By Gerry Shih Gerry Shih China Correspondent Email Bio Follow May 25 at 12:20 PM BEIJING — The video opens with the 21-year-old sociology student facing the camera. His voice quivers as he recounts his interrogation — his humiliation — for days at the hands of Beijing police.
Over the past eight months, China’s ruling party has gone to extraordinary lengths to shut down the small club of students at the country’s top university. Peking University’s young Marxists drew the government’s ire after they campaigned for workers’ rights and openly criticized social inequality and corruption in China.
Since rising to power in 2012, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has repeatedly warned his Communist Party that it needs to win back the public’s faith by alleviating poverty, rooting out corrupt officials and ramping up nationalist education and propaganda work. But often, the public just doesn’t buy it. As China promoted dizzying free-market reforms in the 1990s, some Peking University students cut the other direction.
“But it was precisely the experiencing and understanding of workers’ lives that put you on the path of actually practicing Marxism,” she said. “That painful suffering is the daily existence for 300 million Chinese.” There was Zhan Zhenzhen, who was raised in a brick hut in Henan province by a single mother and didn’t know what staggering wealth looked like until he arrived in Beijing. There was Yue Xin, the daughter of a well-off Beijing family who brought the #MeToo movement to national attention in China.And there was Qiu, their leader, who arrived on a rare full scholarship in 2016 after he won the gold medal in the national Chemistry Olympiad.
When they returned to campus, the students were individually summoned to meet with police. One student, Lucy, recalled the police offering her a choice: confess that they broke the law and quit activism, and the police would drop the matter, maybe even help her secure a spot in graduate school. Don’t confess, they said, and she could be forced to drop out and arrested.In the weeks after that, the disappearances started to mount.
They had the potential to be the most serious threat to the government since the Tiananmen protests, Hu said.
ericfish85 wow……
gerryshih 衣服这么干净，标语这么干净，背景这么干净……摆脱，演戏请专业一点
gerryshih 这演员多少钱一天啊？小样的，挺有钱啊
CarlZha TweetNathanRich HuXijin_GT xuqinduo OcastJournalist qingqingparis chenweihua
Lol, real socialists beaten down by fake socialists.
We r loosing our rights & Chinese r fighting for theirs. Once China realizes how far they can go WITH their citizens- they WILL become the global powerhouse. We had it & we're loosing it.
Stay strong.
迟到早退，不遵守规则还无理取闹，受罚也活该
and off to a labor camp for speaking out in dissent. all hail our glorious leader Xi.