aLu Yuyu felt tired as he trekked through the lush mountains on the China-Laos border. He had been on the road for days, evading authorities and fleeing China. His traveling companion is a smuggler who he pays 15,000 yuan (£1,622) to help him escape, but in the final hours of his journey to freedom he is handed over to two men and a scooter. I was forced to continue my journey.
However, withdrawing from China was only the first step. There are thousands of miles left before Lou feels truly safe.
His daring escape from China last May was accompanied by great luck. Other dissidents tried along similar lines but failed. Some made it to Laos but were sent back to China. From Laos, Lu traveled to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Thailand, where he applied for asylum in Canada and was later reunited with his wife and white-and-ginger tabbie, Anthony.
“I'm very lucky to be able to get out of China,” Lu said in a phone interview from his new home in Calgary.
Lu belongs to a relatively new breed of Chinese activists who use social media to document and publicize unrest within China, a task once carried out by Chinese authorities themselves. According to statistics released by the Ministry of Public Security, the number of such “large-scale incidents” has increased every year from 1993 to 2005, reaching 87,000 in this year. has stopped publishing data.
Instead, civil society groups and activists have sought to trace the flashpoints of public discontent. China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based NGO, monitors strikes and protests in mainland China. Chinese opposition observer groupThis project, run by Freedom House, has counted more than 3,000 events in 2024. Another blogger, Li Ying, a Chinese artist living in Italy, started sharing news and videos of anti-lockdown protests in China in November 2022. His X account, Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher, has nearly 2 million followers and is widely viewed as a source of information about events in China.
Lou started blogging 10 years ago. In 2012, in the twilight of China's relatively open internet era, he noticed several different protests and began searching social media platforms WeChat and Weibo for details. He published the details on his blog, Not the News, which has become a popular resource for researchers in China and abroad.
He was arrested in 2016 and sentenced to four years in prison for “picking a fight or causing trouble,” a charge often used to imprison dissidents. “I know the true identity of the Chinese Communist Party.” [Chinese Communist party] administration. So I expected them to come get me,” he says.
Upon his release in 2020, he wanted to resume work. “But it was difficult to do that because I was being watched every day,” he says. He flew interstate to try to forget his bouncers, but pandemic-related travel restrictions that began that year made that difficult.
By April 2022, he was living in Dandong, northeast China. One day, when a new coronavirus outbreak occurred in his apartment, he was taken to a quarantine center by the police. He was confined there for two weeks. “I felt really helpless because I couldn't even take care of the cat,” he says.
He became anxious to leave China.
However, there were many obstacles in the way. China's borders are effectively closed under the “zero-corona” regime, and in any case, he had never owned a passport. He tried to apply in 2021, but his application was blocked.
The lifting of pandemic restrictions in early 2023 offered Lu a glimmer of hope. First, he traveled 3,000 miles from Dandong to southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, assuming he was a tourist. I then traveled to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, over the long May Day holiday weekend.
There, he noticed that the caretakers were less cautious on weekends. So he booked a Saturday flight to Yunnan province on China's southwestern border. He left his SIM card behind so authorities would have time to realize he had slipped away. After arriving in Thailand, he applied for asylum in an English-speaking country and was offered entry to Canada.
He is slowly rebuilding his life in Calgary and trying to stay active, but China's increasingly sophisticated internet censorship is making that difficult. “It will now be much easier for police to find information about protests, and people will be intimidated into deleting their posts. Otherwise, platforms will filter them from collecting sensitive information. “Yes,” he says.
Lu estimated that 10 years ago there were nearly 100 protests a day in China, but now there are closer to 70, but that's because there are fewer protests. It is unclear whether this is because censorship is more effective, or because censorship is more effective. However, Lu says there is certainly a decline in large-scale protests.
But he says: “There is still dissatisfaction in society. The Chinese Communist Party can only stop large-scale protests, but it cannot eradicate smaller protests. It is a balance.”
Additional research by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu
