Video shows Beijing students rebuke claim 'foreign forces' caused protests
影片顯示北京學生反駁宣稱“外國勢力”引發抗議
| 'We only have domestic forces not allowing us to govern ourselves!' shouts student protester
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A video released on Monday (Nov. 28) showed student protesters in Beijing rebuffing an attempt to blame the recent wave of protests on "foreign forces." On Monday, video surfaced of a large rally held by student protesters shouting slogans with a megaphone in the Liangmaqiao area of Beijing. At the start of the video, a male student wearing a baseball cap used the megaphone to allege that in their midst were "foreign anti-China forces." However, this quickly drew an angry rebuke from the students standing around him. Another student wearing glasses grabbed the megaphone and asked: "The foreign forces you are talking about are they Marx and Engels? Is it Stalin? Is it Lenin?" The man responded by saying, "I want to say to you, I will always love my country." He then said, "I also think the current policy has problems. I really do. So that's why..." Before he could finish his sentence, he was cut off by a male student in a white coat holding up a blank piece of paper who admonished him: "Don't change the subject! Think for yourself!" The student in the baseball cap, then backed off and sheepishly said, "Then you go ahead." The student wearing glasses then asked, "Was it foreign forces who started the fire in Xinjiang? Was the Guizhou bus overturned by foreign forces?" His mention of Xinjiang was a reference to a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi that officially killed 10 and injured nine, but touched off nationwide protests over suspicions that the deaths were far higher and the result of China's zero-COVID restrictions. The second reference was to the Guizhou bus crash in September that killed 27 people and injured 20, spurring outrage because the people onboard were being transported to a quarantine facility as part of a lockdown in the area. The man in the baseball cap then stressed that he "totally agreed" with what they were saying. The man in the white coat grabbed the megaphone and asked the crowd, "Was everyone told to come here by foreign forces?" The crowd then overwhelmingly responded, "No!" He then pointed out that given that Chinese are unable to access the foreign internet "how are foreign forces supposed to be communicating with us?" The bespectacled student took back the megaphone and shouted, "We only have domestic forces not allowing us to govern ourselves!" The student in the white coat took his turn and asked, "Can we leave the country? Or can we go on the foreign internet?" To which the crowd shouted "Neither!" He then asked how these alleged "foreign forces" are supposed to contact the protesters, to which bystanders replied, "They can't!" He closed by asking "Where are these foreign forces?" To which the protestor in glasses humorously replied "The moon!" At the end of the video, another student can be heard saying, "We just want freedom." |
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| Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer | |
| 2022-11-29 |
