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Sitong Bridge Incident (2022)

On October 13, 2022, on the eve of the 20th Party Congress, Peng Lifa (online name Peng Zaizhou) hung banners on Beijing's Sitong Bridge: "No to COVID tests, yes to food. No to lockdowns, yes to freedom..." and set tires ablaze. Arrested on the spot, his whereabouts remain unknown. It was the harbinger of the White Paper movement.

Time

October 13, 2022

Place

Sitong Bridge, Haidian, Beijing

Figure

Peng Lifa (Peng Zaizhou), b. 1974, from Heilongjiang, tech worker

Who decided

1. The protester: Peng Lifa (Peng Zaizhou)

• Born 1974. A physics enthusiast, formerly with a Beijing acrylic-products firm, published in electromagnetics journals.
• On the morning of October 13, 2022, he hung banners alone on Beijing's Sitong Bridge, played slogans on a loudspeaker, and burned tires for smoke — protesting Xi Jinping's personality cult, dictatorship, rights abuses, censorship, lifelong rule and zero-COVID. Three days before the 20th Party Congress — the regime's tightest control window.
• Identity status: the authorities never named him; the NYT (December 7, 2022) identified him as "Peng Lifa" — unconfirmed officially. Attribution is inference, unverified.

2. The crackdown's decision-makers

• The Party Center and the 20th Congress security apparatus: Beijing was under maximum stability maintenance; Beijing police handled the scene. No commanding officer's name is on the public record. Stated plainly.
• To this day, no legal-procedure information on his detention: no charge announced, no trial, no published verdict.

Detailed timeline

Morning of October 13, 2022: Peng hung two white banners on Sitong Bridge and lit tires; the smoke drew crowds. Passersby photographed the banners; images raced across the internet (swiftly censored).

Same day: Police took Peng away. Nothing has been heard since.

October 16, 2022: The 20th Party Congress opened. Beijing's security was unprecedented; "Sitong Bridge" became a sensitive term — unsearchable on maps, blocked on WeChat.

Late November 2022: The White Paper movement erupted; protesters chanted "No to COVID tests, yes to food," echoing the bridge banners.

Full banner texts

Banner 1: "No to COVID tests, yes to food. No to lockdowns, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to Cultural Revolution, yes to reform. No to leaders, yes to votes. Be citizens, not slaves."

Banner 2: "Strike — students, workers — remove dictator and traitor Xi Jinping."

The first banner in Beijing since 1989 openly demanding Xi Jinping's removal.

Who executed

1. The scene: dozens of police rushed in and stuffed Peng into a police van — photographed in an orange construction-worker's outfit.

2. The censorship machine: the site was sealed and monitored; online discussion — even oblique mentions — was deleted. WeChat, unusually, permanently banned some accounts that forwarded protest images and videos. Platforms blocked "Sitong Bridge," "Beijing," "brave man." Peng's Douyin account was banned; in one video he had mentioned an 8-year-old daughter — her situation is now unverified.

Peng Lifa's whereabouts

After his arrest, Peng vanished. Rumors place him in a psychiatric hospital or detention center (unverified). His family has not spoken publicly.

Who opposed

1. Peng Lifa himself — the lone protester:

• Banner one: "No to COVID testing, yes to food. No to lockdowns, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to Cultural Revolution, yes to reform. No to leaders, yes to votes. Don't be a slave, be a citizen."
• Banner two: "Go on strike, remove the dictatorial traitor Xi Jinping."
• The loudspeaker looped the banners; burning tires drew attention. He held out long enough for passersby to photograph and film. Dubbed the "Bridge Man" / "Banner Man" — compared with "Tank Man."

2. Victim scale: Peng vanished after police took him on October 13, 2022 (CHRD, HRW). A July 2025 report claims a secret 9-year sentence (CHRD says it could not independently verify — unverified). No legal-procedure information has ever been published.

3. International response: the BBC called it "one of the most significant acts of Chinese protest seen under Xi Jinping"; Time's 2023 Time 100; HRW's statement on the second anniversary of his disappearance (October 13, 2024); CHRD statements (October 2023, July 2025); governments at the UN Human Rights Council called for his release — Beijing never publicly replied.

4. Echoes: the protest is widely seen as the White Paper Movement's prelude; white-paper protesters echoed his "freedom" and "votes" slogans. On July 30, 2024, 22-year-old white-paper participant Fang Yirong hung a Peng-inspired banner on a bridge in Loudi, Hunan and posted a video — arrested in early August, likewise disappeared.

Impact: harbinger of White Paper

Slogans inherited. The bridge's "six no's" became the White Paper movement's core chants. In November 2022, protesters in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou shouted "No to COVID tests, yes to food."

Emblem of lone resistance. One man, on the Congress's eve, sounding the loudest note — hailed as a "contemporary Tank Man," "Bridge Man."

Censorship escalated. Afterward, "Sitong Bridge," "Peng Zaizhou" and "No to COVID tests, yes to food" all became sensitive terms; censorship hit new heights.

Background: year three of zero-COVID, on the eve of the 20th Congress

The Sitong Bridge protest did not happen in a vacuum. It came in the third year of the dynamic zero-COVID policy, when public endurance was close to its limit. After the pandemic began in early 2020, China ran the world's longest and most strictly enforced lockdown regime: mass PCR testing, health-code tracking, restrictions on movement between regions and sealed residential compounds became daily life for hundreds of millions of people. From March to May 2022 Shanghai was locked down for about two months; in a metropolis of 25 million, food shortages, patients unable to reach hospitals and a stream of secondary disasters were documented in videos and appeals that spread widely on social media. After Shanghai, cities and whole districts across the country were repeatedly sealed over a handful of cases. Factories stopped, shops closed, schools shut, and lost jobs and falling incomes hit ordinary families everywhere.

Running alongside the lockdowns was a continued concentration of political power. In March 2018 the National People's Congress amended the constitution to remove the two-term limit for the state presidency, clearing the institutional obstacle to long-term rule by Xi Jinping. Under the convention established after Deng Xiaoping, a general secretary was expected to serve two terms and hand over after ten years; at the 20th Party Congress opening on October 16, 2022, Xi was widely expected to break that convention and begin a third term. Ahead of the congress the country entered its highest state of stability maintenance: checks on entry to Beijing were tightened, dissidents were placed under surveillance, sent on forced trips or warned, and deletions and account bans on social media visibly intensified. It was at exactly this moment that an ordinary citizen hung banners calling for Xi's removal from an overpass in the capital.

Sitong Bridge stands on the western section of Beijing's North Third Ring Road in Haidian District, near Zhongguancun and Renmin University; it takes its name from the Sitong company nearby, and the area is dense with universities, technology firms and traffic. The choice of a bridge was plainly deliberate: a deck raised above the roadway lets banners be read by vehicles and pedestrians on and below the bridge alike, and black smoke from burning tires can be seen kilometres away, extending the time the protest is visible before the banners come down. Photographs from the scene show the protester dressed in an orange work uniform and yellow hard hat, disguised as a municipal worker, which allowed him to remain on the bridge and unroll the banners without drawing immediate attention.

The protest itself and the response that day

On the morning of October 13, 2022, the protester hung two large banners, white with red characters, from the railing of the Sitong Bridge deck and set tires alight, sending black smoke over the bridge. A loudspeaker rigged on the bridge played a recorded slogan on a loop, identical to the first banner: no to COVID tests, yes to food; no to lockdowns, yes to freedom; no to lies, yes to dignity; no to the Cultural Revolution, yes to reform; no to leaders, yes to votes; be citizens, not slaves. Passing drivers slowed and pedestrians stopped to photograph and film. Within a short time the images and video appeared on WeChat, Weibo and, outside the firewall, on Twitter (now X); domestic platforms began deleting them at once, but they had already spread.

Firefighters and police then arrived. Photographs and video from the scene record the tires being extinguished, the banners being taken down, and the protester being led away by several officers and put into a police vehicle. The banners were not up for long, but the footage shot by witnesses was enough to make the event international news: Reuters, the Associated Press, the BBC and The New York Times all reported it the same day, calling it one of the most open and direct protests seen in the capital in Xi Jinping's decade in power. The authorities have never made any public statement about the incident at all: no bulletin, no press conference, no confirmation of the detained man's identity or whereabouts. That complete silence, set against extensive reporting abroad, is why everything known about Peng Lifa's fate still has to be pieced together from fragmentary information gathered by human rights groups and journalists.

After the incident, control of Beijing's bridges visibly tightened. Multiple outlets reported that pedestrian overpasses and flyovers across the capital were afterwards staffed for long periods by dedicated watchers, dubbed 'bridge guards' by internet users; police deployment around Sitong Bridge increased, and its road signs were reported to have been removed for a time — reports the authorities neither confirmed nor denied, marked here as unverified. For a period the name Sitong Bridge was hard to retrieve on maps and navigation apps. On social platforms, terms including 'Sitong Bridge', 'Peng Zaizhou', 'brave man' and 'banner' became censorship targets, and even oblique allusions, songs and images were deleted. In a system update pushed in November 2022, Apple limited AirDrop's 'everyone' setting for users in China to ten minutes; protesters had used the feature to pass information anonymously in places such as the subway. Apple did not state that the restriction was connected to the protests, but the timing was widely noted.

From Sitong Bridge to the White Paper Movement: a six-week timeline

On November 24, 2022, a fire in a high-rise residential building in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killed ten people according to the official toll. The fire came after more than a hundred days of lockdown in the city, and many residents and commentators questioned whether lockdown measures had delayed the rescue. On the evening of November 25, Urumqi residents took to the streets. On November 26, students at the Communication University of China in Nanjing were the first to hold up blank sheets of paper, and gatherings followed at Tsinghua University, Peking University and dozens of other campuses. A blank sheet carries no words, yet everyone understood it: in an environment where speech is impossible, blankness itself is the protest. The blank paper and the bridge banners covered in characters form a pair.

On the night of November 26–27, Shanghai residents gathered on Urumqi Middle Road to mourn the fire victims and protest the lockdowns; some in the crowd chanted 'Communist Party, step down' and 'Xi Jinping, step down' — direct political slogans rarely heard on the streets of a major Chinese city since 1989. On the evening of November 27, large crowds gathered near Liangma Bridge in Beijing, holding blank paper and phone lights and chanting 'no to COVID tests, yes to food' and calls for freedom — the words of the Sitong Bridge banners come back to life in the crowd. Protests followed in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Xi'an and other cities over the next days. Police responded with phone checks, summonses and arrests; many participants were taken in for questioning and most were released within 24 hours, some were held longer, and a number of cases were processed quietly over the following months with few details made public.

On December 7, 2022, the State Council's joint prevention mechanism issued the 'new ten measures' easing testing, quarantine and lockdown requirements, effectively ending three years of dynamic zero-COVID. Infections then surged; drug shortages, overwhelmed hospitals and rising deaths continued for weeks. The official death toll was widely regarded as a severe undercount, and excess-mortality estimates by scholars and media diverged sharply from it and from each other; this page adopts no single figure. The first line of the bridge banner — no to COVID tests, yes to food — became a historical footnote after the policy reversal: the demand was met in this fashion, while the man who made it remained disappeared. Participants in the White Paper protests interviewed afterwards said repeatedly that they knew of the Sitong Bridge protest and had been encouraged by Peng Lifa's act.

Whereabouts, family and commemoration: the public record to date

Since Peng Lifa was taken away, no official channel has ever confirmed where he is held, what offence he is suspected of, whether he has been indicted or whether he has been tried. His family has never spoken publicly and their situation cannot be known from outside; overseas reports that relatives have been placed under surveillance and pressure cannot be independently verified and are marked unverified here. In July 2025 Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) reported that Peng had been secretly sentenced to nine years, stating explicitly that the report could not be independently verified. This page follows the same line as the Peng Lifa entry in the Persecution section: that he was arrested on the spot is established; his whereabouts and any sentence have no official confirmation, and the nine-year report is marked not independently verified. Human Rights Watch and CHRD issued repeated statements at the first and second anniversaries and other points, noting that prolonged secret detention with no family access bears the features of enforced disappearance, and demanding that the Chinese government disclose his whereabouts and release him. The authorities have never responded.

Commemoration has taken place mainly overseas. Around October 13 each year, Chinese people abroad have gathered outside Chinese consulates or in public places in London, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, holding replica banners or blank paper and demanding Peng Lifa's release. Inside China, public commemoration is impossible and the date has become a sensitive period for censorship. In April 2023 Peng was named to Time magazine's Time 100 list, with a citation comparing him to Tank Man. On July 30, 2024, Fang Yirong in Loudi, Hunan, hung a banner modelled on the Sitong Bridge protest from a local overpass, filmed it and posted the video; he was arrested days later and his whereabouts are unknown — evidence that two years on, the Sitong Bridge form of protest was still being copied, and that those who copy it meet the same end as Peng: taken away, then disappeared into detention without any public process.

The limits of this record should be stated plainly. What can be verified about Peng Lifa is the protest itself — the time, the place, the full text of the banners, the recorded slogans, the burning tires and the arrest on the spot, all documented by images and by multiple news organisations. His name and personal background come from journalistic investigation and have never been confirmed by the authorities; his place of detention, charge, sentence and physical condition are all without any official information. The principle of archival work is to write what is known as fact and to mark what is not known as unknown. This page will be updated as public information changes; until he is free or the authorities publish formal notice, the entry for his current status can only read: whereabouts unknown.

How the images got out: the race between transmission and censorship

The images of the Sitong Bridge protest that reached the outside world are few, but each survived a race against censorship. It was a weekday morning and traffic under the bridge was heavy; the earliest photographs were taken on phones by passersby, circulated first in WeChat groups and Moments, then moved to Weibo, and were then carried by users outside the firewall to Twitter, Instagram and the news desks of major media. Deletion on domestic platforms was extremely fast: posts carrying the photographs typically survived only minutes to tens of minutes, and some WeChat accounts that forwarded the images were permanently banned — uncommon in earlier censorship practice, and a sign that the authorities ranked this incident at the highest priority. The purge reached seemingly unrelated content: songs, film lines and photographs of bridges, and even metaphorical posts — a blue-sky photograph captioned with nothing more than a remark on the fine weather — were handled as suspected allusions.

The specific targets of censorship shifted over time, but its logic stayed constant: not to delete a particular photograph, but to delete the evidence that the event had ever existed in public memory. The place name was handled, the date was handled, the man's name was handled, and for a long period the three characters for 'Sitong Bridge' themselves could not be searched normally on domestic platforms. The bridge was later reported to have been fitted with additional barriers and cameras; the claim has no official explanation and is marked unverified here. Abroad, the contrast was sharp: on the first anniversary, multiple news organisations produced retrospectives; institutions that study Chinese censorship treated Sitong Bridge as a landmark case of 2022 censorship and preserved samples of the deleted posts; overseas archives kept the banner photographs and the video from the scene. Precisely because preservation is not permitted inside China, this archive has to be built outside the firewall — which is the reason this page exists.

One further detail deserves recording: the form of the protest text. Peng Lifa distributed no leaflets and published no long essay. He compressed his demands into six paired short phrases, each first half negating the present and each second half proposing the alternative: COVID tests against food, lockdowns against freedom, lies against dignity, Cultural Revolution against reform, leaders against votes, slaves against citizens. The form grows out of the traditional cadence of Chinese political slogans; ordinary people grasp it at a hearing and remember it at a glance, and it survives word-of-mouth transmission without distortion. Most of the slogans chanted by crowds in the White Paper Movement a month later came directly from these six pairs. The second banner pointed at one man: strike at school, strike at work, remove the dictatorial national traitor Xi Jinping — the first two a call to action, the third a concrete target. Not one line of either banner invoked violence. Preserving the two banners alongside the photographs from the scene is the most basic archival work for reconstructing this event.

Why a bridge: protest sites after the squares were closed

Peng Lifa's choice of an overpass is connected to the changing geography of protest in Beijing. In 1978–79 a stretch of wall at Xidan filled with big-character posters and unofficial journals and became known as the Democracy Wall, before it was shut down. In 1989 Tiananmen Square was the centre of protest; after it was cleared, the square came under permanent tight control, with identity checks for entry and any gathering dispersed at once. Once traditional spaces such as the square and Chang'an Avenue were completely controlled, a lone protester was left with the flyovers and footbridges: heavy traffic below, a raised vantage point, and instant capture by phone cameras. Sitong Bridge was not the first bridge used this way, nor the last: Fang Yirong in Loudi, Hunan, in 2024 likewise chose an overpass. What bridges have in common is that they belong to the public space everyone passes through daily. A protester needs no organisation and no venue — only a few minutes and a banner — to take a controlled public space back, briefly. Only on this understanding does the authorities' later decision to post watchers on bridges across the city make sense: to prevent a next time, every bridge had to become a guarded place.

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