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Journalism of Courage
While it may be too early to predict whether the Chinese protests, like in Iran, would spread throughout the country and strengthen over time, there is an underlying similarity in the manner in which the protests originated in both countries.
The immediate triggers for both these movements seem to have only a tenuous link to the larger political consciousness in these countries, having originated in places and circumstances that perhaps would not have generally been expected to catalyse a nationwide movement in either country.
But in both cases, that’s exactly what seems to have happened.
This unrest followed a protest in the north-western city of Urumqi, where China’s strict Covid-19 lockdown rules were blamed for impeding the rescue efforts after a tower block fire in which 10 people are reported to have died. China’s authorities have subsequently denied those claims.
Urumqi, with a population of close to 4 million people, is the capital of the north-western Xinjiang province that has a predominantly Uyghur population, a largely Muslim ethnic minority group that is native to this area, and physically and culturally distinct from the Han Chinese majority population in multiple aspects.
Beijing began a sweeping crackdown in Xinjiang in the garb of counterterrorism action nearly five years ago, and has been seeking to forcibly assimilate the local Uyghur population with the rest of the country. This forced rehabilitation policy is reported to have support across the rest of China and is seen as having widened the divide between Xinjiang and the country’s Han-dominated mainland. Also, Urumqi has been under a strict lockdown since August, despite its daily Covid infections staying around 100.
That a protest triggered by an incident involving 10 deaths in this backward, almost disconnected part of China, which the rest of the population generally does not identify with in the general sense, is being seen as somewhat unexpected.
And that this event has resonated as far as downtown Shanghai, the south-western city of Chengdu and the central Chinese cities of Xian and Wuhan, and now to Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and even Tiananmen Square in the capital’s central business district, is something that the Chinese Communist Party would perhaps be rattled about.
A Kurdish woman’s death at the hands of the Iranian government triggered the unprecedented feminist mobilisation that has since gone on to envelop the entire country.
The ongoing series of protests and civil unrest against the government of Iran, triggered in the wake of the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by the morality police for wearing an “improper” hijab when she was visiting Tehran, originated in Saqqez, the capital of Saqqez County in Kurdistan Province in the country’s northwest bordering Iraq.
Saqqez, like Urumqi, is a restive region in Iran, which has a majority Sunni Muslims in predominantly Shia-dominated Iran.
Saqqez was also Mahsa’s hometown, and would, under normal circumstances, not have been considered a possible trigger point for any pan-Iran movement.
She may have died in a Tehran hospital, but the mass protests originated when local authorities tried to bury Mahsa in her hometown on the night of September 16 in order to prevent large crowds from attending the burial. Her family resisted and forced them to postpone the burial to early the next morning, when thousands of Saqqez residents turned up at the town’s main cemetery to protest the killing.
The protests quickly spread from Amini’s hometown to other cities in the province of Kurdistan and to other parts of Iran, and like in China now, eventually reached the capital Tehran and most other key cities.
The protesters’ rallying cry of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” is Kurdish in origin — it was first used during the Kurdish feminist resistance movements in the late 20th century and has historical ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and their women’s military wing, according to Jiyan Zandi writing in the Time magazine. In Farsi, it gets translated to “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi”, but people across Iran have chosen to stick with the Kurdish battlecry against the regime.
It took just two days after Mahsa’s burial for the protests to reach Tehran. The movement that has since engulfed the country, is seen to pose the most serious threat to the Islamic regime in the last 40 years.
