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So, summing up your evidence: 1) one of the protest signs - one filtered through social media to look like that - is written weirdly. . 2) ... the protests don't make sense because "demonstrations are allowed, and you can plea for the national government to fix issues, but the news agencies won't cover them". Maybe they're doing that? 3) "protesting against the national government is punished". Yeah, it is in iran too, yet protests happened there. Protests happen a lot, including in countries they're illegal in. The long duration of covid measures is making people more willing to protest! Not to say that protests are human nature or anything, social phenomena like this are (somewhat) historically contingent and depend on a history of protests people learn about, but it's plausible they are protests.
This isn't enough to prove intelligence involvement. From the twitter thread:
The covid measures are by the national government, though. And most protestors aren't calling for regime change! I can believe western media is playing up 'regime change' as a component of the protest - but even they acknowledge it's a small fraction of protestors. From cnn:
Some china watchers on twitter have also claimed media / twitter randoms were mistranslating vocal protests, swapping covid slogans for anti-regime/pro-democracy slogans, which is plausible. But all of that undermines her argument - if most of the protestors are just protesting covid, then your reasons 2 and 3 and her thread aren't relevant! And in the context of large protests about covid, a subset of them making more extreme claims becomes more plausible. From her thread again:
This just sounds like the china-lover equivalent of 'americans would never vote biden because he is a communist subverter so TRUMP WON ' or 'america would never vote trump so RUSSIAN HACK ELECTION BOTS', tbh.
It's like the 'half of this board are feds' / 'half the twitter people who disagree with me are bots' claims (which was even less plausible pre gpt3, yet was about as common) - intelligence agencies exist and do things, but they don't do everything. Even if the CIA were involved in this, that involvement is very complex - even if the CIA ran 'protest-covid-china.cn', where the protestors downloaded pngs for their signs how much of a causal role in the protests does that actually have, might the protestors have used other signs otherwise?
You claim "I don't think they're entirely organic. Some are likely intelligence agency ops". Well, if 5% of the protests are 'ops' and 95% are 'organic', then how does that matter? Russia funds a bunch of leftist media organizations in the US that have a strong following on twitter (hence the 'russian state-affiliated media' tag). Does that make communism russian? Not at all.
This isn't to say US intelligence are 'the good guys' or would never do such a thing, not at all - this is much 'worse': In 2010, a new decade was dawning, and Chinese officials were furious. The CIA, they had discovered, had systematically penetrated their government over the course of years, with U.S. assets embedded in the military, the CCP, the intelligence apparatus, and elsewhere. The anger radiated upward to “the highest levels of the Chinese government,” recalled a former senior counterintelligence executive. ... Within the CIA, China’s seething, retaliatory response wasn’t entirely surprising, said a former senior agency official. “We often had a conversation internally, on how U.S. policymakers would react to the degree of penetration CIA had of China”—that is, how angry U.S. officials would have been if they discovered, as the Chinese did, that a global adversary had so thoroughly infiltrated their ranks.. But spies existing doesn't mean they're responsible for the car that just drove past your house.
I'd argue that it is hard to underestimate significance of even small fraction of protesters demanding Xi Jinping or CCP being replaced. This NEVER happens in China, never. There was a precedent to this in form of famous bannerman protest in Beijing calling for end of Covid restrictions and calling for free elections as the National Congress of CCP was in sitting. This was immediately suppressed and censored and the bannerman AKA Bridge Man was promptly disappeared - probably with his larger network of friends and family also severely punished up to three generations. But his message still spread out in various forms including Apple Airdrop campaign, for which Apple caved in to CCP. That is the reason why you normally never see these things in China, and yet here we are.
Again, even if it is a small portion of the crowd demanding a change it cannot be compared to the Western protests. This is huge shift in sentiment of the population. If you actually have vocal voices willing to take such an incredible risk, there are bound to be much more people silently sympathizing but scared to voice their opinion.
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