Technology has become the double-edged sword of Asia's protests
(BBC) It began with a simple call - come and mourn the dead. On 27 November, many in China were reeling from the news of a deadly apartment fire. After nearly three years of strict zero-Covid lockdowns, the incident struck a deep, angry chord.
(BBC) It began with a simple call - come and mourn the dead.
On 27 November, many in China were reeling from the news of a deadly apartment fire. After nearly three years of strict zero-Covid lockdowns, the incident struck a deep, angry chord.
Across Chinese social media and messaging apps, calls to hold candlelight vigils began spreading spontaneously. Thousands responded. Holding up blank sheets of paper, chanting slogans denouncing their leaders, they transformed the vigils into mass demonstrations.
China's White Paper protests were far from an anomaly in the region. From Sri Lanka to Thailand, Asia has in recent years seen a rash of protests that erupted seemingly out of nowhere: some ebbed as they lost traction, and others were silenced in swift crackdowns. In Myanmar, pockets of resistance continue despite a descent into civil war.
This is no coincidence. Scholars point to a larger, worldwide phenomenon: as mass protests become increasingly common, they're also more likely to fail.
What's more, the tool that's proven crucial in powering these demonstrations - technology - has also hobbled them.
Data gathered by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2017 shows that anti-government protests have been steadily increasing around the world, peaking in 2022. But last year was also the least successful year for protests, according to Carnegie's definition, with the lowest percentage of movements that resulted in an immediate change in policy or leadership.
On a much broader scale, but using narrower definitions, academics at Harvard University have been tracking demonstrations and civil resistance since 1900. Counting non-violent "maximalist" campaigns - movements that aim to topple a government, expel a military occupation, or secede - they found a huge spike in the last two decades, but also a concurrent drop in the success rate. One theory for why this is happening is the rise of social media and messaging apps.
In the past, protests would be organised via community networks built on years of activism, which made them harder to stamp out, experts say. But with unprecedented connectivity, it's never been easier to spontaneously mobilise people - and also to track them down.
"It's a double-edged sword," said Ho-fung Hung, a Johns Hopkins University professor specialising in political economy and protests.
"Individuals need to find their grievances are not, in fact, individual - that others share their sentiments and there's a sense of community. So they mobilise. But if you rely too much on social media to organise, authoritarian regimes can also use it to censor and employ techniques of surveillance. The whole thing can be shut down quite easily." Governments are relying increasingly on what Professor Erica Chenoweth, one of the academics behind the Harvard study, calls "digital authoritarianism". And it goes beyond mere surveillance.
During the protests against the Myanmar coup in 2021, authorities shut down the internet entirely to cut off demonstrators from communicating with one another.
In Hong Kong and mainland China, police have attempted to track down protesters by searching phones and encrypted messaging apps. Chinese activists recently said they were approached by users of fake social media accounts posing as reporters, raising fears that this was yet another way to for authorities to gather information on them.
Another tactic is counter-attacking protesters to discredit them and their movement's legitimacy. This often plays out on social media where disinformation spreads quickly, fuelled by well-coordinated trolling and smear campaigns.
Blaming "foreign forces" for instigating protesters is one example - seen in the Indian authorities' response to the 2020 farmer demonstrations, and also a common refrain in Chinese state media that is echoed online by nationalist bloggers.
But digital authoritarianism is also just one of the many ways regimes have gotten better at shutting down protest movements, observers say. Other methods include launching stealth or pre-emptive crackdowns; shoring up internal support to prevent dissatisfied sections of the establishment from joining protesters (a key factor of the success of any movement); and using emergency powers during the Covid pandemic to quash dissent.
With democracy on the backpedal particularly in Asia, authoritarian governments can increasingly get away with this despite international criticism. "Now there is a solidarity of authoritarian and autocratic regimes, they are supporting each other… they crack down hard, and when there are international sanctions imposed on them, they can help each other out," Prof Hung said.