What motivates Chinese activists and journalists to tell the truth in the face of repression?

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in early 2020, one focus of international reporting has been the Chinese authorities’ handling of the story. The BBC, CNN, the New York Times, AP, among others, have investigated the attempt to construct an official narrative of the pandemic domestically and internationally.

These reports cite a number of Chinese whistleblowers – citizen journalists and archivists who save and republish articles deleted from websites and social media by the government – who have tried to expose the government’s campaign of censorship over the outbreak in Wuhan.

Though rapidly suppressed, these “Covid truth-tellers” as they became known, provide a window through which to glimpse the nature of political dissent in China today, as well as the increasingly repressive nature of Xi Jinping’s regime.

As China is poised to overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy, while simultaneously projecting an increasingly ambitious and often rhetorically confrontational “wolf warrior” foreign policy stance, it is crucial to understand the sources of this internal dissent and potential opposition.

While scholars still debate the nature of civil activism in China, it is hard to deny the fundamental social shifts and growing objection to state control among many Chinese. US-based scholars Guobin Yang and Merle Goldman and Paris-based Sebastian Veg have all documented various forms of online activism, pro-democracy and environmental NGOs,…

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