I didn’t think I’d start the newsletter talking about something that, in a way, completely undermines the subject.

The subject I chose to cover — how and why Chinese people spend their money —feels ironic and out-of-touch in the moment, as protests erupted across campuses and streets against zero-Covid policy after 10 were killed by an apartment fire in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, and nine injured on Nov. 24.

Many questioned the official account saying that residents were allowed outside their building under Covid restrictions, and were angered by another official’s comment claiming that “certain residents lacked the capability of disaster prevention and self-rescue (部分居民自防自救能力弱)”.

Crowds gathered on Wulumuqi Middle Road on Nov. 26 for a vigil for the lost lives in Urumqi apartment fire on Nov. 24. Image: Unknown/WeChat

In Shanghai, the young people who have been chased after by consumer brands as the ‘target audience’ held a vigil on Nov. 26, on the street where they’d come for new coffee shops, boutique stores and brunches. Doing it on Wulumuqi Middle Road, which is named after Urumqi, was a meaningful choice.

Not in a million years would you think a protest could happen here, an 880-meter road in the former French Concession that is lined by trendy food and beverage establishments, including the famous grocer avocado lady, and a refurbished Wuzhong (short for “Wulumuqi Middle” in Chinese) wet market, which offered vegetables and fruits in Prada wrappings for the Italian luxury brand’s global fall/winter 2021 campaign.

A wet market on Wulumuqi Middle Road was briefly transformed into a pop-up for Prada’s fall/winter 2021 campaign “Feels Like Prada”. Yaling Jiang/Oct. 9, 2021

Yet, it did. The people in the videos and images that have made rounds on Twitter and WeChat are going head-to-head with the police: they are singing national anthem, they are demanding freedom, they are peaceful but firm.

As Danish journalist Philip Róin reported in his live tweets:

My friend who went there said she got really emotional, and she’s concerned of the mass surveillance in retrospect: “None of us are wearing masks, we’re probably all captured by the street cameras.”

Protesting in a heavily-surveilled state, where the police are enabled by phone trackers, facial recognition and powerful censorship machines built by Big Techs, takes guts and sacrifice. No one knows exactly how many were detained (one said two trucks full of people), no one knows what’s going to happen to their future and whether their life trajectories may change forever.

Some of my relatives were on the streets in 1989, many young people showed support during that time across China. But we never talked about it in the first 18 years of my life until I asked. As Louisa Lim, a former NPR and BBC correspondent, pointed out in her 2015 book The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited:

“Memory is dangerous in a country built to function on national amnesia.”

I get it, most Chinese people swallowed the pain because they wanted to have a livelihood instead of struggling for food.

Although my newsletter will still be very much about the consumer markets, I think this snapshot of history, which took place at a location that captures the zeitgeist of China’s consumption hub, matters greatly. I feel pessimistic and hopeful at the same time.

This is also when businesses and brands could learn about more the complicated country and its people. Chinese consumers aren’t all taking selfies at so-called ‘wanghong’ (a subset of consumer culture shaped by influencer marketing) retail spots, they aren’t just boycotting Western brands because of patriotism.

Yes, the ones that took it to the streets in Shanghai may just be a few hundreds, but they represent a group of individuals whose life choices are affected by the society and politics, with the latter increasingly looming large.

Let’s not look away.

Crowds gathered on Wulumuqi Middle Road on Nov. 26 for a vigil for the lost lives in Urumqi apartment fire on Nov. 24. Image: Unknown/WeChat

Following the Yuan

Shanghai protest shows everything is…