October 13th, Beijing. The Sitong Bridge (aka Stone Bridge) is in the centre of Haidian district, the high tech area of Beijing. Within 3 km from this intersection, many famous universities are located. Next to it are hotels that the representatives of the party congress might stay for the congress that will start on October 16th.
Around 1pm, a loud speaker started repeating: “We want to eat, we want freedom, we want to vote. Strike on schools, strike on work, strike down Xi Jinping.”
Smoke rose on the bridge. Two banners with red characters on it were hang on the bridge:
“We want food, not PCR tests. We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves,” said one banner, while a second called for a boycott of schools, strikes and the removal of Xi.
~ Translated by the Guardian.
Initially people thought the protester burned himself alive, later a video showed that the man, dressed as a construction worker, was taken by the police.
Various video and photo of the protest spread fast on Chinese social media. But they were quickly removed and blocked. People edited the photos and re-posted them to bypass automatic censorship. So, many groups were removed. Many social media accounts were banned.
Keywords were also quickly censored. First, they were “Sitong Bridge”, “Haidian”, “Banners”, “Brave man”.
Then, quickly, “Beijing”, “Bridge”, “Lone Brace Warrior” were banned.
Then people just kept posting: “What a brave man!”. So they had to censor the single word “Brave”.
One act by one man took down most communication on Weibo by forcing the censorship of so many simple words!
People posted: “I saw it.” So their accounts were suspended too.
The next day, people guessed about 600,000 social media accounts were removed. And all bridges in Beijing were guarded.
One pop song, the Chinese song for the Netflix TV series Arcane became very popular. You can listen to it on YouTube with English translation. The song was released in November 2021, and it has been very popular because of the show. Its title is: “Lone Brave Warrior.” You can guess why it’s even more popular now.
On Twitter, the video and how the event triggered censorship were documented in real time.
People also quickly found two Twitter accounts by the same man that they believe belonged to the man.
One hour before he carried out his brave act, he went to a few famous Twitter accounts and posted under their tweets asking them to retweet his message:
Hello my friends who share the same convictions as me, we are going into action soon. We hope you can retweet us, Thanks!
On October 16, 2022
Nation wide school boycott
Nation wide general strike
Nation wide car horning to protest
Nation wide military uprising
We are going to let the dictator Xi Jinping know that on the way to freedom there are many men in the land of China.
He also gave a link to his long essay for general votes.
A few hours after the man on the bridge was arrested, these tweets were deleted. People guessed that he was forced to delete his tweets, or the police got access to his phone and did it themselves.
Just before that deletion, one more video was posted on Twitter showing the bridge and the fire (the original link is supposed to be https://vxtwitter.com/lifa_petter/status/1580414339554873344 but it’s deleted), it’s not clear when it was taken. Take a look and decide. 97.4 is Beijing Music Radio.
People identified him as Peng Lifa, his internet nickname is Peng Zaizhou:
From his (archived) tweets , he was identified as an engineer in his forties.
Someone archived the Baidu search of “Peng Zaizhou” on October 13th and 14th. This name was cleansed on the 14th. People think this implied that the man on the bridge could be Mr. Peng.
There are many different reactions. Most people reacted with admiration. Chinese people on Twitter are more aware of the brutality of the regime, so they have more fear, and they know how rare bravery is. Some are telling people to stop spreading the news on Chinese social media because they will lose their social media accounts.
Some famous people in the democracy movement are calling Mr. Peng the new Tankman, and calling for Chinese students overseas to support him. Across the USA, many Chinese students posted the words from Mr. Peng on campus bulletin boards and send pictures to Twitter.
One Twitter user posted that he (inside China) is going out to make some posts before the daybreak. Many wished him being safe and gave him tips.
The 20th party congress is called “20 Big”, literally.
Without any surprise, it started in the morning on Oct 16th.
Many pupils were required to watch it at home, and the parents have to take photos of the kids in front of the TV and send them to the teacher via Weixin/Wechat.
Many people watched it, and documented what Xi said. For example, one Twitter user said Xi had used the words “Security” 50 times.
Many people watched closely who was there and who was absent.
Notable absence, Jiang Zemin, a former party Secretary general, who backed Xi to be the successor of Hu Jintao; Jiang’s premier, Zhu Wenji was also absent.
Zhang Gaoli, former high level official, accused of raping tennis player Pengshuai, was there.
Another sport was to document all the mistakes Xi made when he read his speech — common words, but he could not get them right. This thread gives a few examples.
Others chose Douyin. One channel that streams their hens got 500,000 people watching, while they usually has only dozens viewers. The stream video was taken off. No one knows why. Some say that was because in the comment section of the video, some one said “Long live the hens!” Some say it was because people were choosing to watch something so trivial to avoid watching the 20 Big.
After the chicken show, a donkey show got popular. The donkey was pulling a mill. Some people screenshoted the comments. Many of the comments were making fun of Xi.
Then, a show of Zhu Bajie. a well known pig from the Journey to the West, a Chinese classic fantasy novel written in the 16th century, got popular. Many people think the pig refers to Xi.
One person stole the show, though. Yes Mr. Peng. Again. He posted a tweet at 9am Beijing time, an hour before the 20 Big began. And the tweet was not deleted.
The tweet is an excerpt of the will of Sun Yat-sen, it says:
For 40 years I have devoted myself to the cause of the national revolution, the objective of which is to achieve liberty and equality for China. The forty years’ experience has convinced me that to realize such goal, we must awake our people, to unite with peoples of the world who treat us equally, and together to carry out our common fight.
Mr. Peng had no more than 500 followers when people discovered him on October 13th, now he has almost 40,000 followers.