White Paper Movement Anniversary Commemoration on Capitol Steps

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There comes a point where tyranny becomes so obvious, the censorship so overbearing that slogans, arguments, and manifestos are no longer needed. All you need is a blank sheet of paper. Everyone can fill in the content, even the oppressors.

No one in China, no one watching from abroad, was at all confused about what the A4 protesters’ blank sheets of paper said. Most importantly, the CCP got the message, loud and clear, as if a dissident manifesto had been published on the front page of People’s daily.

Here is what Xi Jinping read on those blank pieces of paper:

The blank paper said: “We want to be masters of our own destiny…not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their wild ambitions. 

The blank paper said: “Why? It’s my duty?” 

The blank paper said: “We don’t want covid tests, we want food. We don’t want Cultural Revolution, we want reform. We don’t want a dictator, we want votes. We don’t want lies, we want dignity.” 

The blank, white paper said all of that and more. It didn’t just echo with history. It spoke of the future. And it said it with style, in the new language of the Chinese netizen - clever, sly, ironic, and contemptuous of the CCP's thuggish, blunt power.

The Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”

It is easy for us here, as members of Congress, as Americans, to stand up for truth and think we are courageous, but we are not. 

The real brave ones are Peng Lifa and the White Paper protesters who are sitting in jail for a simple truth, the truth was printed on their blank pieces of paper as surely as if they had held big character posters: that Chinese people want and deserve freedom.

That simple truth is what brings us here today. Chinese people, like all of us, want freedom. Chinese people, like all of us, deserve freedom.