Halloween revellers in Shanghai have poked fun at the Chinese authorities with their costumes, dressing up as Covid prevention workers, surveillance cameras and China’s falling stock market.
Videos posted on social media showed police shepherding away people with particularly subversive costumes on Tuesday night, including one dressed as Lu Xun, a Chinese writer from the early 20th century whose fable about a useless scholar has become a meme for China’s unemployed youth.
The Lu Xun impersonator carried a sign that said: “Studying medicine cannot save the Chinese” – a Lu Xun quote – and recited one of the author’s famous sayings: “Those who can do things, do things. Those who can speak out, speak out.” Police moved him off the street shortly afterwards. The Guardian was unable to verify the date of the video but the impersonator was standing in front of a car with a Shanghai licence plate.
This year’s Halloween festivities were the largest gathering of people on the streets of Shanghai since thousands of people in cities across China demonstrated against China’s harsh zero-Covid regime in November last year. Those protests were seen as one of the reasons that Beijing abandoned the restrictions shortly afterwards.
Shanghai had endured a particularly severe lockdown, with millions of residents largely confined to their homes for three months in 2022. Many vented their frustrations on social media before taking to the streets in November, in a show of dissent the likes of which has not been seen in China for several decades.
Other tongue-in-cheek costumes posted to social media this year included a person dressed as Winnie-the-Pooh – a mocking reference to Xi Jinping, China’s leader, often censored on social media – and several people dressed as Covid protection workers, who wore white hazmat suits during the pandemic.
上海万圣节 pic.twitter.com/kDVvu6kCJe
— 李老师不是你老师 (@whyyoutouzhele) October 31, 2023
Another photograph, described as coming from Shanghai, showed a person holding a sign with the slogan: “It is forbidden to flow backwards.” The sign depicted a graphic of a man surfing a wave on a yellow background.
The costume appeared to be an oblique reference to Li Keqiang, China’s former premier, who died on Friday. Li was seen as an economic liberaliser who pledged that China’s reform and opening up would never stop, saying: “The Yellow River and Yangtze River will not flow backwards.” Public mourning of Li has been strictly controlled as authorities fear an outpouring of grief for the man seen to represent an alternative vision for China that has failed to materialise with Xi tightening the Communist party’s grip on the country.
