How an Act of Vandalism Helped a Dissident Find His Voice

One afternoon in October 2024, Li Ying was lying in bed, scrolling through X, when he got a notification on his phone from the peephole security camera on his apartment door in Turin, Italy.

Two men were lingering in the hallway.

He got up quietly, went to the door and watched them through the camera feed on his phone.

For two years, ever since he turned his X account into one of the most influential Chinese-language sources for uncensored news and dissent, Mr. Li had received threats of physical harm. Should those threats ever come to pass, he imagined summoning the courage to livestream his capture, possibly even his own death.

When one of the men reached into his pocket, Mr. Li froze. He forgot to livestream.

The man pulled out a can of spray paint and scrawled the word “stupro,” Italian for rape. Then both men left.

Mr. Li’s worst fears had not come to pass. He called the police. Four officers came, and they took his statement and his security camera footage. A friend drove from Milan to collect him and his two cats. By morning the apartment was empty.

After that moment, Mr. Li, who is known as “Teacher Li” to his followers on social media, decided that his life should not be dictated by fear. Rather than back down, he expanded his activities — traveling, attending human rights conferences and meeting diplomats, journalists, activists and politicians across Europe, Asia and North America.

“When you are able to face the abyss directly,” Mr. Li said, “the abyss gradually starts to fear you instead.”

The Italian police have not released any information about the investigation, but Mr. Li was certain that the Chinese government had hired the vandals. Under Xi Jinping, censorship and surveillance have made sustained dissent inside China extremely difficult. Beijing has proved equally determined to pursue those who speak out from abroad.

Mr. Li, 34, is among the biggest targets of Beijing. Constant doxxing kept him on the move. Smears and death threats filled his X feed. Then the intimidation turned physical: Strangers appeared at his door, photographed his building and scrawled threats in his hallway.

A growing number of Chinese who found living in an authoritarian state intolerable have moved abroad. Most are too fearful of a vengeful government to speak up. But people like Mr. Li provide an alternative to the official government narratives through podcasts, YouTube channels, bookstores and X accounts run from Tokyo, Toronto and New York.

Few have reached an audience as large as Mr. Li’s.

According to data analytics firm Similarweb, his X account, which has 2.2 million followers, ranked fifth globally on the site by traffic in December — extraordinary for an account written in Chinese. From 2023 to 2025, the account generated more than six billion views each year.

He posts accounts of unemployed university graduates, delivery drivers who once held more prestigious jobs, the people who spent money on apartments that were never built or who were never paid for their work. Some of the information is sent by people inside China, such as videos of the police cracking down on Wuhan residents protesting plans for a battery factory. Some posts come from Chinese social media sites, such as Weibo and Douyin, the sister short video app of TikTok.

“His is not just a single voice,” said Laura Harth, a director based in Italy for Safeguard Defenders, a human rights organization. “He’s like the loudspeaker through which all the other voices” — Chinese voices — “come out into the world.”

A Cute and Menacing Cat

Mr. Li grew up in eastern China’s Anhui Province and has been drawing for as long as he can remember. He moved to Italy to study painting. In November 2022, when demonstrations erupted in China protesting the country’s draconian “zero Covid” policies, he was living in Milan. He had a modest following on Twitter, as X was known at the time; his avatar is a hand-drawn cat that’s simultaneously cute and menacing.

The protests were the largest wave of public dissent since Tiananmen Square in 1989. Mr. Li opened his account to anyone inside China with something to show the world. People began sending him photographs, videos and witness accounts — for example, of police officers arresting protesters or people chanting for Mr. Xi to step down — that would have been censored on the Chinese internet. His following exploded.

Then came the retaliation.

Each time he posted online, the police would appear at his parents’ house in Anhui. The Chinese Embassy in Italy wrote to a language school in Milan where Mr. Li worked, accusing him of fraud. He lost his job.

His parents begged him to stop posting. His bank accounts in China were frozen. So were his payment apps and gaming accounts.

Convinced he was being tracked, he moved four times in a year. At his most isolated, he did not leave his building for two weeks, surviving mostly on McDonald’s takeout delivered to his house.

In 2024, the police in China began summoning Mr. Li’s followers and pressuring them to unfollow his account. Then came the graffiti in Turin.

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China runs the most extensive version of transnational repression in the world, touching millions of people in at least 36 countries, according to a 2021 Freedom House report. Beijing uses espionage, cyberattacks, threats and physical assaults to silence and punish its critics.

Over the past few years, the authorities in Europe and the United States have investigated and prosecuted cases linked to Beijing’s efforts to monitor and intimidate dissidents abroad.

In February, an OpenAI report documented how Chinese law enforcement had used the company’s ChatGPT to conduct online influence operations against dissidents and foreign leaders, using Mr. Li as one of the examples. Mr. Li’s team and Safeguard Defenders encourage overseas Chinese to document their experiences of Beijing’s transnational repression and submit evidence to the authorities in democratic countries.

Beijing denies accusations of transnational repression and accuses foreign governments of interfering in China’s internal affairs.

I’ve talked to Mr. Li many times over the years. I once joked to him that there are two publications I read every day to keep up with China news: the official People’s Daily and his X feed.

Early on, he resisted the “rebel” label and told me that he regretted what he had gotten himself into. He was incredulous that some Chinese pinned their hope of democracy on an influencer like him. Having paid the price of dissent, he understood why so few people dared to speak out.

But as time passed, Mr. Li seemed increasingly comfortable inhabiting his role as an activist. He still doesn’t want his photo taken, and he surveys any room he enters. But the man who once hid inside his apartment now moves confidently through airports and attends conferences and visits embassies. He briefs diplomats on what’s going on in China and Beijing’s methods of transnational repression.

He oversees staff and volunteers who help aggregate news and manage his X account as well as putting out a new weekly newsletter in English. In February 2025, Mr. Li’s team organized a crowdsourced investigation into long school hours inside China, drawing thousands of submissions from students and parents. Some schools adjusted their schedules after the findings circulated widely online. (His work is supported by private donors.)

In December, I asked whether he considered himself a revolutionary. He hesitated.

The word, he said, carries associations with violence and bloodshed — things he abhors.

But Mr. Li said he now saw his work as part of a nonviolent struggle against Communist Party rule.

“For a long time, I was the one being chased by them,” he told me, referring to the Chinese government. “But now, I’ve turned the tables — I’m the one pursuing them around the world and pushing back against them.”

In April, we met in Tokyo. Mr. Li likes the city because of its Chinese diaspora, which in recent years has attracted a growing number of journalists, activists and intellectuals.

He also likes the proximity to China — as close, perhaps, as an exiled dissident can get.

In May, during President Trump’s state visit to China, Mr. Li’s posts made a brief splash on Chinese social media. Mr. Li’s account had posted a photo showing Mr. Musk walking with his young son, who was wearing a Chinese-style vest. Mr. Musk, a member of the U.S. delegation, replied to the post in Chinese: “My son is learning Mandarin.”

The exchange quickly became one of the most discussed topics on Chinese social media. A state media outlet created a hashtag #ElonMusksaidhissonislearningChinese on the Weibo platform. Some comments slyly asked, “So, to whom he was responding?” After a few hours, the hashtag was deleted.

Soon after, Mr. Li posted an image generated by artificial intelligence showing Mr. Musk and Mr. Xi seated together at a state dinner. Mr. Musk was holding up a phone toward the Chinese leader.

On the screen was Mr. Li’s mischievous cat avatar.