The blank white paper as a disobedient object

On November 24, 2022, the White Paper Protests were started by Chinese people to protest against China’s strict zero-COVID policy and excessive censorship during the pandemic lockdown. In the protests, blank white papers were used as a means of protest. Framing the blank white paper as a ‘disobedient object’, our paper intends to capture a glimpse of the aesthetic composition of the protest movement. For this, we collected responses from 42 Chinese citizens about their views of the ‘white paper’. Based on the data, we interpret the aesthetic composition of the protest movement in three parts, ‘Blank Means:’, ‘Blank Fiction’ and ‘Making with Blank’. Treating the blank white paper as a design artefact, our concern is not just the object’s visual characteristics as a form of expression but also the potential and capability of ‘Blank’ to facilitate transformation and change that we believe is what a design object should do.