A mostly masked crowd in Beijing's Liangmaqiao district held up blank sheets of paper and called for an end to tough Covid policies.Across the city at the elite Tsinghua University, protesters held up printouts of a physics formula known as the Friedmann equation because its namesake sounds like “free man.” Similar scenes played out in cities and college campuses across China in a wave of protest that has been compared to the 1989 student movement that ended in a bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square.“The mood on WeChat was like nothing I've ever experienced before,” says one British national who has lived in Beijing for more than a decade, who asked not to be named to avoid scrutiny from Chinese authorities.“There seemed to be a recklessness and excitement in the air as people became bolder and bolder with every post, each new person testing the government’s —and their own—boundaries.” He saw posts unlike those he’d seen before on China’s tightly controlled internet, like a picture of a Xinjiang official bluntly captioned “Fuck off.”Chinese netizens have built up a sense of what censors will and won’t allow, and many know how to skirt some internet controls.The anti-lockdown demonstrations began as unofficial vigils for the victims of a fatal fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province."