To Outlive Tyranny, by Yangyang Cheng – 18 September 2025

From Dissent

Flesh and blood alone cannot halt the advance of iron and steel. To stop the tanks, we need people to place blocks on the road and throw sand into the gears.

It’s early summer, and images of tanks dot my social media timeline. The metal beasts are lined up against an urban backdrop, a column of steel that stretches to the horizon. Sixteen years after moving from my birth country of China to the United States, I have learned to expect pictures like this to circulate every June. On the fourth day of that month in 1989, shortly before I was born, over 180,000 Chinese troops advanced into Beijing to crush a student-led pro-democracy demonstration. A photo from that day, of a lone man in a white shirt standing in front of a procession of tanks, became a global symbol of defiance.

This year, the images are different. They’re not blurry with age, and they did not originate from another continent. Instead, they show American tanks in transit to Washington, D.C., for President Donald Trump’s birthday parade, advertised as a celebration of the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary. On the other side of the country in Los Angeles, hundreds of Marines and thousands of National Guard troops have been sent in to “restore order” after small-scale protests erupted against ICE raids in immigrant communities.

For a Chinese person living in the United States, the terrors of this moment are laced with irony. Over the past decade, partly in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s tightening grip at home and increasing belligerence abroad, but primarily as a reaction to China’s economic rise, policymakers and pundits in the United States have almost uniformly labeled the Chinese government as the greatest threat to freedom and democracy worldwide. Many have used Beijing’s authoritarian rule as justification to paint any person of Chinese descent as a potential agent of the Chinese state.

Five years ago, while quarantined in my apartment in Chicago, I pictured the city under martial law, with armed agents bursting through my front door. Today I no longer indulge in such torturous speculation. Perhaps I have exhausted my nerves; perhaps imagining dystopia was only cathartic when the scenarios still seemed remote. Some of my colleagues are already adopting safety techniques used in China for their work in the United States: avoid sensitive topics or keywords, scrub social media, carry clean electronics when crossing the border, and tell students to submit paper copies of their essays to evade digital surveillance.

While in my younger years I was primarily concerned for my own future, these days, as an immigrant scholar living and working in the United States, I find myself preoccupied with a different question: how do we teach the children? What can we tell the young about how to exist and persist at this historic juncture?

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Yangyang Cheng is a research scholar at Yale Law School. A particle physicist by training, she studies the history of science in China and U.S.–China relations.

To Outlive Tyranny, by Yangyang Cheng – 18 September 2025

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