Dear All, The past week has been a rocky one for China’s ruling elite with anti-lockdown/zero-covid protests erupting in multiple cities across the country. This week’s edition of Sinification will not be covering this major issue for one simple reason: Chinese think-tank analysts and scholars on the mainland have remained largely silent on this particularly sensitive topic. Indeed, censors in China have been going to great lengths to prevent Chinese citizens from sending and receiving information relating to these incidents (not always successfully). On Sunday, for instance, at the height of the protests, news outlets in China remained silent about them. Tellingly, the top news item on Baidu (supposedly ranked by popularity…) was a story about