her diary published internationally unleashed a backlash in China—and not from the Communist Party, but from Chinese citizens online. The critics, mostly young people, accused Fang of failing to highlight the Chinese government’s success in containing the outbreak, and of being a tool for “anti-China forces.”

On the popular Chinese microblog Weibo, a user commented, “the West smears us and wants to get together to demand sky-high compensation. Fang Fang passes the sword hilt to them to attack the nation.” Another user blamed Fang for racist attacks on ethnic Chinese in Canada. Some exposed Fang’s personal information, including her home address, and alleged that she lived a luxurious lifestyle at the expense of taxpayers, which Fang refuted.

This attack on Fang illustrates a striking change in China under President Xi Jinping, especially among the internet-savvy and globally connected young Chinese who have long been most open to different worldviews.

For many years, the internet in China was seen as a channel for new thinking, or at least greater openness; Chinese citizens could go online to expose government corruption and criticize leaders. Online discussions were relatively free and open, and users, especially younger ones, had an eager appetite for learning and debating big ideas about political systems and how China should be governed.

That has changed sharply in recent years as a crackdown on the internet and civil society has become more thorough and sophisticated—and the government’s messaging has grown more nationalistic.

While nationalistic sentiment among Chinese youth has always been strong in certain areas of national security—especially when it concerns “sovereignty” or territorial issues, such as the Senkaku Islands, Taiwan and Tibet—in recent years it has increasingly spread to discussions of culture, technology and even medicine. Now young online Chinese, once conduits for new ideas that challenge the power structure, are increasingly part of Beijing’s defense operation.

Widely popular movies, TV shows and books portraying the Chinese society in a critical light are attacked for being “unpatriotic.” The 2001 comedy Big Shot’s Funeral, critically acclaimed in China at the time, a stinging satire of China’s fledgling capitalists, is now deemed “a smear on national entrepreneurs.” Once a hero for making Chinese innovation global, TikTok’s founder, Zhang Yiming, is denounced as a U.S. “lapdog” for negotiating to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations—despite the fact he didn’t actually have a choice. Chinese scientists who question the scientific proof, clinical validation and effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine are labeled “Han traitors.”

For anyone concerned about U.S.-China relations, or China’s with the rest of the world, it’s hard to overstate the importance of this change. The past 10 years in China have seen a combination of communications crackdown, ramped-up propaganda and rapid expansion of surveillance efforts that—when paired with China’s rising global ambitions—have changed the public conversation in China, even among educated and younger people. It will make it harder, even in a post-Trump world, for the world’s great powers to avoid splitting further apart, perhaps dangerously.

To anyone who believes global openness in the internet is a one-way street, the situation in China is a troubling rebuke. What happened?

Ten years ago, it was possible to believe we were heading to a very different direction. Millions of people—many my age—used social media every day to discuss social and political issues and to pressure local officials to right wrongs, prompting the widely known slogan, “changing China through collective spectating.” Despite the risks, tech-savvy young people made songs, cartoons and animations to condemn censorship and one-party rule, and photoshopped the country’s top leaders to make fun of them.

When I was in college in China in the late 2000s, while I still had to study and pass government-mandated ideological courses such as “Mao Zedong Thought” and “Deng Xiaoping Theory,” vibrant exchanges with like-minded millennials on online platforms such as Twitter and the Chinese blogging site Bullog stoked my interest in the unofficial version of Chinese politics and history. Writings and activism by liberal intellectuals like Ai Weiwei, Xu Zhiyong and Liu Xiaobo played a critical role in shaping my views. International news websites such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal provided me with information about China unrestrained by domestic press censorship. All these served as antidotes to official teachings I got through China’s education system.

China’s internet censorship system, colloquially known as the Great Firewall, has existed since 2000, when the Ministry of Public Security launched the Golden Shield Project, a giant mechanism of censorship and surveillance aimed at restricting content, identifying and locating individuals, and providing immediate access to personal records. Initially, the Firewall blocked only a handful of anti-Communist Party Chinese-language websites, and it was relatively easy to circumvent the blockage to access them. Gradually, more websites got blocked, and netizens became increasingly irritated.

In May 2011, a student at Wuhan University in China’s Hubei province threw eggs and shoes at Fang Binxing, the architect of the Great Firewall, when Fang was giving a speech at the university. Appropriately or not, numerous netizens cheered the student’s action, and called Fang “a running dog for the government” and “the enemy of netizens.” In January 2010, when Google was forced to pull out of China after it refused to comply with government demands to filter its search results, some netizens, risking police harassment, gathered to offer flowers in front of Google’s Beijing office.

Online ideas also turned into offline activism. Human rights activists, lawyers and journalists came together to investigate, publicize and litigate cases involving land seizures, forced evictions, environmental degradation and employment discrimination. In college, I volunteered at legal aid centers for migrant workers where I met human rights lawyers, children who lost most of their fingers while illegally operating printing machines, and American law students from universities like Harvard and Columbia. Everyone involved was determined to find justice and build a nation rooted in the rule of law, and foreigners were welcome to help out.

In 2009, when I moved to Washington, D.C., to study and work, I came with a sense of optimism. I had grown up in a China that was getting better each day, both more prosperous and more open. I, the daughter of farmers from a small village, wanted to learn what I could in the West, and come back to help our country grow into not just an economic superpower, but a land of freedom and rights.

However, the country that I had thought I would go back to was quickly disappearing.

In February 2011, an online appeal calling for people in China to emulate the Arab Spring uprisings resulted in small gatherings of curious onlookers in Beijing and several other cities. The authorities took it as a threat, and reacted by rounding up over 100 of the country’s most outspoken critics and forcibly “disappearing” many of them for months, without any legal procedure, subjecting them to forced sleep deprivation, abusive interrogations and threats.

Beijing’s disproportionate response to a nonexistent “revolution” indicated a fundamental fear of independent activism, and considerably chilled the vibrant and by then ever-expanding online political discourse.

In late 2012, Xi Jinping became the paramount leader of China, assuming the position of secretary general of the Communist Party. Xi’s rule has been marked by accelerated repression of the civil society and ideological control.

In November 2013, the Communist Party issued Document No.9, an internal communique warning its members against “seven perils” that could undermine its rule, including “universal values,” civil society and a free press. With the document setting the tone, what followed was a period of unrelenting crackdowns on the internet, media, civil society and education that largely blocked any meaningful channels through which young people could gain perspectives that are different from official narratives.

Gradually, the experience of being online in China changed. The list of banned words and images grew. Articles and posts that managed to be published got removed quickly. The government got savvier, and more aggressive, about using its own technology: AI-powered censors could scan images to determine whether they contained certain sensitive words or phrases. An increasing number of foreign websites were blocked by the Great Firewall. Twitter has long been inaccessible, and so have the Times and the Journal. It is still possible to use VPNs and other circumvention tools to scale the Great Firewall, but it is getting increasingly dangerous to do so. Some people went to jail for selling VPNs, and others were fined for merely using them.

The government also tightened its ideological grip over universities and schools. In 2019, Xi called for educators to fend off “false ideas and thoughts” when teaching ideologies and politics courses.

University teachers who dare to deviate from textbooks get reported by student informants who keep tabs on their professors’ ideological views. Some professors, including foreigners, were punished for making comments critical of the government.

Perhaps the most devastating form of censorship is physical. Authorities have silenced numerous leading writers, rights lawyers and activists who served as the conscience of the nation: aforementioned Ai Weiwei is in exile, Xu Zhiyong has been forcibly disappeared, and Liu Xiaobo died three years ago in state custody. In July 2015, authorities rounded up and interrogated without counsel about 300 rights lawyers, legal assistants, and activists across the country, many of whom were subjected to torture and other ill treatment and a few are still in prison today. Mostly recently, law professor Xu Zhangrun was detained for six days on bogus—and laughable—“soliciting prostitutes” charges. Police jailed some Twitter users while forcing others to close their accounts.

At the same time, against the backdrop of China’s economic rise and growing influence around the world, the Communist Party has been ramping up its nationalistic propaganda, promoting the idea that a diminishing West, especially the United States, is determined to thwart China’s rise. The Chinese government still invokes the idea that China suffered “a century of humiliation” in the hands of these “imperialist powers.”

When so few have alternative sources of information, government propaganda becomes more believable: The coronavirus was brought to China by the U.S. Army; protesters in Hong Kong are “violent and extreme” and instigated by U.S. intelligence; the election of pro-independence candidate Tsai Ing-wen to Taiwan’s presidency was a result of American manipulation. Inside China, people are living in an information bubble that the government is getting better at controlling.

In some cases, this is almost leading to a generational split. In my cohort—those who experienced a relatively free internet as young people—many strongly resent the Great Firewall. Among people who started college after Xi took power, however, there is a strong impulse to defend it.

Having grown up never hearing of or using international platforms such as Twitter and Google, they believe the Firewall has protected them from false information and the country from social instability. They also think it has created the necessary conditions for the rise of China’s own tech giants, of which they are understandably proud.

The worldview they’re exposed to is one in which foreign criticism of the Chinese government is often reflexively thought to be backed by the U.S. government. But while the U.S. is perceived to be omnipresent in activities to undermine China, it is at the same time chaotic and dysfunctional domestically. The way the state media depicts the U.S.—ridden by gun violence and police violence—has my own family constantly worried that I might get shot on the street.

Some examples of this new nationalism are absurd but largely harmless, like a storm of criticism that erupted around a famed infectious disease doctor for suggesting that Chinese children should have protein-rich eggs and milk for breakfast, rather than rice porridge. He was lambasted online for “worshiping things foreign” and “sucking up to Americans,” though in this case the state media came to his defense, explaining that protein is good for boosting the immune system to fight the virus.

But some nationalistic fervor has the potential for real-world harm. Recently, there have been renewed calls for the Chinese government to seize the opportunity created by the pandemic to take Taiwan by force. Videos and photos have also emerged of people, including children, warning or wishing for the deaths of Americans.

Of course, not all youth are strident nationalists. Now and then, students in China or living abroad quietly reach out to me to express their objections to the Chinese government’s human rights violations and political aggression. While rising nationalism in China is a reality and policymakers should take it seriously, they should also keep in mind that many in and from China live in silent fear, struggling with guilt for not speaking up.

At minimum, countries around the world should keep their universities, institutions and open societies supportive of and welcoming to those who want to learn and debate. Governments and institutions should also invest in overseas independent Chinese-language media—many young people inside the Great Firewall quietly find ways to jump over the wall to look for information—and technological tools that can be used to circumvent and even dismantle censorship. Finally, they need to keep supporting journalists, writers and activists inside the country—the real agents of change.

“Netizens around the world unite to tear down the CCP’s cyber Berlin Wall!” The founder of the wall-tearing down movement talks about China’s media environment

washington —On the eve of World Press Freedom Day on May 3, 2023, Qiao Xinxin, the founder of the wall removal movement, called on netizens around the world to unite and ask governments and parliaments of all countries to fully understand the harm this electronic prison wall has caused to human society and work together to dismantle the CCP’s network Berlin Wall. The Tear Down the Wall movement defines the Internet Firewall established and operated by the Chinese Communist Party as an information war against the free world and an extremely serious crime against humanity. It is also an extremely wide-ranging crime of apartheid. Advocates of the movement said they would file a complaint with the International Criminal Court.

In the past two months, some overseas Chinese democracy and human rights activists have actively carried out a campaign to dismantle the Great Firewall (GFW, also known as the Great Firewall or the Great Firewall) on the Internet, which blocks overseas online information and news communications. The initiators of the movement call this virtual wall that isolates mainland China's 1.4 billion people or more than 1 billion Internet users the "cyber Berlin Wall" and vividly compare the local area network space within the wall to an electronic prison.

The "Tear Down the Wall Movement" (BanGFW in English) calls on overseas Chinese people's movement circles to respond to the dissident Ms. Tong Yi's initiative in the U.S. Congress and make the demolition of the wall the first priority in promoting China's social progress, aiming to completely dismantle the CCP's Internet Firewall.

The Wall Down Movement believes that in order to maintain its brutal totalitarian rule, the CCP spends huge sums of money to build and operate the Great Firewall, deliberately isolating the 1.4 billion people in mainland China from the more than 6 billion people outside the wall for a long time. This is an important part of the information war against the free and democratic world. ring, committing a crime against humanity. One of the movement’s demands is to bring the chief elements of the Chinese Communist Party responsible for the establishment and operation of the Great Firewall to the International Criminal Court in The Hague on the basis of collecting sufficient evidence.

The document "The Wall-Tearing Down Guide" written by the founders of the movement states that "those who built the wall committed a crime against humanity by isolating information. The urgency of a global public trial of the Great Firewall is no less urgent than that of Putin who invaded Ukraine. Pioneers of the wall-tearing down We call on the 8 billion people around the world to join the wall-tearing movement, to protest by writing posts online and holding placards on the streets, and to vote online in support of wall-tearing. Ultimately, the leaders and suppliers of wall-building will be punished by national parliaments and the International Criminal Court. Issue severe sanctions to achieve the purpose of demolishing the wall."

In an exclusive interview with Voice of America, Qiao Xinxin, the founder of the wall-tearing down movement, focused on his journey before and after launching the wall-tearing down movement and his outlook for the future. He called on netizens around the world to unite and work together to dismantle the CCP’s cyber Berlin Wall.

Reporter: The 30th World Press Freedom Day is approaching. What is the current status of China’s media environment?

Qiao Xinxin: This year marks the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day. As a Chinese journalist in exile, I believe that without press freedom, democracy and human rights are impossible. Human rights lawyers and journalists are often targeted by the Chinese government. Even if you are in the United States, Europe, or even Southeast Asia, the Chinese Internet Police will focus on overseas expeditions.

Recently, because I am leading the wall-tearing down movement and I was originally contributing articles to Radio Free Asia, my family members in China are now being threatened and asked to delete my articles.

Citizen journalists like Fang Bin and Zhang Zhan, who originally reported on the new coronavirus, are still in detention. For example, Uyghur journalist Kurban Mamut was secretly arrested and even sentenced to 15 years because he reported the massacre of Uyghurs. Therefore, I hope that the international community will pay attention to their fate and urge the CCP to release them as soon as possible.

Reporter: What is the purpose of launching the wall demolition movement? Is it going well so far?

Qiao Xinxin: In order to pursue freedom of press and freedom of speech, we are now launching a wall-breaking movement involving 8 billion people around the world to dismantle the CCP’s Internet firewall. This is more important than banning TikTok and ending the war in Ukraine. In the past 40 days or so, we have attracted nearly one million fans.

Reporter: Why does the wall-tearing down movement regard the CCP’s Great Firewall as a crime against humanity? Why do you advocate seeking the support of governments and parliaments around the world and going to the International Court of Justice to sue the responsible parties? ​

Qiao Xinxin: Because since 2000, China has become the world's largest electronic prison. China spends US$6 billion every year to build an Internet firewall, blocking 310,000 websites around the world such as Google, Twitter, BBC, CNN, etc., so that everyone can only access the Communist Party’s brainwashing information.

In recent years, China has even exported firewall technology to Russia, Iran, Myanmar, Cambodia and other countries. It forces 1.7 billion people to hate the United States, oppose Japan, and attack Taiwan every day for no reason, causing continuous conflicts around the world.

The Great Firewall is the key and most critical part of the CCP’s information war against the free and democratic world. We invite you to join our movement to tear down the walls. That is to hold up placards and post, and then bring it to the International Criminal Court and national parliaments for a public trial, and impose strong sanctions.

Reporter: Why is dismantling the Great Firewall of the Internet strategically important to the freedom of speech and information and communication freedom of Chinese netizens? What are the specific contents of the action plan proposed by the wall-tearing movement?

Qiao Xinxin: The two main tools used by the CCP to maintain totalitarian rule are lies and violence, which correspond to the pen and the gun respectively. The firewall is the biggest tool for its rule of lies. So we've looked at NATO's rules for information warfare. We must elevate the firewall to the level of information warfare. This is also a word that the CCP has mentioned for a long time, information war, fighting an information war. Therefore, we must help Europeans, Americans, and Japanese to deeply understand the harm of this information war. The 1.4 billion Chinese people are the biggest victims, and they are no exception. This corresponding evidence of crime can be confirmed in seconds, because websites such as Google, Twitter, Youtube, and BBC are blocked, which is a common knowledge to passers-by.

So we just have to keep writing posts and raising placards to attract people to continue to discuss it online. It is convenient for us to go to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute, and to lobby the parliaments of various countries.

Go to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to file charges, mainly against Fang Binxing and Yan Wangjia. These two people are highly educated, both have doctorate degrees. One is the father of firewalls, and the other is the mother of firewalls. They are technicians representing millions of wall technologies in the wall, as well as Internet police. We need to make key accusations.

Others, like the United States, now have a US$9.5 billion democracy fund. Our wall-tearing down movement also needs to find ways to write some copywriting to see if we can get some funding. At present, the force in the Chinese-speaking community is relatively weak and disorganized. We must try our best to seek support from the forces of justice in the English-speaking, Russian-speaking, Japanese-speaking, French-speaking and other international circles. This will allow us to quickly expand this matter. We all know that the CCP’s domestic economy is in turmoil. The long-term wolf warrior has also made many countries hate it. So this regime is very unstable now. If any country takes more sanctions against it now, it will make things worse.

All in all, it is to strengthen the campaign, because in the end it may be necessary to leverage the pen and knife of the international community, and let everyone sanction its overseas stolen money, food, oil and gas, chips, technology, etc. Sanctions order, let alone the sanction order in place, as long as everyone starts talking about it, it will be very panic. So I hope everyone will come and do something good, tear down walls, post posts and hold up placards.

Reporter: As a Chinese university graduate born after 1985, what kind of experience made you abandon the propaganda and brainwashing education of the Chinese Communist Party authorities and take great risks to pursue freedom of the press and freedom of speech?

Qiao Xinxin: I was born in 1986 in a small mountain village in Hunan, China. So now I have been in Southeast Asia for ten years. I have been taught since I was a child that I should quickly join the party and take the civil service examination. I have never joined the party. There is resistance to the Communist Party. My grandfather starved to death in 1959. My uncle liked to create inventions when I was very young, and often designed some agricultural machinery. But it does not receive any government subsidies. Later, I often went to the county government and Beijing to petition. Over the years, he has told me a lot about these things and the shady secrets of the Chinese Communist Party.

Later, after I went to college, I saw the three-hour video of the Tiananmen Massacre in the dormitory next door to my neighbor. I was shocked. During this period, I just went to work as a part-time employee at an American cultural center. I often went hiking, shopping, and worshiping with Americans, young people from various states in the United States, or older people. Anyway, it’s an American holiday, Thanksgiving Day. The whole feeling is very relaxing. They are very respectful. Most of them still make me feel very cute, and they are not as evil as the CCP’s public opinion machine promotes.

Later, after I went to work in Guangzhou in my first year, I often went to the U.S. Consulate General to attend some cultural lectures. In 2012, I also went to observe the US election finals. Then at the same time I also read the Hong Kong English daily newspapers for a year. These were eye-openers for me. I quickly came to a conclusion. Why can't we be like our friends of the same age in the United States, where our wives and children stay together and communicate all over the world? My conclusion is that the CCP has robbed most of our wealth, causing us to be very hard and suffering all the time.

Reporter: You said that your relatives in your hometown have been threatened because of your remarks and activities overseas. Are you worried about your personal safety now?

Qiao Xinxin: I am now launching a movement to tear down the wall. The Internet police of the Ministry of Public Security of the Communist Party of China have threatened my family and asked me to delete any negative remarks about China. Otherwise, arrest will be made. Of course I don't care about them. Because they themselves are an infringement of the sovereignty of other countries and transnational law enforcement. I abide by the law here, am friendly, have no personal grudges, and am in good health. So I'm not afraid of other people. But just in case something unexpected happens, I have handwritten a non-suicide statement in Chinese and English. If anything happens to me, please contact the CCP.

A4 REVOLUTION

In Nov 2022, there have been scenes of unrest and protest movements in various places across China. While there were protests in Shanghai, Beijing also saw crowds gathering around the Liangmahe area in the city’s Chaoyang District. Some videos showed crowds softly singing the song “Farewell” in commemoration of those who lost their lives during the deadly inferno in Urumqi. Later, people protested against stringent Covid measures. “The crowds at Liangmahe are amazing,” some people on Weibo commented. Photos and videos coming from the area showed how people were holding up blank sheets of white paper.

The students in Nanjing and Xi’an also held up blank paper sheets in protest of censorship and as the only ‘safe’ way to say what could otherwise not be said. This form of protest also popped up during the Hong Kong protests, as also described in the recent book by Louisa Lim (Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong). The recurring use of blank paper sheets led to some dubbing the protests an “A4 Revolution.” “When can we have freedom of speech? Maybe it can start at Beijng’s Liangmahe,” one person on Weibo wrote on Sunday night. Another Beijing-based netizen wrote: “Before going to sleep I saw what was happening in Liangmahe on my WeChat Moments and then I looked at Weibo and saw that the Xicheng area had added 279 new Covid cases. I started thinking about my own everyday life and the things I am doing. I can’t help but feel a sense of isolation, because I can’t fight and do not dare to raise my voice.” “I didn’t dare to believe this is happening in 2022. I didn’t dare to believe this is happening in Beijing. I do not dare to believe that again it will all have been useless tomorrow morning,” one Weibo user commented. During the night, various people at the scene shouted out things such as “we want to go out and work,” and other hopes they have. One person yelled: “I want to go out and see a movie!” “I want to go and see a movie.” The phrase “I wanna go watch a movie” was also picked up on social media, with some people commenting : “I am not interested in political regimes, I just want to be able to freely see a movie.” “I want to see a movie! I want to sit in a cinema and watch a movie! I want to watch a movie that is uncensored!” Despite social media users showing a lot of support for students and locals standing up and making their voices heard, not everyone was supportive of this gathering in Beijing.

Some suggested that since Liangmahe is near Beijing’s foreign embassy district, there must be some evil “foreign forces” meddling and creating unrest. Others expressed that people were starting to demand too many different things instead of solely focusing on China’s zero Covid policies, losing the momentum of the original intention of the protest. Political commentator Hu Xijin also posted about the recent unrest on his Weibo account on Sunday night: “The people have the right to express their opinions, and you may have good and honest aspirations and have the intention to express legitimate demands. But I want to remind you that many things have their own rules, and when everyone participates in the movement, its direction might become very difficult for ordinary participants to continue to control, and it can easily to be used or even hijacked by separate forces, which may eventually turn into a flood that destroys all of our lives.” Hu also called on people to keep striving to solve existing problems, but to stay clear-headed, suggesting that it is important for the people and the government to maintain unity in this challenging time. The term “outside forces” or “external forces” increasingly popped up in social media discussions on late Sunday night. “I worry a lot of meddling by external forces. Let’s be vigilant of a color revolution. I just hope things will get better,” one netizen from Hubei wrote. “Young people should not be incited by a few phrases and blindly follow. Everyone will approve of people rationally defending their rights, but stay far away from color revolutions.” The idea that foreign forces meddle in Chinese affairs for their own agenda has come up various times over the past years, during the Hong Kong protests but also during small-scale protests, such as a local student protest in Chengdu in 2021. The term “color revolution” is recurring in these kind of discussions, with some netizens suggesting that foreign forces, such as the CIA, are trying to get local people to cause unrest through riots or demonstrations to undermine the stability of the government. “It’s not always external forces, it can also just be opposition,” one person on Weibo replied: “In every country you’ll have different opinions.” “What outside forces?” another commenter said: “I’m not an external force! I am just completely fed up with the Covid measures!”