Be citizens, not slaves.

"Boycott classes. Boycott work. Depose the traitorous despot Xi Jinping.” - Peng Lifa, 48, whereabouts unknown.

After a weekend in the wee hours monitoring the flood of livestreams bursting through Xi Jinping’s “Great Chinese Firewall,” I think I covered a good bit of ground in my National Post column today

I’ve got another column deadline in 24 hours but history turns on dimes, so what’s here in the Real Story might be what ends up really counting. In any case, today’s newsletter is for backstory and angles that may not make their way into print.

Peng Lifa, a face in the crowd, a human being with a name.

The thing about mass protests and uprisings is that people assemble in throngs and it’s hard to see them as individuals. We really shouldn’t lose sight of the “Bridge Man,” Peng Lifa, who has been disappeared into the Chinese detention system after his heroic act on the Sitong Overpass last month.

I wish I could tell you more about Peng Lifa than I did in today’s National Post. The crew over at China Change have put together a fine little package about him and his audacious courage. Phil Cunningham, author of Tiananmen Moon, has done an amazing job: The hero China needs.

Peng is, in his way, like Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor whose self-immolation 12 years ago sparked the Arab Spring, the greatest upheaval in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century earlier. Those revolutions, no thanks to the “west,” came largely to nought.

You could also say the Peng Lifa is like Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old whose death at the hands of the Khomeinist regime’s “morality police” in September touched off a revolution in Iran that remains in a state of suspended animation.

Or Liu Xiaobo, the human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in 2017 in the eighth year of an 11-year sentence for signing on to a modest democracy charter. At the moment of Liu’s death, Canada’s Governor General, David Johnston, was enjoying the tea and company of Xi Jinping and all the swells in Xi’s circle in Beijing. By then it was already as though Liu Xiaobo had never even existed, Beijing’s internet-scrubbers having so successfully shunted his name and his legacy down the memory hole.

Sunday’s newsletter was for the breaking story of the insurrection, and it also got pretty deep into Beijing’s friends in high places in Canada and some unreported and barely reported background details on Beijing’s network of election-interference and candidate-incubation operations in this country. So let’s not lose sight of that.

It was also for all subscribers, not just paying customers, as is this edition of the Real Story (but you know you really should take out a paying subscription, don’t you). I’ll have a special edition of the newsletter out this week, a bit of a blockbuster unrelated to China or Canada-China unseemliness, and I’m afraid much of it will be on the other side of a paywall.

In today’s National Post I try to show how the sudden upwelling of dissent in China is not just about the cruelty of Xi Jinping’s absurd Zero-Covid strategy. It was a spontaneous, countrywide and explicit challenge to the legitimacy of China’s one-party state. It was too much for the censors to deal with, which is why we know as much as we do about what happened, and it’s not quite as sudden as much of the news media has understandably and inadvertently made out.

The China Dissent Monitor logged 636 “offline” events during the four months leading up to the day Peng Lifa strung his banners from the railing of Beijing’s Sitong Overpass. Peng’s stroke of genius caught people’s attention, and the censors were overwhelmed then, too. But you could get a knock on the door in the night just for mentioning that you’d seen the banners, and the Chinese internet has been scoured and scrubbed of all mention of the event, and any mention of Peng Lifa.

You could have your Weibo account deleted, too, which in China is pretty well the equivalent of having your credit cards and your health insurance frozen.

The thing about these past few days is that again, the censors - there are millions of them employed by a variety of state agencies - were overwhelmed, except this time in a really, really big way. I get into that in my column today. The Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Internet Security Emergency Command Center, the Internet Management Office and the Illegal and Unhealthy Information Reporting Center - none of them could keep up.

Private (or semi-private) social-media and commercial platforms are forced to employ their own legions of censors too, so that they don’t get into trouble with the authorities. Last year Weibo got hit with fines more than 40 times, with penalties exceeding $2 million, for failing to immediately scrub messages that did not flatter the government. The hipster platform Douban, a site where people mostly talk about movies, was hit by fines levied by Beijing’s Cyberspace Administration last year totalling $235,000 for “unlawful release of information.”

So it’s hard to get information from one end of the country to the other, let alone to the outside world. And that’s just about online activity. Here’s a glimpse of what it’s like in the streets of China’s cities. There are 372 surveillance camera for every 1,000 people, and face-recognition technology is in hyperdrive. This is from Agence France-Press:

Anyway, I’ve got to get to my column for the Post and the Ottawa Citizen now. It’ll be mostly about the surreal photoshoot and rebranding exercise that featured Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly on the Vancouver waterfront on Saturday for the “new China policy,” we’ve been waiting for since since 2018, which morphed into an “Indo-Pacific strategy” by 2020, which, by this summer, had evolved into a first draft that didn’t even mention China.

We’re supposed to be impressed by the Trudeau government’s “U-turn” on China, but I don’t see it. The main readout from Melanie Joly on Sunday was 1,321 words long, and China wasn’t mentioned once. There’s been much talk about tough talk, about Trudeau calling China a “disruptive power” and so on, as if we all didn’t know that already.

It’s sounds tough, the talk about bolstering our military presence in the region, for instance, but that seems to consist mainly of redeploying a single frigate from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Here’s what I think it’s mostly about.

As recently as this past spring, U.S. president Joe Biden’s administration and a dozen American allies kicked off the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), and Canada wasn’t even invited. That’s how seriously Canada is taken in the region. So some rebranding was necessary.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time on all this for my column but I have to say, right now, as far as I can see what’s really happening is the Trudeau government is trying to redeem itself in the eyes of the Pacific world after having spent the last seven years serving as Xi Jinping’s bitch in the G7.

Meanwhile, Beijing police swooped in on the places where protests had been planned for Monday, so none materialized. Same thing in Shanghai, where police surrounded the proposed assembly point and cordoned off the area with huge barriers.

It’s pretty quiet in China right now. It could be just that everyone is exhausted, and slightly terrified, and they’re busy with the work week.

We’ll see.