NEW DELHI – The Chinese Communist Party officially celebrates the May Fourth Movement as a patriotic awakening. Its treatment of students who act on that movement’s actual principles — accountability, justice, civic courage — tells a different story entirely.
Today’s student activists face a repression apparatus that is systematic, technologically sophisticated, and ruthless in its pre-emption. The contradiction at its heart is not lost on those targeted: the government that invokes 1919 as a founding inspiration actively dismantles any student movement that resembles it.
The 2018 Jasic Technology case makes the contradiction almost absurdly explicit. Workers at Jasic, a welding-equipment manufacturer in Shenzhen, sought to form a trade union in accordance with Chinese labor law.
Management responded by firing them; authorities responded by arresting them. After learning about the arrests on social media, dozens of college students from across the country traveled to Shenzhen to protest, wearing T-shirts with portraits of the workers and singing socialist anthems. They described themselves as Marxists standing with the working class. The party that claims Marxism as its ideology had them detained.
Some families of the detained student activists received police notices informing them that their children had been placed under “residential surveillance at a designated location” — a form of secret incommunicado detention that can last up to six months without access to legal counsel or family contact. On August 11, Shen Mengyu, a graduate student from Sun Yat-sen University, was bundled into a car by three unidentified men and has been missing since.
Authorities initially claimed the cameras in the area were broken. Activists detained during the crackdown were later released only after agreeing to abandon their activism — a condition reportedly secured through sustained psychological pressure, including the presentation of forced confessions from fellow activists.
The repercussions spread across campuses: Marxist student societies were forcibly closed at Peking University, Renmin University, and Nanjing University. Cornell University suspended its partnership with Renmin University in protest.
The pattern repeats in China’s #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2018 and produced concrete early results: universities investigated and dismissed accused professors, and the civil code was subsequently amended to define sexual harassment for the first time. The state’s response was to dismantle the movement’s organizers.
Journalist Huang Xueqin, who had built a platform for survivors to report harassment, and labor activist Wang Jianbing were arrested in Guangzhou in September 2021 and charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” In 2015, five feminist activists — the “Feminist Five” — were arrested and held for 37 days for planning to distribute flyers on public transport about sexual harassment. The charge was the same catch-all used against Jasic workers: “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
These cases share a common architecture of repression. Arrests and forced disappearances neutralize individuals. Academic expulsion and employment blacklisting function as warnings to peers. Forced confessions — often filmed and shown to other students — extend the chilling effect.
University officials, faculty members, and fellow students are co-opted into a surveillance culture that discourages transparent discourse before dissent can coalesce. Digital monitoring augments this: social media posts, private chat groups, and academic discussions are routinely reviewed for ideological deviation, and accounts are deleted.
What makes the current era distinct from earlier crackdowns is the meticulousness of the repression. Advances in facial recognition, data analytics, and AI enable the state to identify and neutralize potential organizers before they can build networks.
Campuses serve as early testing environments for these tools. The goal is fragmentation — ensure that no movement approaches the scale that might force a response.
Yet dissent has not disappeared. It has adapted — moving into informal networks, coded language, and brief moments of collective expression.
As one activist noted of China’s #MeToo movement: “Once you become a feminist, it’s very hard to give it up.” The same applies to the broader impulse toward accountability. The desire for civic voice that animated the May Fourth protesters in 1919 persists in the students the CCP is working hardest to silence. That continuity is precisely what Beijing fears.
A government certain of its legitimacy does not need to secretly detain graduate students, shut down Marxist reading groups, or film coerced confessions. The scale of the repression is itself a measure of what the state knows: that the distance between its rhetoric and its conduct is visible, and that some students are willing to say so.
Ashu Mann
Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD in Defense and Strategic Studies at Amity University, Noida. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.
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- Ashu Mann#molongui-disabled-link
- Ashu Mann#molongui-disabled-link
- Ashu Mann#molongui-disabled-link
