How Communist China Accidentally Created A New Generation Of Pro-Democracy Activists

The recent anti-government protests in China have attracted Chinese people from all walks of life. One protest group that stood out is Chinese youth, especially college students. Their participation in anti-government protests spells particular trouble for Beijing.

Today’s Chinese college students were mostly born after 2003 and have no memories of the atrocities the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed since 1949. The CCP has worked hard to erase its bloody history between 1949 and 1989 (including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) from the Chinese people’s collective memory. Students’ only exposure to that period is from a few historically inaccurate paragraphs in their history textbooks. Government censors also quickly expunged all references to the CCP’s bloody past from the internet. 

Consequently, most young Chinese have little knowledge of past events. According to Australian journalist Louis Lim, when she took the iconic tank man photo to four top Chinese universities in Beijing and asked roughly 100 Chinese students what it was, only 15 of them could recognize it had something to do with the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen. It’s an astonishing example of the effectiveness of the CCP’s censorship.

Young Chinese grew up in a China that has been a rising world power with signs of prosperity and modernity everywhere. With neither memorials nor historical knowledge, they did not see the CCP as an evildoer. Instead, many of them were more nationalistic than previous generations. They believed in the CCP’s lies that any criticism of the CCP is a smear campaign by hostile foreign forces and that Western-style democracy won’t work in China. They accepted at face value the “China dream” that President Xi Jinping promised — that only Xi would return China to its previous power and prestige and guarantee the Chinese people prosperity and security.

The CCP’s indoctrination of Chinese youths has been so successful that some Chinese students brought their distorted beliefs and blind faith in the CCP to foreign campuses. Rather than taking advantage of the political freedom to discover the truth, they defended the CCP by protesting against speeches and viewpoints that contradicted the CCP’s propaganda. For instance, in 2019, some mainland Chinese students on U.S. college campuses threatened their fellow Hong Kong students who publicly supported Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. 

Rude Awakening

Yet, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Chinese government’s draconian responses have brought a rude awakening for many young Chinese. According to a report by The Washington Post, school administrators enforced Covid restrictions, including “confining students to their dorms for weeks, requiring appointments to use shared bathrooms and barring them from showering.” And students were banned from “leaving campus or even going to the hospital. Cafeteria options had become limited, including for minority students with dietary restrictions, and food deliveries were blocked.”  

Naturally, students were upset that they had been forced to spend the best years of their lives on prison-like college campuses, enduring with little dignity the kind of hardship they had never experienced before. Chinese youth also feel growing anxiety about their economic future. Due to frequent

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