CNN
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The unprecedented protests that swept China late final month, posing the largest problem to chief Xi Jinping’s authority since he got here to energy, had a peculiar point of interest: a Chinese Twitter account with a cat avatar.
As folks took to the streets to name for larger freedoms and an finish to zero-Covid restrictions, the account “Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher” live-tweeted the demonstrations in real-time, providing a uncommon window into simply how rapidly and broadly the eruption of dissent reverberated throughout the nation.
Inside China, movies, pictures and accounts of the protests have been swiftly censored on-line. But contributors, witnesses and others who knew how to scale the Great Firewall would ship them to “Teacher Li,” which grew to become a vital supply of data for folks in China and past. (Twitter, like many different social media platforms and information websites, is blocked in China, however it’s accessible by way of a VPN.)
Behind the account is Li, a bespectacled 30-year-old painter, who spent most of his waking hours glued to a chair in entrance of a curved monitor and a pastel-colored keyboard – lots of of 1000’s of miles away from the protests in a lounge nook in Italy.
“I haven’t seen sunlight in what seems like a long time,” Li informed CNN, every week after the protests broke out.
For days on finish, he waded via an countless flood of personal messages in his Twitter inbox, despatched by folks throughout China with updates to share about the demonstrations and their aftermath. He posted them on their behalf, shielding the senders from the scrutiny of Chinese authorities.
In current years, Beijing has prolonged its crackdown on dissent to the overseas platform, detaining and jailing Chinese Twitter customers who criticized the authorities. But via Li, these nameless voices of dissent have been converged and amplified.
Li acquired 1000’s of submissions a day – and up to dozens per second at the peak of the protests. His following quadrupled in two weeks to greater than 800,000. Journalists, observers and activists monitored his feed carefully, and a few of his posts have been aired on televisions throughout the world.
“I didn’t have the time to react at all. My only thought at the time was to document what was happening,” Li mentioned. “The influence is beyond my imagination. I didn’t expect billions of clicks on my feed in such a short period of time.”
As his profile grew, Li caught the consideration of the Chinese authorities. As the safety equipment went after the protesters in China with a sweeping marketing campaign of surveillance, intimidation and detention, Li additionally got here into their crosshairs.
Last Saturday, Li was tweeting away when he acquired an anxious telephone name from his mother and father again dwelling in japanese China – they’d simply had one other go to from the police, they informed him.
“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 mentioned.
It was their second police go to of the day. In the morning, an area police chief and a handful of officers had already referred to as on Li’s mother and father. They accused Li of “attacking the state and the (Communist) Party” and offered an inventory of his tweets as “criminal evidence.”
“They wanted to know if there were any foreign forces behind me, whether I received any money, or paid people money for their submissions,” Li mentioned.
Li informed his mother and father he wasn’t working for anybody, and no cash was concerned. His father pleaded for him to “pull back from the brink” and cease posting.
“I can’t turn back now. Please don’t worry about me,” Li informed him. “I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong.”
“You’re an artist, you shouldn’t touch politics,” his father mentioned.
Li’s father knew what it was like to be on the mistaken facet of politics. Born to a Nationalist military officer in 1949, he was persecuted as a “counter-revolutionary” rising up below Mao Zedong’s tumultuous reign. In his adolescence, he might now not stand the torment and fled to the hills in southern China, the place he discovered work in a manufacturing facility.
In the latter half of the Cultural Revolution, which swept China in the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, he was enrolled into a university as a “worker-peasant-soldier” scholar (admitted not on tutorial advantage however class background), and stayed after commencement to work as an artwork instructor.
Since the brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests in 1989, “Don’t touch politics” has develop into a mantra for a technology of Chinese. As the nation pivoted its focus to financial development, an unstated social contract was struck – that individuals would surrender political freedoms for stability, materials consolation and freedoms of their personal lives.
But below chief Xi, that implicit deal is wanting more and more precarious. His zero-Covid coverage has shuttered companies, hampered financial development and pushed youth unemployment to file ranges; his authoritarian agenda has expanded censorship, tightened ideological management and squeezed private freedoms to an extent unseen in many years.
“Chinese people are not keen on politics, but politics is constantly intruding into their lives. They assume there is an elephant in the room, but the elephant is gradually growing bigger and squeezing everyone’s life,” Li mentioned. “That’s why we’re seeing the explosion (of dissent) now.”
In China’s largest cities, from the japanese monetary hub of Shanghai to the capital Beijing, the southern metropolis of Guangzhou and Chengdu in the west, political calls for have been chanted together with slogans towards Covid assessments and lockdowns. Many younger folks held up sheets of white paper in a symbolic protest towards censorship, demanding the authorities give them again the freedom of speech, the press, films, books and humanities.
Their calls resonated deeply with Li, who grew up studying how to paint and watching overseas cartoons and movies (he has a toy Yoda from Star Wars on a shelf subsequent to his chair) throughout an period when China appeared freer and extra open to the world.
Li mentioned he didn’t search out politics – as an alternative, like many younger Chinese who took to the streets, he was unwittingly swept up by political currents. He described himself as somebody who had been “pushed along” by the tides, “chosen by history” by likelihood to doc an necessary chapter of it.
“I was someone who painted and scribbled cringy love stories,” Li wrote in a press release addressed to Chinese officers on November 28. “All of this is supposed to be far away from me. But you, with your control of speech, made me who I am.”
Li wouldn’t even have been on Twitter – not to mention be one of its most influential Chinese-language customers – if censorship hadn’t develop into so suffocating on Weibo, China’s personal Twitter-like platform.
Li was amongst the earliest customers of Weibo, relationship again to 2010. “I was lucky to have witnessed that era – it was, in fact, pretty free,” he mentioned.
Liberal intellectuals, legal professionals and journalists and different influential commentators led crucial discussions on social points – typically issuing scathing criticism or ridicule of officers.
From the web, Li realized about human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and dissident artist Ai Weiwei, which – amongst different issues – progressively shifted his political beliefs. (Li referred to as his youthful self a “little pink” – a considerably derogatory time period for China’s younger and fierce nationalists. He used to discover tales about his father’s tormented youth laborious to imagine. “Our country is so strong and powerful, how could these kinds of bad things happen?” he recalled himself asking.)
By 2012, Li had develop into extra crucial of society. At 19 years previous, the budding artist held his first private exhibition at a gallery in the japanese metropolis of Jinan. He named it “Picasso at the Circus” – meant to “mock this absurd society, which is like a circus filled with funny animals,” in accordance to an introduction of the occasion.
The relative freedom on Chinese social media was fleeting. Censorship began to tighten earlier than Xi got here to energy, and the clampdown on free speech and outspoken commentators solely accelerated.
Things acquired even worse throughout the pandemic. On Weibo, numerous accounts have been banned for talking out on a wide range of points, from feminism to the human price of zero-Covid. Earlier this 12 months, Li misplaced 52 accounts in the span of two months. “My accounts would survive for about four or five hours – with the shortest record being 10 minutes,” Li mentioned. “I treated it as a performance art.”
He misplaced his final Weibo account by retweeting {a photograph} of a 15-year-old Uyghur woman in detention, who was featured in the BBC’s investigation on the Xinjiang Police Files. “I wanted to be brave for once, for her. It was well worth it,” he said on Twitter. “Having seen her face, I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight if I just sit by and not retweet it.”
After exhausting all the means to create new accounts, Li switched to Twitter. “It felt liberating because you no longer need to use acronyms or code names,” he mentioned.
On Chinese social media, folks have develop into accustomed to talking in coded language to keep away from censorship: “zf” means the authorities, “zy” means freedom, and the most delicate time period of all – the identify “Xi Jinping” – can by no means be talked about with out triggering censorship or worse repercussions (Some web customers have been taken in for questioning by police for sharing memes or jokes about Xi in group chats). Instead, the prime chief is commonly referred to merely as “him” or “that man.”
And so on November 26, when Li noticed in his Twitter inbox a video displaying crowds overtly chanting “Xi Jinping, step down!” on the streets of Shanghai, below the shut watch of police, he was dumbfounded.
“We can’t even discuss him on the internet. It is beyond everyone’s imagination that such a slogan would be shouted out on Urumqi Road,” Li mentioned, referring to the website of the Shanghai protest.
“I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that I froze for a second when I heard the slogan. But I told myself that if they dare to shout it, I should be brave enough to document it. So I wrote it out word by word (in a Twitter post),” he mentioned.
Among the 1000’s of direct messages Li acquired in his inbox have been dying threats. “I get a lot of anonymous harassment saying I know who you are, where you live, and I will kill you,” he mentioned.
He ignored them and stayed centered on processing updates on the protests. But when he stepped away from his pc, the darkish ideas would come again to hang-out him.
These threats, in addition to the police harassment of his mother and father, weighed closely on Li’s thoughts. But he’s decided to stick with it.
“This account is more important than my life,” he mentioned. “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 protesters received phone calls from the police warning them towards taking to the streets once more, others have been taken away for questioning – and a few remained in detention.
But in a significant victory for the protesters, China introduced on Wednesday a dramatic overhaul of its pandemic policy, scrapping a few of the most onerous restrictions in the clearest signal but the authorities is transferring away from its draconian zero-Covid coverage.
Like many protesters, Li could have to proceed to face the penalties of his political defiance. He has not returned dwelling to his mother and father since 2019, due to China’s border restrictions and the skyrocketing costs of aircraft tickets. The easing of home Covid measures has raised hopes that China is a step nearer to opening its borders. But Li might by no means have the option to go dwelling once more.
“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 mentioned. “I’m mentally prepared, even if authorities won’t let me see my parents again.”
Looking again, Li mentioned he discovered absurdity in the proven fact that China’s stringent censorship of the press and the web has made him, a painter as far-off as Italy, a key documenter of the nation’s most widespread protests in many years.
In the warmth of the second, he didn’t have the time to mull over whether or not it was all price it. But he is aware of his life’s path is perpetually modified.
“I don’t think I am a hero. Those who took to the streets, they are the real heroes,” he mentioned.
Now, Li has solely one remorse – that his Twitter identify and deal with weren’t chosen thoughtfully sufficient.
“If an account is to leave a mark in history, it should have a serious name,” he mentioned.
His Twitter identify is a self-mockery of his personal accent: folks from his dwelling province can not differentiate the pronunciations of “Li” – his surname – and “ni”, which means “You.”
And his Twitter deal with @whyyoutouzhele is a dig at Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lejian’s feedback final 12 months that overseas reporters ought to “touzhele,” or “chuckle to themselves,” for having the ability to stay safely in China throughout the pandemic. The phrase has since been used broadly on Chinese social media in a sarcastic approach to criticize zero-Covid.
But Li is extraordinarily pleased with his Twitter avatar – a doodle of his tabby cat.
“The cat is now known to the Chinese diaspora around the world. But at the same time, it has also become the most dangerous cat on the Chinese internet,” he mentioned.