A woman holds a blank sheet of paper as demonstrators protest the deaths caused by an apartment complex fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, at the Langson Library on the campus of the University of ...

‘If you fear a blank sheet of paper, you are weak inside.’ — One much-quoted social media post from China. The antecedents of white-paper protests stretch back at least as far as 1924, when ...

The blank sheet “obviously has an existential meaning”, says the pioneering Chinese artist Xiao Lu, whose 1989 piece, Dialogue, is considered the “shot that started Tiananmen” and who has ...