‘I was very lucky’: activist and blogger Lu Yuyu on escaping China

As he trekked up the lush mountain range on China’s border with Laos, Lu Yuyu felt exhausted. He had been travelling for days, dodging his official minders to slip out of China. His travelling companions were smugglers who he’d paid 15,000 yuan (£1,622) to help him escape, and forced him to keep going until he could be delivered to two men and a scooter for the final few hours of his journey to freedom.

But leaving China was only the first step. Lu had thousands more miles before he would truly feel safe.

His daring escape from China in May last year involved a great deal of luck. Other dissidents have tried and failed on a similar route; some have made it to Laos but been sent back to China. From Laos, Lu headed to a UN refugee agency office in Thailand where he claimed asylum in Canada, and has since been reunited with his wife and his cat, a white and ginger tabby called Anthony.

“I was very lucky to get out of China,” Lu says in a phone interview from his new home in Calgary.

Lu is part of a relatively new breed of Chinese activists who use social media to document and publicise unrest in China – a task that the Chinese authorities used to do themselves. Statistics published by the Ministry of Public Security showed that the number of such “mass incidents” increased every year between 1993 and 2005, when the tally hit 87,000 – the same year in which the government stopped publishing the data.

In its place, civil society groups and activists have tried to keep track of flashpoints of mass dissatisfaction. China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong based NGO, monitors strikes and protests in mainland China while China Dissent Monitor, a project run by Freedom House, tallied more than 3,000 events in 2024. Another blogger, Li Ying, a Chinese artist based in Italy, started sharing news and videos from anti-lockdown protests in China in November 2022. His X account, Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher, has nearly 2m followers and is a widely watched source of information about events in China.

Lu had started blogging a decade before. In 2012, he noticed a few different protestsin the twilight of an era in which China’s internet was relatively open and started searching the social media platforms WeChat and Weibo for details of more. He published the details on his own blog, Not the News, that became a popular resource for researchers in China and abroad.

He was arrested in 2016 and sentenced to four years in jail for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a charge often used to imprison dissidents. “I know the true colours of the CCP [Chinese Communist party] regime. So I anticipated they would come for me,” he says.

On his release in 2020, he wanted to resume his work. “But it was hard for me to do that,” he says, “because I was monitored every single day”. He hopped between provinces in an effort to lose his minders, but travel restrictions related to the pandemic that had begun that year made it difficult.

By April 2022, he was living in Dandong, north-east China. One day, he was dragged by the police to a quarantine centre during a Covid outbreak in his apartment building. He was kept there for a fortnight. “It made me feel very useless, because I couldn’t even take care of my cat,” he says.

He became desperate to leave China.

But there were many obstacles in the way. China’s borders were effectively sealed under the “zero-Covid” regime, and in any case, he’d never owned a passport. He had attempted to apply for one in 2021 but his application was blocked.

The lifting of pandemic restrictions in early 2023 providing Lu with a glimmer of hope. First, he travelled 2,000 miles from Dandong to Guangxi, a province in southern China, on the premise of being a tourist. Then he travelled to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, on the long weekend for the May Day holiday.

It was there he realised that his minders were less vigilant on the weekends. So he booked a Saturday flight to Yunnan, a province on China’s south-west border. He left his sim card behind so that it would take the authorities longer to realise that he had slipped away. After arriving in Thailand, he requested asylum in any English-speaking country, and was offered Canada.

He is slowly rebuilding his life in Calgary and trying to continue with his activism, but China’s increasingly sophisticated internet censorship makes that difficult. “Nowadays, it’s much easier for the police to find information about protests, and people will be intimidated into deleting their posts. Or the platforms will filter sensitive information so that it can’t be collected,” he says.

Lu says a decade ago he could count nearly 100 protests a day in China, now he estimates it is more like 70, although it is unclear if that is because protests are becoming less common or because the censorship is more effective. Certainly, though, large-scale protests have declined, Lu says.

He notes, though, that: “There is still dissatisfaction in society. The CCP can only stop mass protests, but on a smaller scale, the CCP can’t eradicate them. It’s a balance.”

Additional research by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu