Proud, scared and torn. What the Chinese protesters told me

They witnessed their first demonstrations.

They chanted their first protest slogans.

They had their first encounters with the police.

Then they went home, shivering disbelief for challenging the world’s most powerful authoritarian government and the toughest leader China has seen in decades.

Chinese youth are protesting the tough policy of “zero-COVID” of the country and also urging its top leader, Xi Jinpingresign.

It’s something China hasn’t seen since 1989, when the ruling Communist Party brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protesters, mostly college students.

Regardless of what happens in the coming days and weeks, the young protesters represent a new threat for the Xi government, which eliminated his political opponents and suppressed any voice questioning his rule.

Such public dissent was unimaginable until a few days ago.

These same young people, when mentioning Xi online, used euphemisms like “X”, “he”, or “that person”, fearing even to mention the president’s name.

They have endured everything the government has thrown at them: harsh pandemic restrictions, high unemployment rates, fewer books available to read, movies to watch, and games to play.

Therefore, something broke.

After nearly three long years of “zero-COVID” which has become a political campaign for Xi, China’s future looks increasingly bleak.

The economy is in its own worst moment over the decades.

Xi’s foreign policy has alienated many countries.

Its censorship policy, in addition to stifling challenges to its authority, killed much of the fun.

As a popular post said weibo, The Chinese get by with books released 20 years ago, music released ten years ago, travel photos from five years ago, income earned last year, frozen dumplings from a blockade three months ago, COVID-19 test yesterday, and a freshly baked Soviet joke from today.

“I think this has all come to a tipping point,” said Miranda, a Shanghai-based journalist who attended the protest on Saturday night.

“If nothing is done about it, it could really explode.”

In recent days, in interviews with more than a dozen young people protesting in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Wuhan, I have heard of an outburst of pent-up anger and frustration at the way the government is conducting the “zero-COVID” campaign.

But his anger and despair go further, to question Xi’s government.

Two of those people said they have no plans to have children, a new form of protest among young Chinese as Beijing is encouraging more births.

At least four of the demonstrators said they wanted to emigrate.

One of them refused to look for work after being fired from a video game company following a government crackdown on the industry last year.

They came to the protests because they wanted to let the government know how they felt to be constantly tested, locked up in their apartments or cut off from their family and friends in the COVID-19 web.

And they wanted to show theirs solidarity with his fellow protesters.

They are members of a generation known as Xi’s children

the nationalist “little roses” defending China on Weibo, Facebook and Twitter.

The protesters represent a small percentage of Chinese people in their 20s and 30s.

By resisting the government, they challenged their generation’s perception.

Some older Chinese said the protesters made them feel more hope on the future of the country.

Zhang Wenmin, a former investigative journalist under the pseudonym Jiang Xue, wrote on Twitter that she was moved to tears by the protesters’ courage.

“It’s hard for people who haven’t lived in China for the past three or four years to imagine the fear these people had to overcome to go out into the street, to shout:

‘Give me freedom or give me death,'” he wrote. “Amazing. I love everyone.”

Being their first time marching, most didn’t know what to expect.

A Beijing protester said she was so tense that she felt physically and emotionally drained the next day.

More than one person has told me they needed a day to collect their thoughts before they could speak.

At least three cried in our interviews.

They are proud, scared, and conflicted about their experiences.

They have different opinions on how politically explicit their slogans should be, but all said that shouting slogans was cathartic.

Miranda, a journalist of eight years, said she couldn’t stop crying as she sang “freedom of expression” and “freedom of the press” with the crowd.

“It was the freest moment since I became a journalist,” he said in a broken voice.

All the people I interviewed asked me to use only their first, last or first name in English to protect their safety.

They had felt relatively safe marching with other people a few days earlier, but no one dared put their name in the comments that were to be published.

Slogans they remembered to chant were everywhere, illustrating the widespread frustration in their lives.

“End of Lockdown!” “Freedom of expression!”

“Give me back my movies!”

Many of them were surprised by the outcome of Saturday’s political protest in Shanghai.

They were equally, if not more, surprised when more people returned on Sunday to demand the release of protesters who had been arrested hours earlier.

The six Shanghai protesters I spoke to planned to go to a vigil Saturday night for the 10 victims who died in a fire Thursday in Urumqi, the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region.

At first, the atmosphere was relaxed.

When someone sang “No More Communist Party” for the first time, the crowd laughed, according to Serena, a college student spending her gap year in Shanghai.

“Everyone knew it was the red line“, She said.

Then the atmosphere became more and more charged.

When someone shouted “Xi Jinping, step down!” and “CPC, resign!” the screams were the loudest, according to Serena and other protesters present.

In Beijing, a 25-year-old trader surnamed Wu told his fellow protesters not to shout such politically explicit slogans as it would warrant a crackdown.

Instead, he chanted slogans urging the government to follow the rule of law and release detained Shanghai protesters.

A protester from Chengdu and another from Guangzhou, separated by 1,600 kilometers, said they were prevented from shouting slogans that other protesters considered too political and told to comply with COVID-19-related demands.

For many of them, this weekend was their first encounter with the police.

A protester named Xiaoli in Chengdu said she had never seen so many policemen in her life.

After being chased by them, she said she could hear her heart beating as she passed the officers on her way home.

It was clear that many protesters blamed Xi for the unpopular “zero-COVID” policy.

A young professional from Shanghai, surnamed Zhang, said Xi’s unbreakable third term, won at last month’s party convention, marked the end of China’s progress.

“We have all given up on oursillusions“, She said.

She cried when she mentioned a question from an elder during this year’s lockdown in Shanghai:

“Why has our country come to this?”

Zhang, who said he grew up poor in a village, welcomed government help for his education.

“I thought we were just moving,” he added.

The young protesters are very contradictory about the impact of their actions.

They feel powerless to change the system as long as Xi and the Communist Party are in power.

They believe that many people in the public have supported them because the inflexible rules of COVID-19 have violated what they consider the fundamental norms of Chinese society.

Once the government make flexible politics, they fear that public support for the protests will wane.

At the same time, some of them argued that their protests would cause public aware of their rights.

Nobody knows what the protests will turn into:

at a story point or in a footnote.

The official state media remained silent, even as some pro-government bloggers on social media pointed out the “foreign forces”.

The police strengthened their presence on the streets and called or visited protesters in an attempt to intimidate them.

I asked Bruce, a Shanghai financial employee in his 20s, whether the protests meant that people had changed their minds about Xi.

He replied, “Probably not because public opinion has changed, but because those who criticize him have spoken up.”

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