‘I have no future’: China’s rebel influencer is still paying a price

In November 2022, Li Ying had graduated from painting and art school in Milan, and was living in a state of sadness, fear and despair. China’s strict pandemic policies had kept him from seeing his parents for three years, and he wasn’t sure where his country was headed.

In China, after enduring endless Covid tests, quarantines and lockdowns, people staged the most widespread protests the country had seen in decades, with many holding roughly letter-sized paper to show their opposition to censorship and tyranny. in what is called the White Paper movement. .

Then Mr. Li did something he never expected would become so important: he turned around Twitter account in an information center. People in China sent him photos, videos and other testimonies, sometimes more than a dozen per second, that would otherwise be censored on the Chinese Internet. He used Twitter, which is banned in China, to broadcast them to the world. Mr. Li’s avatar, his drawing of a cat that is both cute and menacing, became famous.

His on-stage following grew by 500,000 within weeks. For the Chinese state he was a troublemaker. To some Chinese, he was a superhero who stood up to their authoritarian government and their iron leader, Xi Jinping.

When the government abruptly ended its Covid policy last December, Mr Li and other young activists were faced with the question: was their protest a moment in history or a footnote?

A year later, Mr. Li was clear in his response. “The White Paper Movement,” he told me in an interview, “was not the end, but the beginning of something.”

His journey from young artist to rebellious influencer has brought fear, guilt, courage and hope. It is one that has become familiar to many of his colleagues.

At 31, Mr. Li is one of a generation of young Chinese activists who rose up against their government and Mr. Xi out of a sense of justice and dignity. They are not professional revolutionaries, but accidental activists who felt compelled to speak out when Mr. Xi turned their country into a giant prison and their future into a black hole.

They live with the consequences, some inside China and others outside. They were arrested, harassed by police or pushed into exile for fear of threats from the authorities. They continued their activism as many more people joined their resistance.

Mr. Li was and is a reluctant hero. A year later he paid a high personal price. Sometimes he cried and thought about quitting. But the Chinese state’s punishments continued to pile up. He couldn’t go back, so he moved on.

It is too risky for him to return to China. The police regularly harass his parents. All his Chinese accounts related to banking, payments and even gaming have been frozen. He lost his only source of income in Milan, where he had been studying and living since 2015; he said this was because the company he was working with received a letter from the Chinese embassy. He has received death threats almost weekly. A man showed up at his apartment, an address he said he had shared only with the Chinese consulate. Mr. Li has moved four times in the past year to stay safe.

He still uses his account on Twitter, now from a former prime minister.

X and most other websites popular in the rest of the world are blocked in China. To access it, some Chinese use software such as virtual private networks to scale the so-called Great Firewall. They then share screenshots and download PDF, audio, and video files with people who don’t have access.

“People say to me all the time, ‘Thank you for letting me know there’s so much going on in China,’” Mr. Li said. He spends at least five to six hours a day on X. He rarely leaves his apartment in Milan and rarely takes a day off. He cooks most of his meals. On the busiest news days he orders McDonald’s.

He has persevered, he said, mainly out of love for his homeland and its people. “I am not surprised by what is happening in China,” he added. “I understand why people there act the way they do.”

In his inbox on X, people in China send him many messages every day. Last year there were mainly complaints that they were in lockdown or quarantine and had no food, no water and no heating. This year, he said, most reports were about protests of all kinds.

Since last year’s demonstrations, the Chinese have done the same held up those sheets of paper when they protested against economic issues such as insufficient pensions, insufficient heating of homes and delays in the delivery of apartments they had paid for.

“The biggest change is that after the White Paper Movement, the Chinese began to realize that we have the right to fight for what we want,” Mr Li said. “I think this is a big change.”

“The same goes for speech control,” he said. He believes that ‘cracks’ have opened in the Great Firewall.

One sign of this, he says, is that his following on X has doubled to 1.4 million compared to a year ago. It could mean that more Chinese people are using VPNs, or that more people are concerned about what’s happening in the country.

Even during last year’s protests, he said, there weren’t many overly deviant reactions online. But a year later, when a former prime minister died, people on the Chinese internet said they cursed Mr Xi and used euphemisms in an attempt to avoid censorship.

“It seems that people’s mental state, or overall emotional state, has undergone a significant change,” he said.

A large following on X has brought little income to Mr Li. His account was viewed more than 300 million times from Oct. 15 to Nov. 1, he said, earning him $280. To earn a living, he started a Youtube Channel in July, posting videos commenting on Chinese current events. Revenue from advertising and donations brings him an average of just over $3,000 a month, enough to feed himself and his two cats, he said.

He may be seen as a hero to some people in China, but in real life, he joked, he is a loser. He thinks the Chinese police are eager to bring him back to the country.

He psychologically prepares himself for the possibility that he could be killed. “Any minute, boom, a few people are going to break in,” and he would become someone who “jumped off the building” or “suffered from severe depression and committed suicide,” he said.

“I am a person without a future,” he said repeatedly.

He does hope for a time when he can pick up his brushes and continue painting, something he hasn’t had time for due to his social media activism. He encouraged more people to start news accounts. A few are on the rise, but have much less influence.

“I cannot say whether China can become a democratic nation or a more liberal, more open society,” he said. “For every Chinese citizen, perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is whether we desire such a society and what we are willing to contribute to it.”

“I think this is a question for everyone,” he said.