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On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide?