A Lonely Protest in Beijing Inspires Young Chinese to Find Their Voice - Newyork Times Reports!
As beginner dissenters, they’re timid and scared. But they are experiencing a quiet
political awakening, unhappy about censorship, repression and “
zero Covid.”
A protester unfurled two banners on a highway overpass in central Beijing on Oct. 13, denouncing
Xi Jinping as a “despotic traitor.” China’s censors
went to great lengths to scrub the internet of any reference to the act of dissent, prohibiting all discussion and shutting down many offending social media accounts.
The slogans didn’t go away. Instead, they caught on inside and outside China, online and offline.
Encouraged by the Beijing protester’s extremely rare display of courage, young Chinese are using creative ways to spread the banners’ anti-Xi messages. They
graffitied the slogans in public toilets in China. They used Apple’s AirDrop feature to send photos of the messages to fellow passengers’ iPhones in subway cars. They posted the slogans on university campuses all over the world. They organized chat groups to bond and shouted “Remove Xi Jinping” in front of Chinese embassies. This all happened while the Communist Party was convening an all-important congress in Beijing and putting forth an image of a country singularly united behind a great leader.
The aftermath of the Beijing protest “made me feel, for the first time, hopeful,” said an organizer of an Instagram account known as
Citizens Daily CN, which posts photo submissions of sightings of anti-Xi messages. “In this era of oppressive silence, there’s anger in silence, hope in despair.”
Young people like him are emerging as unexpected rebels against Mr. Xi, who over the weekend became
China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong by securing a norm-breaking third term and stuffing the party’s leadership with loyalists.
While there has always been political dissent in China, the country’s Generation Zers are known for toeing the government line, both because they grew up in China’s most prosperous period and because the party is very good at using the internet and social media for indoctrination.
Now, though, some of them are experiencing a quiet political awakening, having grown unhappy about the government’s comprehensive censorship, the harsh “zero Covid” policy and the
ever-tightening grip on society.
The vast majority of the young dissenters are having their first brush with political rebellion, which is prohibited in China and closely monitored by the authorities, even as a Chinese person living abroad. In doing so, they’re overcoming their fear of the repressive government, their political depression and their loneliness as political heretics in a society that espouses one leader, one party and one ideology.
As beginner protesters, they’re timid, scared and inexperienced. They are ashamed that they have to ask for anonymity in media interviews and even hide their identities from each other. (All the people interviewed for this column requested anonymity for fear of punishment by the Chinese authorities.) The risks are too high. But being part of the global anti-Xi protest movement empowers them.
By sharing the protest posters online, many people realized that they were not alone in their political thinking. “It comforts people and gives them hope,” said the administrator of the Instagram account
@northern_square, an art student in the United States. The account has received more than 2,000 submissions from all over the world of sightings of anti-Xi messages. Citizens Daily CN said that by Sunday it had received more than 1,500 submissions of anti-Xi slogan sightings from more than 328 universities around the world.
In a sign of the risks these people are taking, Citizens Daily CN’s organizers and volunteers, mostly living outside China, remain anonymous even to each other.
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The Beijing protester is now viewed as a hero and an inspiration among many Chinese. He was last seen being detained by the police on the Sitong Bridge overpass. His identity still unverified, he’s being called the “Bridge Man,”
a reference to the “Tank Man,” who stood in front of tanks during the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing in 1989.
His banners contained a list of accusations against Mr. Xi’s rule over the past decade, during which the autocratic leader severely restricted freedom of speech, walked back economic reforms and subjected 1.4 billion Chinese to mandatory participation in the zero-Covid policy, which has thrown the country into social, economic and political chaos.
Mr. Xi has all but silenced nearly everyone inside the country who has ever spoken up to him, from
activists to
business leaders to
academics, sentencing some of them to
long jail terms. His propaganda machine has been in high gear, brainwashing China’s young generation. People who thought independently either learned to shut up or were
forced to emigrate.
A university student in
Guangzhou told me that he was stunned by the courage of the “Bridge Man.” He wants more Chinese to learn about what the man has done. Several times in the past week, he boarded subways and used his iPhone’s AirDrop function to share photos about the protest and instructions on how to download virtual private network software to bypass China’s censorship.
“The first step to end the Communist Party rule is to wake up the people,” he said. He believes that accessing uncensored information can help break the spell of indoctrination.
This semester he has to spend three afternoons a week in ideology classes, including one that teaches students how to think about current affairs, such as U.S.-China relations and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With the censorship and brainwashing, it’s very hard to wake people up, he said.
He was scared when he boarded the subway, he said. He wore a mask, as required by the Guangzhou metro’s Covid policies, and found a place where he could use his jacket to keep his phone screen from being seen by surveillance cameras or other passengers. He said more than 20 people had accepted his photos via AirDrop. But he also got an unexpected response from a fellow passenger who sent a photo with the sentence, “China doesn’t need smart cookies.”
“The passenger was mocking me that what I was doing was futile,” he said.
For Kathy, a Chinese student in London, political apathy like this is what upsets her the most. Out of her 30-plus undergraduate classmates back in Beijing, she could talk about politics to only one of them. The others either showed no interest or disapproved of her critical views of the government.
“They are usually normal people, even kind,” she said. Then they would become nationalistic “robots” when something like
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit happened, she said. “As if a program embedded in the robots was turned on, everyone started posting the same horrible language on social media,” she said.
When she saw photos of the protest in Beijing, she was awed by the “Bridge Man’s” courage, too. Then she started seeing people posting sightings of anti-Xi slogans in many parts of the world.
She started to cry and couldn’t stop for hours, she said.
As the photos of the protest posters kept coming in, she felt she saw a little light in the darkness. She’s not alone anymore.
“I thought to myself that there are many Chinese who also want freedom and democracy,” she said. “But where are you? Where can I find you? If we meet on the street, how can we recognize each other?”
At about 4 the next morning, she went downstairs from her dorm room to print some posters. She was nervous about running into other Chinese students, most of whom she would describe as “little pinks,” or pro-Beijing youths. She wore a mask to avoid cameras, even though she had seldom worn one since arriving in London a few weeks ago.
She was even more nervous putting up the posters on campus. Every time she saw an East Asian face, she would run to hide in a corridor or a restroom. She was afraid they could report her to the embassy or post photos of her on social media. Her parents are still in China, so she needs to take their safety into account.
After putting up the posters all over her campus, she felt much more at peace with herself.
A week later, when a new chat group titled “‘My Duty’ Democracy Wall in London” was set up on the messaging app Telegram, Kathy was one of the first to join. Within a day, more than 200 Chinese had also signed up. By Sunday, four days later, there were more than 400 members. Most introduced themselves as students and professionals in the U.K. Many said they had joined to find like-minded people because they, like Kathy, didn’t know whom to trust and felt lonely and powerless.
Citizens Daily CN, the Instagram account, organized Telegram chat groups in London, New York, Toronto and two other places to provide a safe online space for overseas Chinese to exchange views. Most people use online handles that disguise their identity.
They have discussed the depths of their frustration with political apathy and the best way to deal with pro-Beijing youth. Quite a few admitted that they were once nationalistic themselves, but added that China’s harsh zero-Covid policy had made them realize the importance of having a government accountable to its people. More important, they discussed what further actions they could take.
On Sunday, Kathy, who is in her early 20s, joined a demonstration for the first time in her life. For safety, she wore a mask and sunglasses, even though it was dark when the protest reached the Chinese Embassy in London. A young Chinese woman started chanting slogans made popular by the Bridge Man: “Students, workers, let’s strike. Depose the despotic traitor Xi Jinping.”
Kathy and a few other Chinese students repeated after her. Just uttering those words gave her goose bumps. She shivered and cried. “Fear never felt so strong and so real in my life,” she said. Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrators cheered them on.
“It was unbelievable that I shouted those words,” Kathy said. “I learned that courage needs practice, too. I won’t be able to learn these things unless I practice them constantly.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/business/xi-jinping-protests.html