Xi Jinping, the Cultural Revolution, and the 20th Party Congress: A Brief Report from Beijing, July 23rd, 2003

Less than a decade later, Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution: Students turned in their teachers for sedition, Mao’s rivals were shot to death, and a whole generation of China’s best and brightest were exiled to the countryside for re-education (including Xi himself). Communism and isolationism kept China desperately poor under Mao.

Xi, however, sees Mao as very much worthy of emulation. Marquis, a professor at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, gave me examples, saying: “He uses Mao’s slogans frequently. He dresses and gestures the same way as him. At the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China” — which was last year — “he wore a very specific type of suit, a special kind of Mao suit that only Mao wore on very specific occasions. And he gave his speech from Tiananmen Square, just like Mao did when he proclaimed the founding of the P.R.C.”

The Chinese government’s policies and actions have sparked outcries online and protests in the streets before. Most of the anger has focused on the local authorities and few have gone so far as to attack Xi himself.

A rare protest against Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his policies was swiftly ended in Beijing Thursday, just days before he is set to secure a third term in power at a key meeting of the ruling Communist Party.

Over the past week, as party elites gathered in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to extoll Xi and his policies at the 20th Party Congress, anti-Xi slogans echoing the Sitong Bridge banners have popped up in a growing number of Chinese cities and hundreds of universities worldwide.

How President Xi Jinping changed since he took power: From the Great Wall of China to Beijing’s 20th Party National Congress

In English, it stated that life is not zero- covid policy, freedom not martial-lawish lock-up, dignity not lies, reform, votes not dictatorship, citizens not slaves.

CNN cannot independently verify the images and footage, but has geolocated them to Sitong Bridge, an overpass on Beijing’s Third Ring Road in Haidian district.

There was no protesters or banners at the Sitong Bridge when CNN arrived. However, a large number of security personnel were on the overpass and in the vicinity. On the Third Ring Road, security personnel were patrolling every overpass.

CNN spoke with two Chinese citizens who scribbled protest slogans in bathroom stalls and half a dozen overseas Chinese students who put up anti-Xi posters on their campuses. CNN agreed to protect their identities with pseudonyms and anonymity because of the sensitivity of their actions.

In China, the only time that the public can protest against the leadership is when Beijing is turned into a fortress to keep the people safe. The Communist Party national congress is one of the most significant events on China’s political calendar.

At the 20th Party Congress beginning on Sunday, Xi is widely expected to break with recent norms and extend his rule for another term, potentially paving the way for lifelong rule.

But under leader Xi, that implicit deal is looking increasingly precarious. His zero-Covid policy has shuttered businesses, hampered economic growth and pushed youth unemployment to record levels; his authoritarian agenda has expanded censorship, tightened ideological control and squeezed personal freedoms to an extent unseen in decades.

I still have that moment on my mind. It feels like a snapshot that illustrates how China has changed since its strongman leader Xi Jinping took power a decade ago – it’s become an increasingly walled-in nation physically and psychologically – and such transformation will have long-term global implications.

During China’s National Day holiday in October, I took several expatriate friends and my children to the Great Wall of China, which is located on the outskirts of Beijing.

As we climbed a restored but almost deserted section of the ancient landmark, a few local families on their way down walked past us. Noticing our kids, one of their children exclaimed: “Wow foreigners! With Covid? Let’s get away from them…” The adults remained quiet as the group quickened their paces.

The Great Wall was closed for 3 years after Xi left: security measures to protect against Covid infection in China, and a warning on the danger of bullying in the domestic front

The Chinese Communist Party is holding a national congress, where the real source of its power is not the president but the head of the party.

The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, stood nearly empty when we went thanks to Xi’s insistence – three years into the global pandemic – on a policy of zero tolerance for Covid infections while the rest of the world has mostly moved on and re-opened.

China’s borders have remained shut for most international travelers since March 2020, while many foreigners who once called the country home have chosen to leave.

With the highly contagious Omicron variant raging through parts of the country, authorities had discouraged domestic travel ahead of National Day holiday. They are also sticking to a playbook of strict quarantine, incessant mass testing and invasive contact tracing – often locking down entire cities of millions over a handful of cases.

Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.

Whether physical lockdowns or digital manipulation, these measures born out of “zero-Covid” have proven such effective means of control in a system obsessed with social stability that many worry Xi and his underlings will never ditch the policy.

China has more security cameras than any other country. Now, in the age of smartphones, mandatory apps allow the government to check people’s Covid status and track their movement in real time. Authorities can easily confine someone to their home by remotely switching the health app to code red – and they did just that on several occasions to stop potential protesters from taking to the streets.

The most sensitive terms on Chinese social media can never be uttered without triggering censorship or worse repercussions; people are used to speaking incoded language to avoid that. Instead, the top leader is often referred to simply as “him” or “that man.”

The local child’s remarks on the Great Wall reflected that. But the true danger of the “blame the foreigners” sentiment comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of mounting pressure on the domestic front.

A history paper by a government-run research institute has gone viral after it upended a long-held consensus. Instead of denouncing the isolationist policy adopted by China’s last two imperial dynasties as a cause of their backward turn and eventual collapse, the authors defended its necessity to protect national sovereignty and security when faced with Western invaders.

More Less: A Silicon Valley Software Engineer’s Story to Rebut Political Misinformation on WeiXin and other Chinese Social Media Platforms

More Less, an online pseudonym for a Silicon Valley-based software engineer from China, likes facts and says that he is an engineer. “I think it’s my responsibility to rebut this nonsense.”

More Less asked not to be identified by his real name because his posts might attract harassment. His Chinese-language fact-checking website is a part of a grassroots movement to fight political misinformation that is spread by US users of Chinese-language social media. His recent posts have taken on claims that California Democrats made it legal to shoplift up to $950 in goods or that widespread voter fraud distorted the 2020 presidential election.

With the US midterm elections two weeks away, More Less and other activists tracking misinformation in Chinese American communities worry that posts stoking racial tensions or casting doubt on the integrity of elections could sway close races—or cause people to abstain from voting.

The Chinese government makes WeiXin subject to censorship, as well as a US acceptable use policy that forbids misinformation and inappropriate content. People tracking misinformation say the platform in the US is unmoderated. WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, declined to respond to questions about misinformation spreading among US users.

“We only get the garbage. Nobody is cleaning it up,” says Jin Xia Niu, Chinese digital engagement program manager at nonprofit Chinese for Affirmative Action. A San Francisco organization launched a Chinese-language fact-checking initiative in June called PiYaoBa which posts articles to its website and public WeChat accounts that are written in a similar style to fact-checking organizations.

Bridge protester Raven Wu wrote about his experiences in China: How a student, Chen Qiang, was born in a China, but without a Chinese citizen

In the hallway of an academic building, Jolie, who’d worn a face mask to obscure her identity, waited for the right moment to reach into her bag for the source of her nervousness – several pieces of A4-size paper she had printed out in the small hours of the night.

Finally, when she made sure none of the students – especially those who, like Jolie, come from China – were watching, she quickly pasted one of them on a notice board.

There are a lot of pro-democracy accounts run by Chinese nationals who are on social media. Citizensdailycn, an account with 32,000 followers, said it received around three dozen reports from mainland China, about half of which involved bathrooms. Northern_Square, with 42,000 followers, said it received eight reports of slogans in bathrooms, which users said were from cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuhan.

“Maybe (the bridge protester) is the only one with such courage and willingness to sacrifice, but there may be millions of other Chinese people who share his views,” said Matt, a Chinese student at Columbia University in New York.

There were people sharing an old Chinese quote when the online censors went into overdrive last week to remove all discussion about the Sitong Bridge protest.

But the risks of speaking out did not deter Raven Wu, a university senior in eastern China. Inspired by the “Bridge Man,” Wu left a message in English in a bathroom stall to share his call for freedom, dignity, reform, and democracy. Below the message, he drew a picture of Winnie the Pooh wearing a crown, with a “no” sign drawn over it. (Xi has been compared to the chubby cartoon bear by Chinese social media users.)

Wu said there was a long lost sense of liberation when he was writing. “In this country of extreme cultural and political censorship, no political self-expression is allowed. I felt happy to have done the right thing for the people while I was a Chinese citizen.

Chen Qiang, a fresh graduate in southwestern China, shared that bleak outlook – the economy is faltering, and censorship is becoming ever more stringent, he said.

In recent years, Beijing has put in place a new strategy to crack down on dissent on the foreign platform, jailing and detaining Chinese people who criticized the government. But through Li, these anonymous voices of dissent were converged and amplified.

The movement has been dubbed by some as the “Toilet Revolution” – in a jibe against Xi’s campaign to improve the sanitary conditions at public restrooms in China, and a nod to the location of much of the anti-Xi messaging.

Among the posters on the notice boards of Goldsmiths, the University of London, is one with a photo of the Sitong Bridge protest, which showed a plume of dark smoke billowing up from the bridge.

Putting up protest posters is the smallest thing that I am able to do, but the biggest thing I can do right now is because of my lack of courage.

A similar feeling of guilt was expressed by others. I feel bad. Yvonne Li said that if she were still in Beijing she wouldn’t have the guts to do such a thing.

I really wanted to cry when I saw the protest. I read Chinese news every day and felt depressed. I couldn’t see any hope. She realized there is still light when she saw this brave man.

The two Instagram accounts, Citizensdailycn and Northern_square, said they each received more than 1,000 submissions of anti-Xi posters from the Chinese diaspora. The posters have been found at more than 300 universities around the world.

When he was a human rights lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, he said he’s been struck by how fast the opposition to Xi has grown.

The scale of posters featuring the slogan “Not My President” and the face of Xi was much less than what was seen in some universities outside China when he scrapped term limits.

When the Dalai Lama is invited to speak at a university, there are protests because professors tend to have anti-China biases in their lectures and other campus groups show their support for the Hong Kong protests.

Even liberal democracies are influenced by China. The Chinese government has a large amount of spies and informants, monitoring overseas Chinese through various United Front-linked organizations,” Teng said, referring to a party body responsible for influence and infiltration operations abroad.

Beijing has expanded its control over Chinese student bodies abroad to make sure the party line is observed and to police the speech and actions of Chinese nationals who are away from home.

Most students CNN spoke with said they were worried about being spotted with the posters by Beijing’s supporters, who they fear could expose them on Chinese social media or report them to the embassies.

We were scared and looked around. Li, a recent graduate in the Netherlands, said that he thought it was absurd at the time and that it wasn’t legal in the Netherlands.

The fear of being betrayed by peers has weighed heavily on Jolie, the student in London, in particular while growing up in China with views that differed from the party line. She said she was lonely. “The horrible (thing) is that your friends and classmates may report you.”

But as she showed solidarity for the “Bridge Man,” she also found solidarity in others who did the same. There was a lot of photos showing Protest posters from all around the world after the protest in Beijing.

“I was so moved and also a little bit shocked that (I) have many friends, although I don’t know them, and I felt a very strong emotion,” she said. “I just thought – my friends, how can I contact you, how can I find you, how can we recognize each other?”

Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher: A Painter’s View of the Demonstrations in Italy during the March 11 March Reionization

Sometimes a knowing smile from a Chinese student can be all it takes to make the students feel reassured.

“(After) I first hung the posters, I went back to see if they were still there and I would see another small poster hung by someone else and I just feel really safe and comforted.”

“I feel like it is my responsibility to do this,” they said. If they didn’t do anything, “it’s just going to be over, and I just don’t want it to be over so quickly without any consequences.”

I want others to know that, as well, because he let me know there are still such people in China. Not everyone is a believer. (We’re) still a nation with ideals and hopes.”

The biggest challenge to China’s authority since coming to power has been the unprecedented protests that swept China late last month.

In real-time, a account named “Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher” live-posted the demonstrations that were taking place across the country to call for greater freedom.

Behind the account is Li, a bespectacled 30-year-old painter, who spent most of his waking hours glued to a chair in front of a curved monitor and a pastel-colored keyboard – hundreds of thousands of miles away from the protests in a living room corner in Italy.

He received a flood of private messages in his inbox, all from people in China who were updating him about the protests and their aftermath. He posted them so that the Chinese authorities wouldn’t scrutinize the senders.

At the height of the protests, Li received thousands of submissions a day, and up to dozens per second. His following rose to almost one million in two weeks. Some of his posts were aired on television around the world as journalists and watchers closely monitored his feed.

Li found out about the two dissident artists, and other things, from the internet, which eventually caused him to change his political views. (Li called his younger self a “little pink” – a somewhat derogatory term for China’s young and fierce nationalists. He used to find stories about his father’s tormented youth hard to believe. “Our country is so strong and powerful, how could these kinds of bad things happen?” he recalled himself asking.)

It was their second police visit of the day. In the morning, a local police chief and a handful of officers had already called on Li’s parents. They accused Li of attacking the state and the Communist Party, and presented a list of his statements as criminal evidence.

“As soon as I started to update Twitter, they called my parents to tell me to stop posting. And then they went to our house at midnight to harass my parents,” Li said.

Li told his parents that he was not working for anyone. His father asked him to stop posting.

In the latter half of the Cultural Revolution, which swept China in the 1960s and 1970s, he was enrolled into a college as a “worker-peasant-soldier” student (admitted not on academic merit but class background), and stayed after graduation to work as an art teacher.

As a young child, Li grew up learning how to paint and watch foreign cartoons and movies, because the time was when China seemed freer and more open to the world.

Li said he wasn’t interested in politics but was caught up in currents because of the young Chinese who took to the streets. He described himself as someone who had been “pushed along” by the tides, “chosen by history” by chance to document an important chapter of it.

Things got worse as a result of the epidemic. On Weibo, countless accounts were banned for speaking out on a variety of issues, from feminism to the human cost of zero-Covid. In the span of two months, Li lost 52 accounts. “My accounts would survive for about four or five hours – with the shortest record being 10 minutes,” Li said. I thought it was a performance art.

Liberal intellectuals, lawyers and journalists were involved in critical discussions on the social issues of the day.

Portrait of the 15-year-old girl Picasso at the circus: a brave teacher profile intl_hnk wrote out “word by word”

By 2012, Li had become more critical of society. The budding artist held his first personal exhibition at the gallery at 19 years old. He named it “Picasso at the Circus” – meant to “mock this absurd society, which is like a circus filled with funny animals,” according to an introduction of the event.

The photograph of the 15-year-old Uyghur girl in the police files was featured in the investigation by the british Broadcasting Corporation. I wanted to be brave for her. He said on his account that it was worth it. “Having seen her face, I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight if I just sit by and not retweet it.”

Li used to create new accounts but switched to micro-Blogging platform. He said it felt like he no longer needed to use code names.

On November 26 of this year, Li saw a video in his inbox of crowds chanting for the president to step down. on the streets of Shanghai, under the close watch of police, he was dumbfounded.

I am embarrassed to tell you that I was in a state of frozen out when I heard the slogan. If they shout it, I should be brave enough to document it. He said he wrote it out “word by word” on the social networking site.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

The Chinese Pandemics Revisited: Education, Propagation and Adversarialization of the Censored

Li received death threats, in addition to thousands of direct messages. “I get a lot of anonymous harassment saying I know who you are, where you live, and I will kill you,” he said.

He focused on processing the updates from the protests and ignored them. When he left his computer, the dark thoughts would return to haunt him.

“This account is more important than my life,” he said. “I will not shut it down. I’ve arranged for someone else to take over if something bad happens to me.”

By the first week of December, the demonstrations had largely petered out. Some of the protesters received phone calls from the cops warning them not to go on the streets again, others were taken away for questioning and a few remained in jail.

But in a major victory for the protesters, China announced on Wednesday a dramatic overhaul of its pandemic policy, scrapping some of the most onerous restrictions in the clearest sign yet the government is moving away from its draconian zero-Covid policy.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

How to live safely in China? A sarcastic comment on zero-Covid’s cat and the most dangerous cat in the Chinese internet

“When I saw people taking to the streets and holding up pieces of white paper, I knew I had to sacrifice something of myself, too,” he said. Even if authorities don’t allow me to see my parents again, I’m mentally prepared.

The pronunciation of his name and his native province’s doesn’t matter to people in his home province.

The Chinese Foreign ministry spokesman said last year that foreign reporters should “chuckle to themselves” if they want to live safely in China during the H1N1 epidemic. The phrase has since been used widely on Chinese social media in a sarcastic way to criticize zero-Covid.

There is a cat that is known to Chinese people around the world. He said it has become the most dangerous cat on the Chinese internet.