Amid the cobbled walls and wildflowers in springtime Ghent, another movement bloomed. The conference, titled “Beyond Borders: Youth Resilience Against the CCP,” brought together rising young activists to enhance their skills and cross-community connections in combating the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s transnational repression. From Tibetan, Taiwanese, Hong Konger, Uyghur, and Southern Mongolian backgrounds, the activists represented the communities most central in this fight.
Through its wide range of workshops, the conference uniquely blended all aspects of peaceful resistance. In the first session, titled “AI as a Tool,” Athena Tong, a research associate at the China Strategic Risks Institute, described AI’s opportunities and risks for activists alongside examples of its use. This focus on how activists can leverage open-source techniques and their comparative digital freedom was an inspiring and urgent perspective amid usual one-sided focus on the CCP’s deployment of AI.
One particular example that Athena gave was how activists used AI to capitalize upon rare leaks like the GoLaxy papers, which revealed the CCP’s development of AI propaganda personas, to profile the developers behind them. Another is MonlamAI, a large language model and translation tool developed by Tibetan computer scientists in exile to counteract censorship and Sinicization of online Tibetan content. As she remarked, “AI tools run both ways. Activists are increasingly realizing this.” Following HRF’s AI Hack for Freedom in January, which connected human rights defenders with open-source AI developers, the opportunities for activists to create digital tools to power their work with the help of AI have never been greater.
The Digital Protection workshop led by cybersecurity expert Sarah Moulton expanded upon this practical element. Through an interactive simulation where guests acted as members of an NGO facing cyberattacks, she illustrated how software vulnerabilities form a critical bottleneck to operations and can exponentially drain resources if left unchecked. By encouraging guests to reflect upon instances where their own organizations have faced such cyberattacks, Sarah’s workshop valuably grounded theory within specific examples.
The Legal Pathways workshop complemented the previous two by refining participants’ understanding of their legal entitlements to protection from common techniques of transnational repression, such as extradition and harassment by plainclothes Chinese agents. With her extensive expertise in advocating for targeted dissidents as Safeguard Defenders’ China in the World director and external liaison for the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, Laura Harth illuminated the legal mechanisms behind notable case studies.
Among these, analysis of both the CCP’s extradition treaties with other nations and its increasing use of bogus charges of economic crimes — such as in the sentencing of the father of Hong Kong activist Anna Kwok in February — was particularly useful for the exiled Chinese activists in attendance.
Participants also shared their own tips about legal advocacy. Misran Dolan, the president of the Uyghur American Association, noted the benefits of building long-term relationships with congressional staffers. “In most cases, senators will be voted out or representatives will leave Capitol Hill, but staffers will remain and might even open up new points of contact.”
This pragmatism was echoed by Freddy Lim, the lead vocalist of the Taiwanese heavy-metal band CHTHONIC, a two-term member of Taiwan’s legislature, and Taiwan’s current ambassador to Finland. During the Artistic Resistance workshop, his honesty about balancing his political, personal, and artistic lives struck chords touched upon during the workshop’s screening of “State of Statelessness,” an anthology of short films exploring Tibetans’ fight to maintain their identities and family ties across borders and nationalities. I moderated a panel discussion featuring three other Tibetan, Uyghur, and Southern Mongolian panelists who discussed how these themes resonated across their own diasporas.
Sonya Imin, a Uyghur-American filmmaker and academic on the panel, unpicked the thorny questions of complicity and estrangement facing Uyghurs able to return to occupied East Turkestan, alongside their relative privilege over those who cannot. Rei Xia, a Han dissident and Chinese activist who fled to Europe from Shanghai after being imprisoned for her role in the 2022 White Paper protests, expanded on the film’s nostalgia. For her, the forests of northern India evoked longing for her own grandparents’ rural village to which she may never return.
The experiences of Rei and other brave Han dissidents are often obscured by those of ethnic minorities. Yet, it takes perhaps the most bravery to sacrifice one’s own Han privilege to speak out against others’ oppression. Rei’s own political awakening in Shanghai’s clandestine and persecuted queer activism networks was an important reminder that in her own words, “in China, the patriarchy and the government are intertwined into a new form.”
Across the conference’s various academic and practical threads, collective care was proven to be activists’ most effective weapon. This was particularly acute during the Physical Protection workshop led by Pema Doma, former Executive Director of Students For a Free Tibet, who trained participants in collaborative self-defense. While fun and interactive, the session was a sobering reminder of the violence that activists perpetually face from CCP plainclothes agents and counterprotestors. Similarly, the Psychological Resilience workshop led by clinical psychologist Vanina Waizmann taught communal methods to manage the constant risks of burnout.
The Beyond Borders conference achieved its purpose in transcending not just imposed territorial borders, but the intangible borders dividing different peoples fighting the same transnational repression. Through its intimate conversations and expert workshops, guests found new empathy and knowledge in each other. Perhaps best symbolizing this was the Graffiti workshop, which saw different activists from many groups blend their political slogans and imagery into bold new wholes. In this spirit, we realized the promise of united youth resistance to the CCP’s repression, where each of us contributes our unique skills to the struggle we all share.