Three pro-democracy banners were hung from an overpass in the Chinese city of Chengdu on Tuesday morning, in a daring echo of the famed “Bridge Man” protest in 2022.
China’s vast censorship apparatus sprang into action immediately, deleting social media posts that described the banners or included photos of them, but some of the photos were posted on a popular dissident X account called “Mr. Li Is Not Your Teacher,” so the images went viral despite the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts:
“Mr. Li Is Not Your Teacher” is an exiled artist and citizen journalist named Li Ying who rose to prominence during the “White Paper” protests of 2022, which also led to Bridge Man’s astounding act of defiance. Even though X is banned in China, his account still has almost two million followers, many of them Chinese subjects who find ways around their government’s firewalls to read his posts.
According to Li, the three banners read:
Without political system reform, there will be no national rejuvenation.
The people do not need a political party with unrestrained power.
China does not need anyone to point out the direction — democracy is the direction.
The banners were draped from a bridge overpass near a bus station in the Jinniu district of Chengdu. The photos were sent to Li Ying by the man who hung the banners. Soon after sending the photos, that man disappeared. Chinese officials have refused to answer questions about the case from foreign reporters.
“The last thing he wanted to convey to the public through us was that he hoped democracy could be realized as soon as possible,” the Mr. Li Is Not Your Teacher account said.
If the Chengdu dissident has been “vanished” by Chinese authorities, his story will closely mirror that of Peng Lifa, the man who hung protest banners from a bridge in Beijing at the height of the White Paper protests against dictator Xi Jinping’s brutal coronavirus lockdowns.
The White Paper movement exploded after Xi’s lockdown policies killed dozens of civilians who were trapped in a burning building in Urumqi, capital city of the oppressed Uyghur Muslims. The incident galvanized long-simmering public discontent and emboldened citizens to speak out, even as the ruthless government warned that criticism would be punished.
Borrowing a literal page from the brave Hong Kong democracy protesters of 2019, the anti-lockdown demonstrators began waving blank sheets of paper and blank placards during their protests, effectively daring the police to arrest them for saying nothing at all. The police took many of them up on that dare.
Peng Lifa went a step further, tossing out banners from a high-traffic bridge in Beijing that were not blank. The most provocative of his banners read: “We want food, not PCR tests. We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves.”
The Bridge Man demonstrated his fearlessness by marching across the bridge and shouting his revolutionary slogans through a loudspeaker. He was quickly arrested and his family was placed under guard. The Chinese Communist Party then made him vanish for over two years, in flagrant violation of international human rights laws. Other dissidents who took inspiration from the Bridge Man to hang their own banners were also arrested.
The White Paper protesters eventually won as much of a victory as they could against their authoritarian government, which dropped its manic coronavirus lockdowns and vaguely promised that such policies would never be implemented again, without quite admitting that the lockdowns were a hideous mistake.
As the fate of the new Bridge Man demonstrates, China has grown no more free in any other respect. The Chinese people might not need “a political party with unrestrained power,” but that is what they have.
