四通桥抗议Sitong Bridge Protest
Background: In the autumn of 2022, Beijing was in the third year of zero-COVID: endless testing, health-code pop-ups and lockdowns weighed on everyone, and residents in Zhengzhou and Guangzhou had already broken through barriers in protest. In three days the CCP's 20th Congress would open; security was at its tightest and the streets were hung with “Welcome the 20th Congress” slogans. At that moment, one ordinary man fixed his sights on Sitong Bridge, where Zhongguancun Street crosses the North Third Ring Road in Haidian — traffic streaming beneath it, its span facing the flow of cars. According to multiple media reports, his name was Peng Lifa, online name “Peng Zaizhou,” an ordinary employee engaged in scientific research. He had already left a long statement online setting out his reasons and methods: it called for strikes, school boycotts and the removal of the dictator, worked through the details of hanging banners and choosing loudspeaker equipment, and urged people in other cities to copy the act. The protest was planned by one man, and carried out by one man.
One man's preparation: From the statements Peng Lifa left online and from media reconstruction afterward, the protest was carefully prepared by one person: he scouted the Sitong Bridge area repeatedly in advance and chose the hanging position with the heaviest traffic and the clearest exposure of the span; the banners were made to the measure of the bridge railing, red characters on white, legible from dozens of meters away; the loudspeaker's slogans were pre-recorded and set to loop; the burning tires and the construction clothes served, first, to draw attention and, second, to keep passers-by from driving him off in the first minutes. He wrote explicitly that he hoped people in other cities would copy the method.
Why that day, why that bridge: The 20th Congress, opening October 16, 2022, is the Party's five-yearly transfer-of-power gathering. For weeks beforehand, Beijing was in a special security state: vehicles and parcels entering the city checked layer upon layer, petitioners cleared out, extra patrols on footbridges and at subway stations, dissidents taken on forced “trips” or visited at home. Peng Lifa's online statement is explicit about his reasoning: he chose the three-days-before timing and this bridge in Zhongguancun precisely because the world's cameras were pointed at Beijing, and the traffic beneath the bridge was his audience. Congress slogans hung all over the city; he wanted his banners in the same frame as those slogans. Events proved he had calculated half the transmission correctly: the banners hung for barely a dozen minutes, yet the images crossed the world before deletion could catch them. The half he did not calculate was that, a month later, the people shouting those slogans would grow from one man to tens of thousands.
The text he left: The long essay Peng Lifa posted online under the name “Peng Zaizhou” before the protest is the primary text for understanding the act. In it, he described having studied protest experience in other countries, set out demands for strikes, school boycotts and the dictator's removal, and appealed to soldiers, police and civil servants to stand with the people. He also wrote out the technical details of the action: how to measure a banner, how large the characters must be to read clearly, how to choose loudspeaker equipment, how to use smoke to draw attention — and stated plainly his hope that people in other cities would replicate the method. At the end, he foreshadowed the approximate time and place of the action and said he was prepared to pay the price. After his arrest the essay was swiftly deleted, surviving through screenshots and overseas archives. Students of this episode note one detail: he did not climb the bridge on impulse — by the evidence of the text, the dozen-minute protest had been prepared for at least several months.
Beijing, that morning: October 13, 2022 was a working day. Daily life in Beijing then ran like this: check your health code for a pop-up before leaving home, scan a code to enter any building, queue forever at testing booths, one day out of date and you could go nowhere; red Congress slogans hung over every street, sharing the frame with blue epidemic fencing. Peng Lifa lived this life like everyone else — by report, he had worked for years at a Beijing research-related institution, and he left home that morning with no sign of anything unusual to his family. The Sitong Bridge he chose was not far from where he worked and lived; beneath it ran Zhongguancun Street, thick with morning rush-hour traffic. At nine or ten on an ordinary working morning, a man in work clothes climbed the bridge railing and, in the heart of the capital, hung up what three years had bottled up. That is the background to why the protest struck so many people instantly: the words on the bridge were the very words millions below it had typed into their phones and deleted, again and again.
What he did: On the morning of October 13, 2022, wearing construction clothes and a yellow safety helmet, Peng Lifa climbed onto Sitong Bridge, hung two giant white banners from the railing, and set a pile of tires alight; black smoke rose and pedestrians below stopped to stare. Through a loudspeaker he played his slogans on a loop. Within minutes, dozens of police arrived, wrestled him down and took him away; the banners were torn down and the bridge returned to normal. But before he was taken, photographs and video from the scene had spread across social media — deleted again and again, and preserved overseas. It was the first public protest in central Beijing aimed directly at the top leader in person since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.
Original demands (sourced): The banners read: “We want food, not COVID testing! We want freedom, not lockdowns! We want dignity, not lies! We want reform, not the Cultural Revolution! We want votes, not a leader! We are citizens, not slaves!” The other demanded: “Strike at school, strike at work, depose the traitorous dictator Xi Jinping.” (Source: CHRD statement, October 12, 2023)
Handling at the scene: According to witnesses near the scene who later spoke to media, police who arrived first wrestled Peng Lifa down and removed his helmet, then took down the banners and the loudspeaker; traffic on the bridge resumed quickly. For hours afterward, police presence around Sitong Bridge was visibly reinforced, and passers-by reported officers under the bridge inspecting pedestrians' phone photo albums and ordering protest pictures and videos deleted. That night, police stood watch on many footbridges across the Zhongguancun area. State media carried not a word about the incident. On domestic social platforms, the terms “Sitong Bridge,” “Peng Lifa” and “brave man” all became unsearchable or unpostable sensitive words within hours, and even textless photographs of the bridge were deleted in large numbers. A protest that had taken place in one of the capital's busiest districts, witnessed by hundreds or thousands, was scrubbed from the domestic internet as though it had never happened.
Aftermath: Peng Lifa has never been seen in public since he was taken away, and the authorities have never announced his whereabouts, any charge, or any trial. Overnight, the characters “Sitong Bridge” became a sensitive word across the Chinese internet; the photographs, the bridge's name, even his own name could no longer be searched on domestic platforms. CHRD records him as a victim of enforced disappearance, and his family has been visited by police and warned not to speak out. Overseas reports say he was secretly sentenced to nine years, but the claim cannot be independently verified and is recorded here as unconfirmed. Every year on the anniversary of his seizure, human rights organizations demand that the authorities reveal where he is and allow family visits. This site's Persecution archive carries his individual case file: Peng Lifa. See also: Sitong Bridge Protest
The bridge watchers: Sitong Bridge left an absurd footnote: the “bridge watchers.” Afterward, Beijing stationed dedicated watchers on its major footbridges — mostly volunteers or security guards wearing red armbands, sitting on small stools at the bridgeheads from morning to night, their duty simply to prevent anyone from hanging a banner. Photographs of the watchers taken by foreign correspondents became one of the classic images of Beijing for a year afterward. At the same time, internet users noticed that the “Sitong Bridge” label had at one point vanished from map apps or become hard to search; navigation could find only the road names beneath it. The bridge thus acquired a double identity: in official city management, a risk point requiring a dedicated guard; in many people's memory, the coordinates of the place where one man said the truth out loud.
Those taken for showing support: Peng Lifa was not the only one to pay a price in this affair. From late October 2022, in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an, Shenzhen and other cities, young people were taken in for questioning one after another for posting solidarity posters, painting echoing slogans on walls, or forwarding Sitong Bridge images on social media; some were administratively detained, others warned by employers or universities. Abroad it was the reverse: from October 2022, solidarity posters — mostly the bridge photograph and the banners' text — appeared on university notice boards in many countries, and on some campuses, posters torn down were pasted up again overnight, becoming local news stories. These scattered acts of support and arrest sketch the protest's true radius: on the bridge there was one man; beneath it, the mood of an era.
Family and echoes: According to CHRD and other organizations, after Peng was taken away, police repeatedly visited and questioned his wife, daughter and relatives, ordering them not to accept interviews or speak publicly; the family has lived under surveillance ever since, and occasional reports of visits can neither be confirmed nor verified. Meanwhile, the images from Sitong Bridge kept spreading beyond the firewall: from late October 2022, echoing slogans appeared in university toilets and on notice boards in a number of Chinese cities, and Chinese students abroad posted “Sitong Bridge” posters on campuses in many countries. By the first anniversary of his seizure in October 2023, people in London, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere raised replica banners in commemoration — the format now fixed as red characters on white cloth, part of the visual vocabulary of protest in these years.
International response: The Sitong Bridge protest was reported worldwide the day it happened: Reuters, AP, the BBC and The New York Times all carried scene photographs and the banners' full text within hours. A US State Department spokesperson, asked at a press briefing, expressed concern over China's human rights situation. Amnesty International, CHRD and other organizations have since kept Peng Lifa listed as an enforced-disappearance case requiring urgent solidarity. On the first anniversary in October 2023, commemorations with replica banners appeared in San Francisco, London, New York, Sydney and Taipei; in the San Francisco Bay Area, supporters hung the same white-cloth, red-character banner from a local bridge. In public discussion of nominations for the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, overseas activists repeatedly raised his name. International attention has not purchased a single piece of news about him: as of this site's last verification, his whereabouts, health and legal status remain a complete blank.
His family: What public reporting can piece together of Peng Lifa's family is this: he came from Heilongjiang, had worked and made a home in Beijing for years, and had a wife and a young daughter — a typical mid-career technical professional who had put down roots in a big city on his skills. He was no professional activist and had no organizational background; in the texts he left online he said repeatedly that he was “an ordinary person.” Human rights bulletins record that after he was taken, his wife was required to cooperate with a police investigation and was for a time out of contact with the outside, later returning home to care for their daughter and the family's elders, living under surveillance. This site does not publish the family's names, address or workplaces, by its principle of protecting relatives. It records one fact only: the bill for those dozen minutes on the bridge is being paid not by the man on the bridge alone, but by a family, every day since.
The text of the banners: Peng Lifa's banners deserve line-by-line record. The six parallel “We don't want… we want…” clauses write epidemic demands (food, freedom) and political demands (dignity, reform, votes, citizenship) on the same cloth — what sets them apart from every protest of the previous three years: many had shouted “end the lockdown,” but he was the first to write “end the lockdown” and “votes” together. The other banner named its target — “depose the traitorous dictator Xi Jinping” — the first slogan on a Beijing street since 1949 to demand an incumbent supreme leader's removal outright. The text has been reused ever since: the White Paper Movement's chant sheets, solidarity poster designs abroad, and replica memorial banners all follow his original wording, punctuation nearly untouched. Against the speed of censorship, the text's fate ran the other way — the more it was deleted, the more completely it survived, each deletion prompting more people to memorize and store the whole.
What it left behind: What one man left behind turned out to be a great deal. A month later, the words on his banners were chanted by thousands on Shanghai's Urumqi Road and along Beijing's Liangma River — many of the White Paper Movement's slogans trace back to this bridge. Afterward, graffiti echoing him appeared in public-toilet stalls in various cities, dubbed the “toilet revolution” by internet users, and solidarity posters went up on university campuses in many countries. “Sitong Bridge” became a place name that cannot be spoken aloud, and shorthand for the lone brave act: when people mention it, they mean that an ordinary man stood alone on a bridge in a capital dense with cameras, knowing he would be taken away — and said the words first anyway.
Verification status: Public information about Peng Lifa's legal status stops at the moment of his seizure on October 13, 2022. Claims in circulation since — “sentenced for picking quarrels,” “held in a Beijing detention center,” “secretly tried and given nine years” — all derive from single channels or anonymous relays, with no judgment document, no official notice and no family confirmation. This site records all of them as unverified: noting their existence without crediting their content. That is also why his case appears in both the Resistance records and the Persecution archive: the resistance is documented by photographs and video, clear and complete; the persecution file, to this day, is a blank page — and the blankness itself is what this archive exists to record.
The bridge's file: Sitong Bridge is an ordinary Beijing overpass in Haidian District, where North Third Ring Road West crosses Zhongguancun Street, ringed by Renmin University, the Shuangyushu residential area and Zhongguancun's office towers; the traffic beneath it ranks among the city's heaviest. Its name, “Sitong,” means “reaching in four directions.” Before October 13, 2022, it appeared in no news at all; afterward it existed in two worlds at once. In reporting and commemorations beyond the firewall it is a proper noun, place and event in one; inside, it was first an entirely deleted sensitive word, and for a time even its geographic label was hard to retrieve. Around the first anniversary, internet users noticed that railings on some Beijing footbridges had been raised and fitted with protective netting, and the watchers' posts at bridgeheads remained. A bridge's fate condenses the whole aftermath of this protest: the man taken away, the word deleted, the bridge guarded — and the memory growing on, outside the wall.
Sources for this entry: Materials behind this entry include the photographs and videos that came out of the scene (corroborating one another from multiple angles), the archived text of Peng Lifa's own online statement, CHRD's statement of October 12, 2023, Amnesty International's case bulletins, and reporting on the event and later commemorations by Reuters, AP, the BBC, RFA and others. On every specific claim about Peng after his seizure — place of detention, charge, trial, sentence, health — this site, after repeated checking, confirms that not one has been verified by two or more independent sources. The principle of these Resistance records is: what the images prove is written as fact; what no one can prove is left as doubt. The blank portions of this entry belong to the archive as much as the filled ones.
Second-anniversary check: In October 2024, at the second anniversary of the Sitong Bridge incident, small commemorations appeared as usual in cities abroad: banners hung on bridges, posters on walls, candlelit vigils. From Beijing there was no public information to set against them — the bridge had its watchers on duty, its name restored on the maps, its traffic flowing as ever. This site conducted its routine checks of Peng Lifa's legal status in October 2024 and October 2025, with the same conclusion as the year before: no new credible public information of any kind. His family, by human rights organizations' relayed accounts, still lives under surveillance. In everything narrated about him, the only element still updating is time. A man who stood on a bridge for a dozen minutes has now been absent from public view for over three years, while the reason, place and duration of the absence are all state secrets — and that, itself, is a fact this site exists to record.
The archival war over a name: The fate of the three characters “Peng Lifa” after his seizure is itself an archive. His statement was deleted within hours, and internet users began a relay to preserve it: screenshots, offshore mirrors, mentions by homophone and split-character riddles, even his name worked into songs and game screenshots. Domestic platforms' filter lists expanded repeatedly in response — “Peng Zaizhou,” “Lifa,” “Sitong Bridge,” and for a time even “Beijing bridge” were filtered. Overseas archive sites and Wikipedia, meanwhile, built his entry within days, gathering the banner photographs, the full text of his statement and world media reports. Two opposite forces raced through the same week: a system for making a name disappear, and ordinary people keeping it alive. This entry, and the case file in this site's Persecution archive, are one link in that race: as long as one place remains where his name and his deed can still be found, the deletion is not complete.
The copiers: In his writings Peng Lifa hoped someone would copy what he did. Twice in the following two years, someone did. In February 2023, a young Shandong man named Chai Song used a projector to throw slogans demanding Xi Jinping's removal onto the outer wall of a shopping mall in Jinan; he then fled China and told his story publicly overseas, saying he had been inspired by Sitong Bridge. In July 2024, Fang Yirong, a recent graduate in Xinhua County, Hunan, hung a banner in the Sitong Bridge style from a pedestrian overpass and played slogans through a loudspeaker; he was taken away within minutes and remained cut off from the outside world, and according to rights organizations his family was warned by police. The two incidents were a year and a half and a thousand kilometers apart; the men did not know each other: one on a bridge, one on a wall, one back on a bridge. The method Peng designed — one person, one wall or bridge, a dozen minutes, carried nationwide on bystanders' phones — was reproduced in full, twice. And the copiers' fates sank into the same silence as the originator's.
Hiding a text in plain sight: The way Peng Lifa published his long manifesto is itself a manual for the censorship era. He did not post it on Weibo or WeChat, where political texts live less than an hour; he uploaded it to an international academic-sharing platform, a place he used in his research work, where the censorship system reacts slowest to long Chinese texts. It survived there long enough to be downloaded, screenshotted and mirrored to overseas archive sites; by the time it was deleted, the text could no longer be recalled. The document contained both the timetable of his action and instructions for making the banners — a do-it-yourself manual and a farewell letter in one file. Archiving that text, this site notes that its transmission history matters as much as its content: for an ordinary person's words to outlive censorship takes not volume, but a precise knowledge of the system's seams.