2025 Annual Report on Digital Activism in China: Breaking the Silence Under Institutional Oppression

Introduction: Breaking Through in the Face of a Human Rights Crisis and Social Atomization

In contemporary China, ordinary citizens are facing an increasingly severe human rights crisis. From high-pressure exam-oriented education to heavy unemployment stress, and to the institutional oppression brought about by the lack of the rule of law, the living environment for individuals continues to deteriorate. Tight censorship has turned social media platforms into information silos, while social atomization has severed community connections. In such an impasse, Digital Activism, as a new form of resistance, is becoming a critical turning point for breaking the silence and rebuilding social consensus.

1. Digital Activism: A New Path for Chinese Civil Resistance

Digital activism refers to the phenomenon of taking shape in cyberspace to advance civil resistance and social movements. Against the backdrop of continuously tightening public opinion space, it provides a platform for isolated individuals to speak out and connect through online petitions, online networking, and anti-censorship actions.

1.1 Documenting Real Circumstances, Refusing to Let Individual Experiences Be Forgotten

In an environment where investigative journalists have disappeared and official statistics are lacking, individual experiences are often treated as isolated incidents and quickly forgotten. Through digital public interest projects, the Li Community transforms scattered harms into searchable, juxtaposable public facts.

2. 2025 Li Community Key Public Interest Projects: From Data Aggregation to Participatory Action

In 2025, the Li Community initiated and advanced several ongoing digital actions. These projects covered core issues such as labor, education, cross-border security, and freedom of expression.

2.1 Quantitative Documentation of Institutional Oppression

• 611Study.ICU: Focuses on excessive study hours and the encroachment on vacations among secondary school students, revealing the prevalence of high-pressure exam-oriented education.

• Niuma ICU: Focuses on the institutional exploitation of Chinese workers, turning the abstract "overtime culture" into real accusations against working overtime.

• Xingfu (Happiness/Surname Fu) Survey: Outlines the common plight of contemporary youth under employment discrimination and the lack of happiness through large-scale questionnaires.

2.2 Cross-Border Security and Individual Lead Verification

• Stars Going Home Project: Centrally organizes and verifies scattered information related to cross-border fraud and human trafficking cases, allowing clues submerged in social media platforms to regain public attention.

2.3 Urban Space and Participatory Interaction

• Free Walk: Documents the forms of "freedom" in urban public spaces through visual media, demonstrating the differences in meaning of this word under different power contexts, enabling invisible individuals to build loose yet real connections.

3. Reflections and Stance: Defending Press Freedom and Daily Human Rights

Our projects stem from a profound reflection on international human rights narratives. We believe that focus should not be limited to familiar topics within Western contexts, but should directly confront the ignored institutional oppression that the vast majority of Chinese people are enduring.

3.1 Accumulation of Facts and Data Authenticity

Li Community is committed to defending freedom of speech in extreme environments. To date, we have received over 20,000 submissions from all provincial-level administrative divisions in China as well as from overseas.

• Rigorous Review: Approximately 20% of disruptive or false submissions have been identified and filtered out.

• Open and Transparent: Deduplicated information is made available to the public, researchers, and media in a searchable and cross-referenceable format.

4. Report Download: Documenting the Social Consensus on China's Democratization Process

Despite facing external misunderstandings, slander, and multiple layers of suppression, the Li Community consistently insists on action as its goal. The controversies of the past year will ultimately serve as footnotes to our maturation.

Full Download of the "2025 Li Community Annual Report on Cyberactivism"

Click here to go to GitHub to download the full report (PDF)

5. Conclusion: The Road Is Long, but Action Will Bring Us There

Change does not stem from fantasy, but is driven by concrete actions one by one. By focusing on specific issues, we are laying the necessary social consensus for China's future democratization process.

In the new year, we look forward to more people with lofty ideals joining the Li Community to reshape the hope for a democratic China through concrete actions.

Below is the original text of the Li tweet

In contemporary China, ordinary Chinese citizens are facing an increasingly severe human rights crisis, deeply trapped under the heavy pressures brought by high-pressure education, severe unemployment, and the lack of the rule of law. These continuously deteriorating conditions urgently call for fairness, justice, and the restoration of the dignity of ordinary people. Groups suffering from institutional oppression need to speak out to seek justice. The complete blockade of expression channels (such as strictly censored social media platforms) has caused information silos and social atomization. Individual voices are isolated, community connections are severed, and ultimately the possibility of collective mobilization is hindered. This institutional impasse allows human rights violations to persist, calling on us to find more innovative and effective ways of advocacy to break the silence. Digital activism is precisely this new type of action, providing a turning opportunity to break the current impasse. It refers to the phenomenon of taking shape in cyberspace to advance civil resistance and social movements. Its common forms include online petitions, online networking, and anti-censorship actions on social platforms. In 2025, the Li Community initiated and promoted multiple ongoing digital public interest projects covering issues such as labor rights, exam-oriented education, transnational fraud, youth employment, and freedom of expression. These practices can be broadly divided into two categories: one uses case compilation, data aggregation, and disclosure as its primary methods, including Niuma ICU, 611Study ICU, the Stars Going Home Project, and the Xingfu Survey, preserving scattered individual experiences through anonymous surveys so that recurring harms are no longer treated as mutually unrelated individual incidents; the other unfolds through participatory interaction, using visual records of everyday urban spaces and tree-hole-style sharing of feelings to enable individuals who were originally invisible to one another to build loose yet real connections. 611Study.ICU focuses on excessive study hours and the encroachment on vacations among secondary school students, aggregating schedule and study intensity information on a school-by-school basis to reveal that institutionalized high-pressure exam-oriented education is a widespread phenomenon across regions and grades; Niuma ICU focuses on the institutional exploitation long endured by Chinese workers, such as excessive working hours and unpaid overtime, turning the abstract "overtime culture" into a series of visible, tangible real accusations. The Stars Going Home Project centrally organizes and verifies scattered information related to cross-border fraud and human trafficking cases, allowing clues and individual information originally submerged in social media platforms and instant messaging to receive attention; while the Xingfu Survey quietly outlines the overall situation of contemporary youth regarding work, income, workplace discrimination, marriage and childbearing, and happiness through questionnaires. It places the indefinable feeling of "unhappiness" held in many people's hearts into a broader social context, showing everyone: our generation shares a common plight. In parallel with the aforementioned documentation projects, Free Walk enters urban public spaces through participatory action, collecting different forms of freedom in slogans, commercial environments, and personal writings to demonstrate the different meanings carried by the same word under different power positions and writing contexts. Despite differing paths, these practices respond to the same realistic dilemma: in an environment where public opinion space continues to tighten, investigative journalists gradually disappear, and stable statistics, effective grievances, and long-term public discussion mechanisms are lacking, individual experiences are difficult to document and can only be treated repeatedly as isolated incidents and quickly forgotten. By supporting these public interest projects to practice digital activism, the community enables experiences to be preserved, juxtaposed, and brought into the scope of public understanding, thereby providing a foundation for further discussion and action. Our project orientation stems from our reflection on the current international human rights narrative—within existing frameworks, attention is often concentrated on issues that are already repeatedly discussed and relatively familiar in Western contexts, while the daily, institutional oppression endured by the broader Chinese population is often overlooked and regarded as lacking "topicality" or "representativeness." Therefore, the Li Community does not confine itself to existing human rights issues, but chooses to proceed from the concrete and daily circumstances of ordinary Chinese people. We are committed to defending human rights, press freedom, and freedom of speech under the realistic conditions of authoritarian China, and to speaking out for those with the least voice in Chinese society through the continuous accumulation of facts and consensus. We have received over 20,000 submissions from all provincial-level administrative divisions in mainland China as well as overseas, of which approximately one-fifth (20.0%) were identified as submissions attempting to disrupt the projects or smuggle false information. After removing duplicates and clearly distorted content, the relevant information is made public in a searchable and cross-referenceable format for the reference of the public, researchers, and media. Download link for the full text of the "2025 Li Community Annual Report on Cyberactivism": https://gi

thub.com/Li-DAO-Dev/LI-2025-/blob/1df56434e215f7dbf024954faf2d1054fb5f711a/li_community_annual_project_report_2025%20(2).pdf It is precisely against the realistic backdrop of the worsening structural dilemmas mentioned above that over the past year, while continuously advancing its work, the Li community has also endured external misunderstandings, slanders, and controversies, experiencing multiple forms of suppression from both the internet and offline sources. However, it is precisely in such an environment that we have gradually forged ourselves through internal collaboration, constantly testing new forms and paths, and remaining focused on work that can truly present the plight of the Chinese people and provide genuine help to Chinese society, completing a series of digital public welfare projects. All of this is not to prove anything, but stems from our sober judgment of reality. We are well aware of the sufferings that the people within the Great Firewall are experiencing, and we understand their most urgent demands. In this context, action itself has become our sole goal and constitutes our most important consensus. We are also deeply aware that change is never achieved through empty fantasies or declarations, but is driven by concrete and sustained actions. The controversies and divergences of the past year will ultimately footnotes to our accumulation of experience and path toward maturity. In the new year, we hope to continue focusing on the things that truly matter, speaking out for the realistic situations of the broad masses of the Chinese people, and laying the necessary social consensus and action foundation for the future democratization process of China. The road is long and difficult, but with action we will reach our destination. As long as we continue to focus on specific issues and continuously promote the substantive development of China's democratization and social movements, change will not merely be a wish, but a reality that can be achieved step by step. In the new year, we also look forward to more aspiring individuals joining us to reshape the hope for a democratic China through action.