1.

In the muted light of this Monday’s morning, tucked still, beneath my sheets and the lingering narcotic fog of the night before, I reach for my phone, open Instagram, and scroll. Seconds later, betwixt a short video essay on the cultural history of the raccoon, and a pair of kissing parrots, I am reminded what day it is, and what day tomorrow will be.

不自由毋宁死

White banner, black text—beneath it, in English, blood-red and capitalized, “LIBERTY or DEATH”—signed, the graduate students of the school of architecture, Tsinghua University.

Beneath the banner is a crowd. Among them, I know, somewhere perhaps not too far beyond the frame, stands my parents, their friends, and my uncle. A flash of fantasy invites me to look for them—but they are of course not quite here. The crowd is dense, abuzz, and busy. But there are three faces gazing into the lens—looking at me. The scroll halts, and I am arrested. Their faces, every one, appears as a face marred with an uncanny ambivalence. It is as though I know but cannot see that behind this face lies hope—lies a burning yearning for the good and for freedom—but, tasked as this hope is, with bearing the weight of not just their own fear, but also their loved ones’ worries, it appears only to emit in flesh a faint, flickering light. As I gaze into their faces, I find myself slipping into their possession—their faces, every one, I think, look like mine—and I come to be skewered between two desires, each contradicting the other. Their hope leaps inside me, first, like a spark, to reignite some flame, and again I am consumed by anger, frustration, indignation for everything that has happened and everything that will.—But then, it occurs to me, that I know something they do not know. They do not know that tonight they shall be greeted with death. Run, I want to scream, run! Do you know what you mean when you say:

不自由毋宁死

2.

These words resurfaced two years ago, first in banners in Beijing and Shanghai, then with more frequency graffitied in alleyways and on bathroom walls, then, everywhere online. The phrase is, of course, owed to America, a translation of “Give me liberty or give me death”—one of the many precious symbolic fragments derived from America’s revolutionary, democratic inheritance, along with papier mâché lady liberty, which made its way across the ocean in 1989.

This time, however, the call-back was not, in the first place, to 1775 but to 1989 itself. This much, these words, it seems, we have remembered.
The protests that erupted in late 2022 were remarkable not only for their size—and sizeable they were—but for their occasion. For the trigger for this wave of protests was, remarkably, the deaths of ten ethnic Uyghurs in the city of Urumqi, in Northwest China, who had burned to death in their homes when their apartment building caught fire, in the midst of a lockdown.

A number of smaller scale protests had already erupted across China, prior to this incident in November—most notably perhaps, the Sitong bridge protest on October 13th. By the late Spring of 2022, faced with the altered properties of the Omicron variant, the lockdown and testing measures driving the CCP’s Zero-COVID policy, which had in the early phase of the pandemic been so astonishingly successful at keeping China running in a moment when the entire world had shut down, were quickly proving futile. China’s early success with the pandemic, it turned out, had the tragic consequence of inducing a false sense of satisfaction among the ruling elite, producing a stubborn and idiotic posture of pride, which functioned effectively as a systematic blockage of social learning that led to the total derailment of vaccination progress. Following the virus’ mutation, the Chinese populace was left defenseless, and infection rates and death rates skyrocketed.

Beijing’s decision in response, then, was however not to admit to their strategic error, and mobilize towards vaccination, but to double-down on their existing, erroneous strategy of utilizing frequent testing and strict lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus. The consequences for the stupidity of the government, again, fell upon the Chinese people. Not only were masses of Chinese citizens prevented from earning their daily bread and accessing vital medical resources, they were furthermore forced to participate, day-in, day-out, in the humiliating and alienating farce which the Zero-COVID policy had become. Entire cities, tens of millions, were collectively trapped within their own homes, sometimes behind literal steel bars, welded onto one’s doors, permitted only to go outside for their daily testing (which, everyone knew, was the only possible way at this point anybody was getting sick). Breakdowns in the supply chain coupled with a make-shift ration delivery system lead to shortages in basic supplies and food. This was a maddening, grueling period of violent, bureaucratic oppression. In Shanghai, the lockdowns were enforced for some three months before they were loosened—and despite its repeated failure, with constant relapses of COVID surges, the policy remained in full force, in Shanghai and elsewhere across China, in major metropolitan areas from Beijing, Guangzhou, to Chongqing for another six months.

Following in the footsteps of other major cities in China, the Urumqi city government enforced strict lockdown measures upon its residents following a surge of cases in August. By November, the conditions in Urumqi were beginning to resemble those in Shanghai in July—hunger, as a result of government rationing and supply-chain breakdowns, together with loneliness, and the daily experiences of bureaucratic alienation and humiliation had already raised the percolating social discontent close to a boiling point. At this moment, a fire breaks to take the lives of ten human beings, burned alive inside their homes, unable to escape, as a result of the lockdowns. Among the dead were Qemernisa Abdurahman, 48, and her four youngest children.

News of their death spread like wildfire across the Chinese internet, despite the government’s best attempts at censorship. Two days later, some four thousand kilometers away, vigils and protests were held in Nanjing, Lanzhou, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an, and by November 27th, they had spread to Beijing, Wuhan, and Hong Kong—and subsequently, across the globe, in major cities, from Toronto, to New York, and D.C. At these protests, citizens—most of whom had never, to this moment, experienced the meaning of being a citizen—gathered together in the streets, in their collective calls for government accountability and the end of the Zero-COVID policy. Words which just days before would have been unthinkable to utter in public—words to the effect of “step-down Xi Jinping,” and “Xi is a big dumb cunt”—were everywhere being unleashed into the world, on- and offline, shouted in megaphones and billowing across banners.

As this all happened, I sat halfway across the world with my eyes glued to my screen, watching—cautious, riddled with anxiety, but harboring deep down, a small but fiery spark of hope. What amazed me about these protests was their breadth, and their apparent humanism. The Han Chinese, for the unaware, have traditionally been a terribly proud and indeed racist people. Those who do not count among the Han are traditionally labeled barbarians of one flavor or another—a way of carving the world, which can be traced back to the Zhou Dynasty’s “Sino-barbarian dichotomy” (huayizhibian 华夷之辨). In contemporary China, this inheritance can be seen manifest in various currents of ethno-nationalism and reactionary (and perhaps legitimate) anti-Western sentiments—and more specifically, in a virulent form of state-sanctioned Islamophobia that has the Uyghur people as its object.

Suddenly, however, it looked as though the CCP had unwittingly engineered the objective social conditions such that the Sino-barbarian dichotomy lost all its salience. What the protestors in Shanghai saw was that, under the hands of this government, they were no different than the men, women, and children who had burned to death in their own homes in Urumqi, and that it was nothing more than luck that had saved them from flames. Set against the monstrosity and stupidity of the CCP, they recognized one another as equals. Regardless of whether this meant equals in humanity, or equals in slavery, the deaths of these others became the death of their kin—deaths, therefore, demanding of justice, and deaths deserving of mourning. The moment, and its words, it seemed, had returned. With the charred corpses of the innocent staked out before us, it became clear that the meaning of slavery is to exist, and to cease to exist, beneath the whim of another—and suddenly, again, we found that we could no longer justify this condition of slavery to ourselves. The choice between liberty and death, in this moment, is paradoxically purged of its appearance of drama. If to live life as a slave is, in any event, to exist as among the living dead, then so indeed:
不自由毋宁死

3.

Given Georgetown’s establishment technocratic bent, it was disappointing, but no surprise that no protests or vigils were held on campus, but a few days in, I saw a flier advertising a vigil held by the Chinese student association at George Washington University. It was a late November evening, and cold. A scattered crowd of thirty, maybe forty, stood around candlelight at the foot of George Washington’s statue, in the main square before the chapel. The organizers looked to me like they were no older than eighteen, nineteen years-old. Many, if not most, of the Chinese nationals in attendance wore a mask, as a precautionary measure against the Chinese surveillance apparatus. The vigil began with a moment and silence, followed by an attempt to rally the crowd into a chant. When they first spoke their slogans— “不做奴隶，做公民”， “I refuse to be a slave, I shall be a citizen”—the organizer’s voice wavered and broke, scattering like ocean spray against the dark November wind. The crowd returned some fragmentary echoes, and the organizers sunk into a quiet murmur. Then a snicker broke, and a big boy from the back shouted, thrice, in quick succession, “傻逼！习近平！”— “Dumb cunt! Xi Jinping!”—and the crowd erupted, first into laughter, but then into effervescent song: “傻逼, 习近平! 傻逼, 习近平！傻逼, 习近平！”

For most of the Chinese students in the audience, myself included, this was an entirely new and, indeed, liberatory experience. Never could I have even dreamed of hearing, let alone chanting these words in public, among other Chinese citizens. Despite the fact that we were, it is true, in America, some ten thousand miles away from the jurisdiction of the Chinese execution block, this was an electrifyingly powerful experience of collective action and expression. I was, I learned, not alone: in our opinion of Xi Jinping as a big dumb cunt, We were an I that was a We and a We that was an I.

But the days rolled by, and this We proved to be momentary, and it dissolved, and with it, too, eroded my sense of hope for a free China. Part of the reason why this happened is that the CCP, responding to the mass protests, eventually decided to pull a total 180, lifting in one fell swoop all COVID restrictions. They did so amidst a massive surge by early December, with disastrous public health consequences. Indeed, it has often seemed to me that the abruptness of the reversal signaled that it was some perverse, oblique attempt to punish the protestors—as though it were the actions of some kind of infantile but tyrannical parent, saying to their child, after their protests: Be careful what you wish for.

The other reason this We dissolved was because it was simply no match for the Chinese state, which, with its terror tactics and its state-of-the-art surveillance technology, moved swiftly and effectively to ensure that the scattered protests did not grow and develop itself into a sustained and structured movement. My friends who participated in the demonstrations in Shanghai, without exception, received a phone call the next morning from the state police, politely inquiring where they were the day before. Then, the words 不自由毋宁死 sunk back down to the pit of one’s stomach. Not one of my friends participated in the protests beyond that day—and almost all of them who could leave China, then did. For my own part, I did not have to suffer this shameful slink back into self-preservation—but I know, I am no hero, and would have done the same.

Suddenly, then, the Hobbesian gambit—that faced with the choice between life and liberty most men will, without hesitation, choose life—began once more to resemble the truth, and I slid back into despair. There can be no free China, so long as its people are entrapped within the CCP’s all-seeing machine of death. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has argued that social movements are among the most reliable and powerful means available to us to effect social change. As we have seen, demonstrations can provide a powerful occasion for learning for the disempowered: insofar as they have been denied political participation, a protest, or indeed any other large-scale collective action, can provide an occasion for the disempowered to learn, sometimes for the first time, how to secure their own standing for political claim-making and contestation. Furthermore, through the use of demonstrations and campaigning, social movements are capable of forging channels of practically motivating information and facilitating its circulation. And by deploying strategies such as sit-ins and boycotts, social movements are, moreover, potentially capable of occasioning genuine opportunities of breakdown and encounter that could compel those in power to re-evaluate and revise their commitments.

However, as the sociologists Charles Tilly and Sidney Tallow point out, a social movement must be “a sustained campaign of claim making, using repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities”—and it seems clear to me that presently, given the sheer power of the Chinese state, no such movement could possibly grow within the borders of the People’s Republic of China. There can be no movement, no sustained campaign of claim making, so long as we can be observed and threatened in our every move. In this respect, I cling onto more hope for Gaza, than for China—as hopeless as Gaza is. For as hostile as American soil is to the Palestinian liberation movement, the basic insurance of liberties in America and elsewhere in the liberal West, however incomplete and imperfect, still holds out the possibility of effective social movements. Crush as they may the campus protests—but the movement can still find space to reclaim its momentum, online, and elsewhere in the streets.

So where, then, does this leave China—and those of us who dream, still, of a free China? Are we simply to sit idle, waiting for his death, or otherwise for conditions in China to deteriorate into true uninhabitability, whatever that might be, twiddling our thumbs among the living dead, hoping that Junior will be kinder to us than his father has been? Is this, indeed, the only thing we can do?—I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

Today, in powerless fury, I know not what else to do except to perform a small ritual of mourning. Thus I light this candle, to remember, to resent, to mourn the unforgotten dead, to keep my hope alive.

不自由毋宁死
不自由毋宁死
不自由毋宁死

These are words upon which I wish but am too cowardly to stake my life—but still, in the meantime, I will chant them and I will chant them, so that perhaps when one day I need to enact them, someday, I can.