To Outlive Tyranny
Flesh and blood alone cannot halt the advance of iron and steel. To stop the tanks, we need people to place blocks on the road and throw sand into the gears.
It’s early summer, and images of tanks dot my social media timeline. The metal beasts are lined up against an urban backdrop, a column of steel that stretches to the horizon. Sixteen years after moving from my birth country of China to the United States, I have learned to expect pictures like this to circulate every June. On the fourth day of that month in 1989, shortly before I was born, over 180,000 Chinese troops advanced into Beijing to crush a student-led pro-democracy demonstration. A photo from that day, of a lone man in a white shirt standing in front of a procession of tanks, became a global symbol of defiance.
This year, the images are different. They’re not blurry with age, and they did not originate from another continent. Instead, they show American tanks in transit to Washington, D.C., for President Donald Trump’s birthday parade, advertised as a celebration of the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary. On the other side of the country in Los Angeles, hundreds of Marines and thousands of National Guard troops have been sent in to “restore order” after small-scale protests erupted against ICE raids in immigrant communities.
For a Chinese person living in the United States, the terrors of this moment are laced with irony. Over the past decade, partly in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s tightening grip at home and increasing belligerence abroad, but primarily as a reaction to China’s economic rise, policymakers and pundits in the United States have almost uniformly labeled the Chinese government as the greatest threat to freedom and democracy worldwide. Many have used Beijing’s authoritarian rule as justification to paint any person of Chinese descent as a potential agent of the Chinese state.
Five years ago, while quarantined in my apartment in Chicago, I pictured the city under martial law, with armed agents bursting through my front door. Today I no longer indulge in such torturous speculation. Perhaps I have exhausted my nerves; perhaps imagining dystopia was only cathartic when the scenarios still seemed remote. Some of my colleagues are already adopting safety techniques used in China for their work in the United States: avoid sensitive topics or keywords, scrub social media, carry clean electronics when crossing the border, and tell students to submit paper copies of their essays to evade digital surveillance.
While in my younger years I was primarily concerned for my own future, these days, as an immigrant scholar living and working in the United States, I find myself preoccupied with a different question: how do we teach the children? What can we tell the young about how to exist and persist at this historic juncture?
After the State Department announced in May that it would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students,” I was invited to an online panel to discuss the latest crises. An audience member asked how international students should conduct themselves in the face of escalating threats and uncertainty. Multiple speakers suggested caution: do not take part in protests or make incendiary remarks; keep your head down and stay out of trouble.
The Zoom chat immediately lit up with a comment from the audience: when has silence and complacency ever protected the marginalized from injustice? Witnessing this exchange pained me. When the magnitude of oppression dwarfs any individual, both encouraging and advising against active resistance can feel like miseducating the youth.
Thirty-six years ago in Beijing, after weeks of student protest and encampment in Tiananmen Square, where some had launched a hunger strike, groups of well-known writers and university instructors tried to persuade the demonstrators to return to their campuses. The intellectuals shared the students’ aspirations, but they stressed that democracy cannot be realized overnight; lasting change requires long-term organizing. Having lived through the brutalities of the Mao era, the teachers feared that the students were willing to sacrifice their lives to stoke the conscience of a state that had none. Continued social turmoil could be used as ammunition by hard-liner politicians in elite power struggles with the reformers.
The elders had little success in swaying the young. Yet after soldiers with machine guns cleared out the square, Chinese authorities still accused the intellectuals of sympathizing with the students and inciting a “counterrevolutionary riot.” Several wereimprisoned or went into exile. Despite paying a high price for their participation, the intellectuals were criticized by some protesters for being insufficiently resolute, and their appeal to moderation was denounced as tacit cooperation with the state.
Decades after the crackdown, arguments about Tiananmen continue in overseas Chinese dissident circles. The exceedingly personal nature of the disputes indicates a collective powerlessness. When fighting Beijing feels impossible, one resigns to fighting with one’s comrades; claiming moral high ground can seem like a consolation prize.
For many in China, including my mother, the lessons of the bloody spring of 1989 are much more straightforward. When the state is deemed beyond reproach, a good citizen blames the agitators who suggest otherwise. The massacre was a tragedy caused by youthful passion, and in its aftermath, silence is golden. Growing up, I sensed the presence of a seismic event in my birth year, but only by observing the vacuum of fear and tracing the contours of censorship: a candle emoji posted online and quickly deleted, a date whispered in code, adults’ nervous glances and quick change of subject when an innocent query stumbled too close to the unspeakable truth. I did not find out what had actually happened until I left China. Many Chinese people my age or younger share this experience, where learning about the forbidden history of our homeland from an ocean away marked a moment of political awakening. That this window might be closing for a new generation of Chinese youth breaks my heart.
Several years after I moved to the United States, I ran into one of my college professors from China while on a work trip. In the privacy of a vacant lobby and with the protection of distance, we talked late into the night and spoke of Tiananmen. The protesters were ahead of their time, my professor said. I had heard that comment before. But how long should they have waited? Doing the right thing when it no longer exacts a cost may help consolidate the gains of liberation, but it means someone else has paid the price to break free from the shackles. The idea that one could bide one’s time to speak up also assumes that progress is linear and freedom is a one-way street. Yet Chinese citizens under Xi Jinping have less room for political expression than they did in the 1980s. History teaches us that the future is always contingent, and the path is not predetermined. One cannot choose the time one is born into, but one can choose what to do with the time one has.
These days, when I hear young Chinese students question their future, I feel profound sadness, but also a pang of guilt. I wonder if this is akin to how my liberal-minded elders felt when they apologized to me for their generation’s failure—for a China that is still not free. I grew up at a time of optimism and relative openness in China and arrived in Barack Obama’s America. By the time I saw the world I thought I knew shatter during the 2016 election, I had completed my degree. In the many years after, and perhaps even to this day, I consider my diploma the most important piece of paper I own, and the one I’m least likely to lose. I do not know what I would have done had politics interrupted my education. It feels like I caught one of the last boats out at the closing of an era.
Yet when I started writing for the public in 2017, it was not from a position of security but out of an acute sense of vulnerability. Watching the political conditions deteriorate in both my birth country and my adopted home, and the widening chasm between them, I sensed the ground was splitting beneath my feet. I was running out of time, so I had to cling to what little I could hold and wield it for all it was worth. I wrote to liberate myself from fear. The first time I saw words critical of Beijing spill from my fingertips and appear on screen, it felt as if someone else’s hands were pressing the keyboard, and I needed to reclaim them. When I finally stood up from my desk, the lights in the room seemed to cast a different glow. The colors had shifted. There was an extra lift in my step. Nothing would ever be the same.
Having experienced the exhilaration of that transformation, I cannot begin to dissuade anyone else from it. However, knowing the cost of that liberatory feeling, which can be addictive, I also cannot promote it. What I can do is be transparent about the price. To continue doing the work I do and to shield my family in China, I cannot return to my birth country in the foreseeable future. I have missed the final moments of loved ones. Everyone over there who birthed me, raised me, taught me, and cared for me: I am still coming to terms with the fact that I might have already seen them for the last time, many years ago, without realizing it.
Exile is not a badge of honor, nor should it be a source of shame. It is a deeply painful condition that I must contend with as a consequence of my own choices. That it was a choice at all speaks to my privilege. Before I ventured into dissent, I considered the range of repercussions and accepted the possibility of indefinite severance from my homeland—not because I was arrogant enough to assume one article could cause so much trouble, but because I needed to be honest with myself about my risk limits. I’m not willing to die for a cause, however much I’m in awe of and indebted to those who are. So, short of martyrdom, what am I willing to forego to live up to this moment and speak as truly and as freely as I can? I did not consult anyone on this question, and no one else could have answered it for me. When students ask me about my choices as they contemplate theirs, this is what I tell them.
Over the past few months, I have been revisiting this question and reconsidering my answer. As the United States slides further into autocracy, the numbing freeze of fear is creeping back into my veins. I have accepted exile, but I’m not ready for imprisonment. I have left the old country, but I’m not ready to abandon the new one. Yet if I retreated to the cage of silence, what would I have given up a homeland for? I wouldn’t be just forsaking an ideal, but also betraying my younger self. I’m reminded of John Berger, who wrote that sometimes, “for those who have little,” hope is “something to bite on”: “With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes the strength, when necessary, to not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl.”
There is a tendency in this country to reduce movements to spectacle and to fetishize suffering, especially if the struggle unfolds on the margins, where heroic acts of the minority can be seen and even celebrated by the majority without disturbing the latter’s comfort. This is why every year when spring turns to summer, the U.S. media and the public share the iconic photo of “tank man” under the banner “Never Forget.” Such innocent gestures offer few clues to what they themselves might do when armed agents of the state occupy their streets.
Flesh and blood alone cannot halt the advance of iron and steel. To stop the tanks, we need people to place blocks on the road and throw sand into the gears. We need people who provide food, water, and shelter to those on the front lines. We need people who study the mechanics of tanks and how to disable them, people who organize strikes at the production plant so that tanks are never built, and people who convert weapons factories into spaces that nurture and sustain life. A fiery burst of courage and conviction can become a beacon in the darkest night: while the students who were willing to risk their lives at Tiananmen may not have moved the state, they stirred the conscience of society. But a mass movement cannot sustain itself on constant political mobilization. The struggle for liberation must be able to outlive tyranny.
In times like these, it can feel like a luxury, even a dereliction of one’s civic duties, to stay in the academy. I have grappled with these doubts since 2016. But I also know that when fascists rise to power, schools are among the first under attack. These days, when I feel hope slipping from between my teeth, I revisit two classrooms I have encountered on the page. The first is in the memoir of the writer and scholar Chi Pang-yuan, The Great Flowing River (translated by John Balcom). Born in Manchuria in 1924, Chi, like many of her peers in China, spent the first decades of her life fleeing war and upheaval. Amid escalating Japanese invasions, her middle school moved west, from Nanjing to Sichuan. The perilous journey took an entire year, and “life on the road was filled with untold hardships.” Yet “whenever a place could be found for a few dozen people, indoors or outdoors, that was where the teachers would hold class,” Chi wrote. The teachers carried with them not only lab equipment and “textbooks in all subjects,” but the dreams and aspirations of a nation. They did not know when the war might end, but they knew someone someday would be needed to rebuild the country from rubble. So long as the class continued, the people were not lost. Some of Chi’s schoolmates became my professors’ professors.
The other classroom I return to is described in Luke Hein’s 2024 essay “Teaching China in Alabama Prisons in Six Objects.” Hein worked at Auburn University’s Alabama Prison Arts + Education Program, where he taught a general interest course on China to incarcerated students. Most of his students had never been to China. What they learned about Chinese culture and language in the course was unlikely to help them land a job. Yet, as Hein illustrates, what capitalism relegates as useless knowledge can become a site of radical imagination. The students acquired new vocabulary, even when a lack of access to dental care made certain syllables impossible to pronounce. In the prison yard, under the watchful gaze of a police helicopter, a group of students and their instructor practiced the eight brocades, a traditional Chinese exercise ritual. One move that involves shaking one’s head and behind became known as “the Beyoncé.” As Hein pointed out to his students, the roads to the prison traversed cotton fields, and the plain socks issued to the inmates were made in China. These humble items served as a reminder that the global history of cotton is also a history of racial capitalism, from the antebellum U.S. South to present-day Xinjiang, where Uyghur and Kazakh workers toil under coerced labor regimes that would be intimately familiar to Hein’s students.
While the scale and speed of democratic backsliding in the United States might surprise even the most seasoned observers, the logic and methods of authoritarian control are not new. They have always existed in this country, used against racial and religious minorities and inside prison walls. As Angela Davis wrote from a jail cell over half a century ago, dissidents are not the only political prisoners. The experience of incarceration can rouse a dormant political consciousness, and the crimes of those who suffer under an oppressive socioeconomic order are no less political than the crime of speech. A more capacious understanding of oppression opens up new terrains of resistance. Even under extreme conditions of surveillance and inhibition, knowledge can be smuggled in and out; alternative ways of speaking and being can be pursued and practiced.
The academy is not an escape from society, though it can be a refuge. It provides an institutional setting to interrogate the world as it is and imagine what it can be. It passes on lessons from the past and places faith in the future. Books outlast the authorities that ban them. Time is on our side, but only if we seize it. A campus cannot insulate the young from the horrors of this world; what it can do is equip them with courage, camaraderie, and critical thinking. Dear students, I’m scared too. Let fear keep us honest. Let uncertainty manifest possibility. In the classroom and on the page and, when the moment comes, in the streets, you and I will meet.
Yangyang Cheng is a research scholar at Yale Law School. A particle physicist by training, she studies the history of science in China and U.S.–China relations.