Rose Tang was stunned when she saw videos last week of crowds in China chanting in Mandarin, “Give me liberty or give me death.” It was a phrase the Brooklyn resident had last heard more than three decades ago, when she was one of the student leaders at the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. It took her back to the afternoon of 3 June 1989, when she spotted military convoys rumbling toward the protest camp. She threw on a black outfit and rode her bike into the square, determined…
Tag: Activism
Tuesday briefing: What’s behind angry protests against China’s ‘deadly’ Covid restrictions
Good morning. After days of escalating protests across China unprecedented since Xi Jinping came to power a decade ago, the state hit back on Monday night. “There was a massive police presence [at the expected protest sites] in Shanghai and Beijing questioning passers-by,” the Guardian’s Helen Davidson, covering the story from Taipei, told me this morning. “They scared people off, which was obviously the intention.” And yet the unrest that has grown over recent days and weeks remains a sign of an extraordinary rupture in China’s political system. “This isn’t…
Ai Weiwei says mother, 90, warns him against China return
The Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has said his desire to be reunited with his 90-year-old mother could lead him to return to China, but that she has implored him not to give up his British exile. The sculptor and activist, who divides his time between Cambridge and Portugal, spent 81 days in custody in Beijing in 2011 and fled his home country four years later on the return of his passport. Asked by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, at an event in London whether people who…