Activists abroad find hope in COVID protests in China

Protesters think moment could lead to solidarity

Three years ago in Melbourne, Ronnie Li and other students from mainland China chanted in support of their government. They were trying to drown out a rally promoting the prodemocracy movement in Hong Kong, the biggest challenge to Beijing’s authority in years.

Li, 23, has since changed her mind about that issue — and about much else.

In recent days, she said, she and other mainland Chinese students have demonstrated in Australia against Beijing’s policies, calling for more freedom in China, including an easing of COVID restrictions.

“Everyone has woken up,” she said. “Slowly. Change takes time.”

The recent protests in China have rippled well beyond the mainland, to cities around the world with large contingents of Chinese students — even Hong Kong, where the prodemocracy protests of 2019 were crushed and dissent of any kind is now dangerous.

Some young people like Li — members of what has been called China’s most nationalistic generation in decades, raised on a censored Internet in which the ruling Communist Party can do no wrong — have experienced what they describe as a political awakening. It is unclear whether they represent more than a tiny minority, or how far beyond the issue of COVID restrictions their criticism of Beijing might go.

But some protesters who oppose the Chinese government for other reasons — like the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, the threat to Taiwan, and China’s persecution of Uyghurs in its Xinjiang region — have at least tentative hopes that the moment might be used to find common cause with them.

“The struggle in the mainland is closely connected to our struggle,” said Sarah Lau, a Hong Kong resident in her early 20s.

Several quiet demonstrations have been held in Hong Kong in solidarity with the mainland protests. On Wednesday, Hong Kong’s security minister, Chris Tang, said they were driven by “familiar faces” from the 2019 protests. He also issued a warning: “Being a mainland student does not mean you’re innocent.”

On the mainland, the protests may have drawn more attention to the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic minority who have been the target of a crackdown that detained vast numbers of them in internment camps. Many in China were aware of a COVID lockdown in Xinjiang that led to shortages of food and medicine. Then the deadly fire last month in the regional capital, Urumqi, set off the recent protests.

But activists and experts said that while the protesters knew about the fire and expressed solidarity with Uyghurs about the lockdown, that empathy did not necessarily extend to the group’s broader plight.

Ben Yan, 29, who said he belonged to another ethnic minority group in China, said he had previously doubted reports of internment camps in Xinjiang. But the experience of living through lockdown in Shanghai, which he called “hell on earth,” led him to believe that the authorities were capable of it.