After the protests, a glimmer of hope — Q&A with Li Yuan

Li Yuan (袁莉 Yuán Lì) is a veteran journalist who started her career at a Chinese state news agency, where she covered Afghanistan and Southeast Asia as a foreign correspondent, before joining the Wall Street Journal as a technology reporter and editor of its Chinese-language website.

She now writes a column on China for the New York Times and runs the excellent Chinese-language podcast “I Don’t Understand” (不明白播客), which has the slogan “Together, let’s search for the truth and the answers” (一起探寻真理与答案).

We chatted by video call on December 6. This is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

What’s your sense of what’s going on in China now? You’ve been following the protest really closely, and you did a great podcast with some young Chinese people who were involved. Have they fizzled out, do you think?

The government is making it very difficult for many of the protesters. They arrested many people. They took them in for a few hours. Some of them stayed there; were detained for like 24 hours, and they visited their homes, they called them. I heard from university students, their teachers, their tutors, talked to them and even called their parents.

I think the young people felt like they won because it’s pretty obvious the government is loosening up. The tone has changed dramatically. There are many government announcements about changing direction.

The young people are quite happy about it, but they’re quite smart. They know that if they persist at this moment, they’re not going to get anything good. So, I think they decided to lay low and then see where things go. But I asked them whether they will join another protest considering what they have gone through. Even people who were detained told me that they would. They wouldn’t hesitate.

One of the students told me today that he was filming the other students holding the blank sheet of white paper. And he said, next time, I want to be the one who holds the paper.

It’s not something that, that’s going to really shake the Communist Party or overthrow Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, but it made people realize what is possible. They didn’t dare to imagine they could take to the street and shout slogans, even say “Down with Xi Jinping, down with the Communist Party.” Or even just say “No lockdowns.” That’s something they never imagined.

Some of them said, even just saying the name of Xi Jinping, the three words, it’s something they wouldn’t imagine because the people are self-censoring quite a bit on the Chinese internet.

When you say you feel more hopeful, what are you hopeful for?

I’m a journalist, I don’t really want to talk about what I hope for, but I think these what protesters hope for is that they don’t want a government that can dictate how they spend their minutes, their days. That a government can just tell them not to go to work, not to have the opportunity to make money, to go to study. Just for a virus that is not as fatal as it was three years ago. And the whole world has opened up.

They realized, this COVID-zero policy made them realize that they cannot let the government have so much power, to have one person to have so much power. That’s really, really consistent from people, what I heard.

Most of the time I was in China — I moved there in 1995 — there was this sense that the government was pulling out of people’s private lives. It wasn’t telling you where to live. It wasn’t assigning you a work unit after college or deciding who you could marry. But COVID put the government back into people’s lives in a way that young people had never really experienced.

Yeah. That’s exactly what people have been telling me. I’m still interviewing people because it’s amazing. We all know how difficult it has become to interview Chinese people since COVID, right? Well, since 2019, and especially since COVID. But there are so many people who want to talk to me. They want to share their thoughts, their stories. I just heard from a protester who told me, “Oh, I might find the one just during the protest.” They want to share every detail with me.

But they all said the same thing; they said, “I did not pay attention to politics before the pandemic. I didn’t really care because I knew the government wouldn’t care about my opinions.” But right after the Shanghai lockdown, I talked to a software programmer. He wrote an ebook after the Shanghai lockdown. He said he went abroad, he studied abroad, and he moved back to China, and he was earning a decent salary. Typical middle-class Chinese, and never cared about politics, never talked about politics with his friends. And then the Shanghai lockdown, he felt that he lost complete control of his life, and he was so depressed. He did not know — how could this happen? He started asking questions. That happened to many, many people. Many people realize the government has too much control there; too much control over their lives and now they’re asking questions — why and how much control they should give to the government.

Being imprisoned in your own apartment, that’ll do it for you, I guess.

What about signs of solidarity with Uyghurs? I found one of the interesting slogans that we heard in Shanghai was “We’re all Xinjiang people.” That seems quite unusual in a country where, generally speaking, there hasn’t been a lot of sympathy on the part of most Han Chinese for Muslim minorities and Uyghurs.

I actually heard a lot from protesters how they changed their opinions about the Xinjiang policy, about the Hong Kong young people.

Remember they used to call the Hong Kong protesters fèi qīng 废青, wasted youth. And they did not believe there were concentration camps in Xinjiang, and they thought the New York Times and other foreign media just made up those stories. But I heard from protesters, again and again, that now they really admire Hong Kong protesters. They’re reaching out. They’re actually watching documentaries of Hong Kong protesters and trying to learn how they protested, how they protected their identity.

And then they also realize that they should be more sympathetic to the Uyghurs. One protester told me that if they could do what they did to Uyghurs and they could do to us. She realized that they…I wrote a column [in March] about how Shanghai was being Xinjianged, right? At that time, some people were like, “Oh, you are exaggerating.” Now people are thinking that they should have two phones — one they can use at home with all the foreign apps and VPNs, and maybe they should carry another one when they go out, which is exactly what happened to many people in Xinjiang, right? It’s just so scary.

Some of my Chinese friends said when the iron face of the government falls to you, then you’ll realize what it’s like to be persecuted or to be the victim. I think it’s unfortunate that many people didn’t realize this until they suffered personally from some cruel policies. But I think it’s still encouraging. This young generation, I think many of them grew up in a very controlled internet environment. And also, the indoctrination at schools is unbelievable.

And they also had, during their whole childhood and, depending on their age, early adulthood, incredible economic growth, where every year, you get a better pair of sneakers or a better car!

It used to be all about consumerism. I joke that Chinese religion is consumerism and because you can’t really believe in anything. If you are religious, Christianity…how many churches has the Party has torn down. And Muslims are persecuted. It’s hard to be religious, but people just believe in striving for better material lives.

And now they realize that life is more than that. I read an online comment today, something along the line that Xi Jinping used COVID zero to teach a civics lesson to the Chinese public. That’s a rough translation. Some people have learned the lesson.

Unintentional lesson.

Unintentional. Yes.

How about the theory that some state media have circulated and even — what’s his name? — Chēn Wénqīng 陈文清, the security chief, suggested in a speech that hostile foreign forces are behind this. Do you think that there’s any pickup of that belief amongst ordinary people?

I’m not sure how many people believe in that, but there are just so many jokes about it:

You scared off most foreigners! There are barely any foreigners in China and you scared off most of the foreign investors, where are the foreign forces? What are they here for? What can they gain from influencing us?

One thing I found encouraging is that I interviewed this one Chinese protester, a Shanghai protester. He did not like the more radical political slogans like ‘down with Xi Jinping, down with the CCP.” But still, he felt encouraged by the protests. He liked shouting the slogans. And he also said that he used to believe there was only a very, very minor percentage of Chinese people who wanted freedom. But he said now he believed there are [more of them].

It’s not scientific, but I think the one thing that’s pretty obvious is that many young people feel they are not no longer alone. It used to be very dangerous to talk about politics to people, even those young people who did not like the government, did not like the Communist Party, they most likely kept to themselves, only talked to a few really close friends. But now they realize they are not alone. There are like-minded people out there. So, that’s one thing they felt really positive about the whole thing.

So does this make you hopeful?

To be honest, I don’t know how hopeful we should be. But still, so many of my friends cried, people of my age. I admit I cried quite a bit, just watching, I choked up quite a bit watching those videos because for many people, for many of my friends, we had been feeling that the darkness was complete, was overwhelming. We believed that the younger generation were mostly the little pinks, and that there was no hope for China to ever become a little bit free. They saw they would have to live in the darkness for another 20 years, 30 years, maybe. [All they could hope for] was to outlive Xi Jinping.

Now, even though we don’t know what’s going to happen, people see a little bit of hope, a little bit of light, even if it’s very distant.

What about you personally, because you are quite regularly attacked by nationalists as an agent of foreign forces. You’re always featured on these misogynist lists of Asian journalists who are “traitors to the Chinese race” or whatever. How do you deal with that?

I saw, yesterday. I laughed. I was named as an “anti-China force” by this blogger on guancha.com.

This blogger who lives in New York!

Yeah. And he got all the facts wrong. I was like, they better find a better writer and better fact checker to write those kind of attack pieces!

I think maybe I’m older than most of the female journalists who are attacked. I think I also went through the Weibo period [2009 to 2012] when I was attacked regularly as well, just because I was a woman and I spoke out, and I had opinions. I think I became quite thick-skinned. But it doesn’t mean that it does not bother me at all, but I learn to mute those voices. I just don’t pay attention to them. What can I do? There’s not much I can do.

I guess that’s all one can do.

I recall you being something of a Big V [opinion leader] at the height of Weibo. It’s such an extraordinary thing to look back on that time. It wasn’t that long ago, and there was quite a vibrant online public square in China for a time!

Yeah. I know there are Chinese and even foreigners who believe that people of my generation are too nostalgic about the so-called Reform era. And it was not perfect. There were many, many bad things happening to people. Many people suffered. The Communist Party has always been pretty brutal to the Chinese people. But still, I think the Reform era was about a little bit of freedom that the Chinese people enjoyed to make the most of their lives, to have better apartments, to have their first car, first apartment, sending their kids to the U.S. or somewhere to study, and to go on a trip, to get on the airplane for the first time.

And to be able to say things out loud on Weibo, even though you could get censored, but you were not going to be detained for five days just because you said something about the traffic cop on your WeChat moments.

And now…

I wrote about that guy who tabulates all the speech crimes in China. It’s amazing. You’ll see how people are punished just for the smallest things they say online. It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. Just 10 years ago, you wouldn’t get into trouble for such things.

It is an incredible change. I mean, during that Weibo period, I was running what was basically an illegal publication out of an office in Beijing. I had this website. I mean, I had trouble sometimes, but they basically let me do it. It would just be impossible these days.

But enough reminiscing. Can I ask about your podcast? It’s one of the most interesting things going on in the Chinese language at the moment.

I started in May because I felt really depressed during the Shanghai lockdown, even though I live in Seoul. I think many people felt depressed, many Chinese, many of my friends because you saw people suffer,; people who are just like you. My friends, I talk to them. I wrote columns about what it was like in Shanghai, and I felt angry, I felt depressed, and I felt like I needed to do something. In addition to writing my column in English, I needed to do something for the Chinese people, the Chinese public. And also, you know this very well, there’s almost no decent Chinese publications left. They’ve killed most of them. Even many publications that are still around are no longer their former selves.

I felt that, especially for the younger people, they should know what a normal news outlet should be like, how you should talk about a news event without censorship. You can ask questions straight. And there will be all kinds of opinions about one thing. That’s what I wanted to do. And I did not expect it to become very popular. I did not expect I would get so much feedback from the audience. Many people listened to us inside China, and we got blocked, our website got blocked after the second episode, and then they just raised the Great Firewall higher and higher and higher, but we still get a lot of listeners.

I’m really grateful. It’s quite an experience. Speaking in Chinese is liberating. And also, a lot of times I can ask a lot more questions, I can cover a lot more questions because it runs pretty long, sometimes too long. I can cover a lot more questions than my columns. Also, our audience is Chinese, and I don’t need to explain too much background.

That’s a big thing, I think, because I mean, a column in English, you kind of have to explain basics like who is Jiāng Zémín 江泽民.

Who’s Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛. When you say like Three Represents — I think most Chinese know, at least our audience know. But if you talk about it in English, you have to spend 100, 200 words to explain.

Where do you want to take the podcast? Are you interested in talking to more ordinary people, like the episode with the protesters, or do you think it’s going to be more expert interviews, or are you just taking each episode as it comes?

I think it’s every episode as it comes. I did not expect the protests, right? I have two or three episodes I recorded that we still haven’t posted because of the protests, and because Jiang Zemin died.

A lot of young people want to listen to the expert takes, and I find it interesting as well. But at the same time, I’m a journalist, I enjoy talking to ordinary people, especially the young people. I really want to understand the Chinese young people, what they’re thinking and who they are, what their plans are for their life, for their career, and all those things.

Where do you think we should be looking in trying to understand where China’s politics are going in the coming years?

The economy is definitely one thing. Everybody knows the economy isn’t doing very well, and the unemployment rate for young people is super high, like 20%. And if they realize that the economy is not going to go back to what it was, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

But elite politics, it’s a black box. It’s really hard to tell. We are all just reading the tea leaves, right?

Yeah.

That’s why I’m trying to talk to as many people as possible and I spend all my waking hours online, reading Weibo, WeChat, whatever. But how all of the online opinions, online takes, and what the events happening everywhere in China, how those things are going to affect the decision-making of the Communist Party. I don’t know. The Party responds to public opinions occasionally, but most of the time it doesn’t really care.