As unprecedented demonstrations against China’s covid restrictions sweep across the country, protestors from Beijing to Shanghai are holding aloft sheets of blank A4 paper, and WeChat feeds are filled with white squares. In a nation where political speech is censored, the white square has become a symbol of what citizens have been forced to leave unsaid by their increasingly authoritarian government. The squares, in that sense, are a way to weaponize enforced silence. The “White Paper Revolution” (????), as it has been dubbed, was sparked by an apartment fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, which killed 10 people on…