“Freedom for China”: Chinese students at Yale stand in solidarity with protesters in China

“We want freedom!” Chinese students at Yale chanted, echoing the words of protesters across China.  

As waves of protesters in China marched on the street—demanding for freedom and condemning the authorities after 10 people in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, died in a fire allegedly because Covid restrictions confined them at home—Chinese students at Yale held a vigil for the victims and stood in solidarity with the protesters.  

On Monday, more than one hundred Chinese students, non-Chinese students and New Haven residents showed up at the candlelight vigil for the victims of the Urumqi fire. The attendants brought candles and flowers for condolence and a protest sign that said “Freedom for China.”  

The protests erupted in China after fury and frustration over the Zero Covid policy, including mass testing, quarantines and lockdowns. While the protest started as people shouted for no lockdown, it has evolved to people demanding freedom, democracy and human rights. In China, public protests are extremely rare because of the loss of freedom of speech and potential government retaliation, which could result in jail time or even life danger for themselves and their family. In the past few days, people in various cities across China are holding up blank sheets of A4 paper as symbols of “everything we want to say but cannot say,” representing the repression of the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship. The protesters call the movement “A4 Revolution” or “White Paper Revolution.”  

During the one-hour-long vigil, the attendees held sheets of blank A4 paper, sang the Chinese national anthem, the Internationale and poignant Chinese folk rock songs. Sharing personal stories of their friends’ and families’ suffering under the Zero Covid policy and reminding people of the long ignored human rights abuse in Xinjiang, speakers encouraged the attendants to stand in solidarity with the protesters in China, speak up and continue fighting for freedom and human rights.  

“No more lockdowns, we want freedom!” chanted the attendees in reference to the banner put up by the known “bridge man” who hung a banner in Sitong Bridge during the prelude of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. “No more lies, we want dignity! No more dictatorship, we want democracy! No more being slaves, we want to be citizens!”  

Support for A4 Revolution at Yale

According to the organizer, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of government retaliation, these series of events in the past few months are “special” because they employed a lot of the strategies to evade censorship of the Chinese government.  

“It is my first time organizing and showing up at an event like this for China,” he said.  

He expressed that he had posted and written plenty of articles online about social political issues since high school and “posted posters individually on campus” during this event.  

The organizer explained the significance of holding up a blank sheet of paper.  

“A blank paper is the absolute absence of content and it only has power when the government in power tries to extend this tangle into every single aspect of people's life and try to exert this absolute control,” he said. “Blankness is a rejection of everything…it's a representation of silence and in the way it involves a lot of abstract things that we saw throughout the twentieth century.”  

Wenbin Gao, a PhD student in the Department of Italian Studies, was one of the main speakers at the vigil. He said the vigil is a really good start and his aim is to inform people about the truth.  

At the vigil on Monday, Gao spoke out frequently about the sequences of tragedies that led up to the protest: the death of ten people, including three children, in the Urumqi fire and the death of twenty seven passengers on a bus to the quarantine camp that was operating at 2:40 a.m.  

“We need to first question why the government is censoring our posts and silencing us,” Gao said in an interview with the News. “Second, why is the government not doing anything to the government officials who are responsible for these tragedies?”  

Gao said that he believed protesters should push the system to reflect on itself by exposing the truth of what happened under the Zero Covid policy.  

He noted that while some of the protesters were shouting “CCP, step down! Xi Jinping, step down!”, at this moment, this demand is too high and abstract. Gao believes that they need to pinpoint their demand on specific government officials, such as the mayors of Urumqi, Guiyang and Shanghai, and hold them accountable for trampling on citizen’s human rights.  

“We need to keep close to paying attention to them until those who have no respect for law and human rights get the sentence they deserve,” Gao said. “It’s a crime against humanity resulting from a war waged by the violent system against its own people.”  

Yangyang Cheng, a research fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, said that this vigil is the first campus demonstration she went to that was organized by Chinese students.  

Cheng said the vigil on Monday affirmed her love and faith for the Chinese community.  

“Chinese students and community members who spoke [tonight] were not speaking from particularly prepared speeches, and a lot of them, you could see that they are working through very difficult questions about their Chinese identity, about their social and political responsibilities in real time while they were speaking,” Cheng said. “At moments, they may be a bit carried away by the emotions. At times, they may be struggling a bit with a specific thread of thought. And I felt just that rather than something really polished, that spontaneity is something quite touchy as well.”  

A graduate student from mainland China, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of government retaliation, said that at the time of high emotional upheaval, the protesters have to be “cleared eye about the nature of the protest,” that this is not just about the Zero Covid policy, but also the issue of entrusting one individual leader with ultimate power.  

Tracy T., who asked for her last name to be only identified with its initial for fear of government retaliation, works at Yale New Haven Hospital and brought her seven-year-old daughter to the vigil.  

“I have been waiting for someone to host this at Yale,” T. said. “At least we should memorialize the people who died in the fire. I have been a mother for seven years and I see my kid grow up freely and happily in the U.S., while at the same time the kids of my friends in China all had to do a COVID-19 test everyday to go to school.”  

T. said that she brought her daughter to the vigil because she wants her to know that there are "people with consciences who will speak out" for those who have suffered.  

Cecilia Yang, a graduate student from mainland China, said that she cried when she heard people singing the Chinese song “Boundless Ocean, Vast Sky.”  

“Forgive me for indulging in the love of freedom / I too fear the day when I fall / Anyone can abandon their beliefs and dreams / How will I fear if one day, there’s only you and me?” a man at the vigil sang as he played the guitar.  

Protesters in China have also been singing this song to express their pursuit for freedom.  

Yang said she was surprised to see so many people come out on Monday night. She was impressed by people’s courage, especially those who chose to not wear a mask and spoke out.  

“I believe that before we all had our visions already, but we didn’t have a chance to connect with each other,” Yang said. “This vigil gave us a chance to find each other. I thought I was alone, but in fact we are together.”  

Yale students and community members reflect on China-related activism

For the past few days, Yang said that she has been on her phone all the time, scrolling through the news and reading about the protest in China. She could see that anger and frustration had spread across China on the Internet, but she wondered how it could materialize in reality when people have always lived under extreme totalitarianism.  

She was amazed to see that in the past two days, people in China have been marching on the street and holding blank sheets of paper to protest. Many of the protesters have been beaten and arrested by police and some of their family have not been able to contact them since then.  

“I wish there is something I can do for them even if I am in the United States,” Yang said. “I want people in China to know that we support them.”  

At first, Yang was concerned about going to the vigil at Yale. She was worried about the relationship between Yale and Chinese consulates and that her action may put her parents back in China in danger.  

Still, Yang eventually decided to show up at the vigil and shared her story because she felt like she was already facing less danger than them in China and that it was the least she could do.  

Yang has been to other rallies before—including the solidarity with Ukanian rally and abortion rights rally—but going to this vigil, she said, was different.  

“The systematic violence is too deep in our life,” Yang said. “After living in this system for years it becomes hard to realize that the system is wrong. For Chinese people, it is difficult enough to dream about revolt. You no longer think what you are doing—fighting for freedom—is the right thing to do. It’s a privilege and ability to dream.”  

She hoped that the non-Chinese students at Yale could understand that for Chinese citizens who constantly live under the fear of being forcefully detained and tortured, showing up at a vigil for a cause related to China means they themselves and their family may be in danger. This, she said, requires tremendous courage and overcoming political depression.  

“To take risks together with people in China is the only chance I have to stand with them,” Yang said. “You can’t think about it too much because you can’t do anything that way. The only thing that I know I can do is to do my part and protect myself. You never know what would happen in a social movement like this and I don’t want to use my academic mindset to make any prediction or judgment. I can only participate with my body, take risks with my body. Right now, we need the courage to dream.”  

A graduate student from Hong Kong, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of government retaliation, said that this vigil is the first time he participated in a protest activity organized by people from mainland China and he saw it as a good start.  

He said that through the protests in China, he saw that Chinese people are having a political awakening and that the problem of Zero Covid policy is more than a policy problem—it is also the manifestation of the Chinese autocratic government system not serving its people but rather the party’s interest.  

“Before, people in mainland China didn’t quite understand or support what Hong Kongers were protesting against,” he said, having been to the Hong Kong protest in 2014 and 2019. “It’s a chance for them to realize like people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we all live under the same harsh totalitarianism. It’s a chance for them to understand each other’s struggle and fight for their freedom together.”  

As a Hongkonger, he said he is supportive of the protests in China, and because Hongkongers have more experience in political activism, he thinks that they have a responsibility to speak up and show solidarity.  

Cheng also said that when the student speakers mentioned the protest in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, she saw the “glimpse of probability” to confront these difficult questions and reflect what it means to be Chinese—something that can only be done by Chinese people.  

Going forward

At the vigil, Chinese students at Yale expressed their hope to continue their support of the people in China fighting for freedom.   

“Going forward I hope we use the anti-politics to bring more people to be conscious about the possibility of action,” the organizer said in an interview with the News.  

According to one attendee at the vigil, who asked to be anonymous for fear of government retaliation, she had always felt that she was “not in a great position to make some change.”   

But she thought that this time, when there are so many people who are brave enough to stand up in China, they as students studying abroad can make some sort of difference.  

“I feel like [this COVID-19 crisis] might actually be a critical inflection point for Chinese history,” she added. “We're spreading information on WeChat, on Instagram, to educate people about what's happening. We think that that's what's very feasible for Chinese national students to do at the moment.”  

Overall, most of the attendees that the News spoke to were not optimistic about the current political environment in China.  

 “I was pessimistic about the possible venues of effective change,” said one participant, who asked to remain anonymous.  

Still, she found the recent social events both online and offline “give [her] more hope for the future of China.”  

 She added that although people sometimes analogize current events to that of 1989, she prefers to think of them as a “proto-neo “New Culture Movement”, after that of the 1910s and 1920s, when the future of China seemed similarly dim—she hopes that their passions and intelligence will model that of their predecessors a century ago and bring practical change to her home country. 

Both the media and protesters have compared the A4 Revolution to the 1989 student movement that ended in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. While many social media posts expressed worry that the tragedy will repeat again, Yang said that “we are the new generation of Chinese youths. This is a new revolution.”  

Yang urged non-Chinese students at Yale to learn about the situation their Chinese classmates are in, show empathy and stand together with them by showing up at events like this vigil to protect them.  

Joshua Friedlein, a citizen of Cherokee Nation and second-year master student at the Yale School of Environment, showed up at the vigil on Monday after seeing the poster on social media.  

“I felt that it was important to use my power and my privilege as a U.S. citizen and as a white presenting male to be another body at the vigil,” Friedlein said. “Even though I'm not fully aware of all the complexities of these issues and not connected personally, I wanted to be there and be a witness and…hopefully, in some way, protect the Chinese students from any repercussions that might have happened.”  

Friedlein said that he felt a sense of collective sorrow and determination and was inspired by how the Chinese students chose to speak up in spite of all the danger they might be facing. He noted that it was sad that the vigil did not bring out as many Yale students and community members as some others, such as the one that occurred in response to Russia invading Ukraine.  

Meanwhile, moving forward, Yang suggested that the Chinese students at Yale should establish a community where people trust each other and can act in solidarity.  

“Before we could take any action, we need to have a community, we need to have trust,” Yang said. “Rather than just taking down the dictator, it’s important for Chinese people to learn how to love, how to take care of each other and how to communicate with each other through this social movement.”  

The Hong Kong graduate student suggested that Chinese students at Yale and the Chinese diaspora as a whole need to establish overseas civil society organizations that reflect the diverse views of the Chinese people.  

Meanwhile, he said, they can advocate for countries like the United States and Europe to enact human-centric foreign policies towards China—from passing legislations similar to the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act to shifting the narrative on China to one that humanizes Chinese people and emphasizes their struggle for freedom and human rights, instead of the conventional framing of great power competition.  

“Human rights should be in the language of the West when talking about their relationship with China,” he said. “Civilian protesters in China are alone and vulnerable without support from outside the country.”  

Overall, he said that he feels pessimistic about the future of the protests in China. Even though the protests in Hong Kong reached an unprecedented scale, he said, after months of protests, it still did not succeed. For people in mainland China who have less experience and support, he was uncertain about where the movement would go. Still, he believed that it was an important and necessary beginning.  

Cheng, on the other hand, said that nobody can predict how this movement is going to go and that its unpredictability is in fact one of the few predictable things about any kind of social uprising.  

“In the context of social movements, it's not something that just happens overnight.” Cheng said. “It's always a generational struggle. And the time it takes is part of the journey.”  

Gao urged Chinese students at Yale to use the comparable freedom that they have here to hold the negligent government officials accountable on a legal level.  

Moreover, Gao encouraged students at Yale Law School to hold seminars and start a COVID-19 accountability initiative where law professionals can sue these government officials in the International Criminal Court.  

“Holding a blank sheet of paper in a way becomes really subversively powerful because it is also like holding up a mirror to the state,” Cheng said. “They know how the state silences people, but its control is never complete. There are always fugitive spaces to subvert it.” 

According to Gao, multiple Yale students went to New York City on Tuesday to participate in a rally in front of the Chinese Embassy.  

According to WHO, in China, between January 3,  2020 5:36 pm CET to November 29, 2022, there have been 9,643,020 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 30,192 deaths.  

Correction, Dec. 1: The article has been updated with Yangyang Cheng's correct surname.