Jiang Bu recalled that during the Spring Festival, Li Ying mentioned that he had received a series of submissions from Chinese students complaining about excessive class hours and excessive academic pressure. Jiang Bu initially dismissed the issue. "It's just that the students don't like the class. What's the big deal?" he told the reporter.
Soon, these submissions evolved into a project focused on overtime studying among Chinese middle and high school students—611Study.ICU. Jiang Bu was the project leader. Sitting at his computer in Paris, France, Jiang Bu flipped through submissions from Chinese students, describing stories of schools forcing students to leave at 11 PM and classmates committing suicide due to the pressure. He then realized how deeply these "bloody, living data" resonated with him. Jiang Bu, born and raised in Beijing, went to study in Paris a few years ago. Today, he juggles multiple identities: independent documentary filmmaker, organizer of overseas Chinese social movements, and something of a dissident. As the project drew to a close, Jiang Bu lamented that this was the period of time he had truly understood China the best in the six years since he left.
611Study.ICU refers to the mandatory 6 AM to 11 PM school schedule, a common theme among Chinese middle and high school students. 611Study.ICU was founded by overseas activist and well-known blogger "Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher" (real name: Li Ying) and her team. This young, overseas Chinese team uses crowdsourcing to collect data. Li Ying, who boasts two million followers on X, encourages students to fill out a Google Doc to report on overtime in their respective schools. As of press time, data has been collected from over 4,000 schools, representing approximately one-third of all high schools in China.
Surprisingly, about a month after the project launched, high schools across China suddenly began implementing a two-day weekend off system. While Chinese media and the public applauded the "burden reduction," many began to wonder if this was related to the promotion of the 611Study.ICU project.
A project focusing on overtime learning among students has just concluded, and another project focusing on overtime work in the Chinese workplace has also been seamlessly launched. The driving force behind both projects is the controversial $Li community—a community established by Li Ying and her team in response to the $Li meme token, which was launched at the end of 2024. A community of young people overseas, built on cryptocurrency, may have directly and effectively driven change in Chinese society. Breaking through the Great Firewall and attempting to connect Chinese people at home and abroad—what does this mean for the practice of globally connected social movements?
The CCP's handling of this incident made me realize how much influence I have."
Li Ying herself hadn't anticipated the sheer number of Chinese students willing to "climb the Great Firewall" to report them. "The final result was truly beyond my expectations," Li Ying recalled. They initially expected only a few hundred submissions, but the number quickly exceeded several thousand. This means that perhaps one-third of students across China are voluntarily reporting their schools for forcing students to attend overtime to "foreign forces" by "climbing the Great Firewall."
On X, Li Ying boasts 2 million followers and is one of China's most influential young bloggers and dissidents abroad. Originally a painter in his thirties, he studied at an Italian art academy. During the pandemic, he began discussing China's epidemic control efforts on Weibo, but his account was repeatedly blocked. He later decided to move to X.
Two years ago, the White Paper Movement rapidly catapulted Li Ying to fame. He began receiving numerous private messages from Chinese citizens, including videos protesting the zero-COVID policy. He forwarded these news items on X, which were deemed too sensitive in China and were subsequently blocked. This made him a thorn in the Chinese government's side and a dangerous figure.
Li Ying said his X account was frequently attacked, his bank account in China was frozen, his parents in China were frequently harassed, and the Chinese Embassy sent a letter to his company in Italy, leading to his dismissal. But he didn't disappear. After the White Paper Movement, he continued to serve as a hub for reporting on "sensitive" news in China, from civil protests to official corruption, thereby defying the Chinese government's censorship apparatus. This gradually spread his reputation among Chinese democrats both at home and abroad.
Xu Bin, a sociologist at Emory University who studies Chinese citizen participation, told RFA that this form of linkage between China and abroad is part of the global trend of transnational movements, and is particularly noteworthy for providing Chinese people with an outlet for public opinion.
"It wasn't the number of submissions I received," Li Ying said, her words measured, during an interview. "It was the CCP's handling of this incident that made me realize how influential I was."
Li Ying traced the connection between the 611Study.ICU project and the sudden "two-day weekend" shutdown in Chinese schools: Shortly after the Overtime Study project was officially launched on February 1st, Li Ying said students reported to her that the schools listed were investigating who was submitting their submissions through a "cheat" (circumventing the firewall). Fearing exposure, some students requested that their information be deleted. News of the listed schools' holiday schedules gradually spread. About a week later, on social media platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin, popular among young Chinese, reports emerged that many schools had announced delayed start dates for the winter break. Subsequently, local education bureaus issued official documents requiring schools to resume two-day weekends.
A more direct connection is that in mid-March, Li Ying's X account publicly released two photos: one was of Wang Jiangang, the principal of Beihai Middle School, holding a school-wide meeting, and the text on his big screen read: some students who "don't want to study and are brainwashed" fed information to "Teacher Li is not your teacher" through a VPN website, saying that this was an external reason for the school's high school to implement a two-day weekend after the Spring Festival.
Some netizens remain skeptical of whether Li Ying's team has truly contributed to reducing the burden on Chinese high school students. On Reddit, some insist the photo of the Beihai Middle School assembly was photoshopped, while another popular voice questioned whether "the rooster crowed the sun out." Education departments across the country have long had plans to "reduce" student burdens, and the overtime study program simply happened to coincide with the timing. In response, Li Ying responded in an interview that plans to reduce student burdens and implement "two-day weekends" have been in place for years. The nationwide implementation of this initiative aligns with the overall strategy of the 611Study.ICU.
Jiang isn't the director of 611Study.ICU. He organized protests in Paris in support of the "White Paper Movement" in China and later registered a Paris-based NGO focused on Chinese social issues. As an organizer of overseas communities, he sometimes wonders, "Can our voices truly reach across the Great Wall and back home?" To what extent can overseas Chinese citizen movements influence and change China?
Jiang Bu's concerns are not without reason. In the internet age, from the beginning of the Chinese women's rights movement in 2012 to the White Paper Movement in 2022, citizen movements in China often quickly trigger responses overseas, demonstrating a "decentralized" and "transnational movement model."
However, scholars who study civic movements are not entirely optimistic about the concept of "decentralization." "Leaderless movements can be effective in the early stages of protests," Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, told the New York Times. "But to advance a movement from protests and venting anger to one that can have a real impact requires leadership, organization, and strategic tactics."
In addition, these loose groups of overseas social movements, apart from protests and support, do limited things and usually fade away as the heat of social events grows, making it difficult to maintain them for a long time.
The 611Study.ICU team was also founded on the concept of a "decentralized community." Jiang, however, disagrees that because of Li Ying's reputation, "interacting with Professor Li will become a 'national security issue,' with various departments contacting your school." Instead, the issue has been taken seriously and resolved. With only a brief online audience, "the ability to truly change a part of China" and immediate results is a huge source of motivation and inspiration for the team members.
"Foreign Anti-China Forces" Establish China's "Overseas Petitions Bureau"
Whenever the team holds online meetings, Jiang Bu describes himself as hearing a cacophony of "birdsong and flowers." Sometimes, if he accidentally forgets to mute himself, the conversation becomes a double cacophony. "Every meeting is a mess," Jiang Bu admits, "but this is actually good for everyone's safety." During the interview, Jiang Bu repeatedly mentioned safety. "Only by protecting everyone can the project move forward," he says.
The 611Study.ICU project has over a dozen members. They are spread across the globe, including mainland China, and are mostly young people. They were recruited primarily through Teacher Li's X account and the $Li community's Telegram group. As the project leader, Jiang not only knows the interviewees' time zones and online identities, but also, he claims, knows almost nothing about their real-life identities, such as their names and addresses. To ensure the team's safety, candidates also need to pass a security test, including how to use the Telegram group and whether they use a two-level verification email address. This ensures that members can maintain a clear distinction between their online and real-life identities. Only after passing this test can they begin work.
Among those using a voice changer to protect themselves is Alang, who lives in Hong Kong. Alang began following Li Ying's X account during the White Paper Movement during the pandemic. A college student majoring in design, he was responsible for designing graphics for the 611 project. During his interview with RFA, he carefully avoided his family, who were unaware of his work for Li Ying. Alang grew up in Hong Kong, but many of his family members live in mainland China. He was always curious when they talked about the academic pressures there.
Despite efforts to protect members' safety, Jiang noted that the identities of some team members, including himself, were exposed, and their parents in China were interviewed by relevant authorities, who accused them of being "foreign anti-China forces." Li Ying also mentioned that the 611 website had been severely attacked over the past month, stating that "dozens of AI-generated deepfakes were being posted every second."
However, the "external and internal troubles" actually galvanized the team members. Alang said that everyone came to help when needed. "We declared war together against this greatest and most despotic empire," Chiang said. "This is a deep revolutionary friendship."
"Many people jokingly claim that petitioning in China doesn't solve their problems, but rather that my petitioning alone can solve their problems." Li Ying told RFA that in the submissions he received, he saw petitioners queuing in front of the Beijing Petitions Bureau in the early morning hours to submit their petitions. He felt the petitioners' hardships were immense, so he and his team came up with the concept of an "Overseas Petitions Bureau"—one that eliminates the need for queues and is not subject to the "long-arm jurisdiction" of the Cyberspace Administration of China. This would allow the Chinese public to fully express their demands, which became the prototype of the 611study.ICU project. They weren't stopping there. As the project focusing on students' overtime study drew to a close, another project focusing on overtime work in the Chinese workplace, "Niu Ma ICU," was also gradually launched.
(For security reasons, Jiang Bu is my online name and Alang is a pseudonym.)
