Two years ago, Wan Huizi was a Chinese university student who considered herself deeply patriotic and hoped to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Today, she lives in Canada, openly criticizes Beijing and says her accounts on WeChat, Douyin, and Weibo have all been shut down by Chinese authorities.
In an exclusive interview with Vision Times, Wan described the change not as a single revelation, but as a gradual collapse of beliefs she had held since childhood. “I used to want to join the Party, and I was also a member of the Communist Youth League,” she said.
Wan grew up in what she described as a military family. Her father was a firefighter, her grandfather had taken part in the Long March, and her brother served in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force. “It gave me this deeply rooted idea that you absolutely had to love the country,” she recalled.
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A Party application thrown away
At university, Wan served as an organizational committee member for her class and said she earned high marks, including the highest score in her class on the CCP’s “Study Xi, Strong Nation” app. But her enthusiasm for joining the Party began to unravel after a dispute with her class monitor. “I clearly saw the application I personally placed on his desk. The next day I went to look, and it was gone; it was in the trash,” she recalled.
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The documents included her Party membership application and an application to volunteer as a teacher in a rural area. “Three of them, mine and my friends, were all gone, just because we had offended the class monitor.”
Wan believed personal connections between the class monitor and university staff prevented her from challenging what happened. “At the time, someone told me, ‘You can report this counselor.’ But I said, ‘Do you think the counselor doesn’t have connections? Above that is the university president.’”
Around the same period, Wan said her mother’s construction business had spent nearly a decade trying to recover more than 2 million yuan in payments allegedly owed by a local government. “I was so angry that I quit the Communist Youth League,” she said.
Speaking out from Canada
Wan moved to Canada to study in September 2024. The distance from China, she said, made her more willing to express political opinions online. “Because Weibo has trending topics, I posted some of my own views,” she said, referring to comments supporting Taiwan independence. “The replies were all calling me a traitor.” Weibo is a popular blogging and social media app used by millions in China.
She said she was then doxxed and her Chinese social-media accounts were suspended. “They doxxed me, and then my account was gone.”
More troubling, Wan said, was what happened afterward. She recalled discussing Taiwan with friends over WeChat and later learning that her family had been contacted in China. “My mother received a call saying, ‘What has your daughter been saying online?’”
Revisiting the history she learned in school
Wan said her doubts about the political system had begun much earlier. She first learned how to circumvent China’s internet restrictions around 2016, while still in middle school. Access to overseas websites exposed her to accounts of the Cultural Revolution, the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and other subjects largely absent from her school curriculum.
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deployed troops and tanks to crush a nationwide pro-democracy movement led largely by students. Though publicly-available information is scarce, the military assault ended weeks of peaceful demonstrations centered in Beijing, resulting in the deaths of many civilians, with estimates ranging from several hundred to over a thousand.
“I was a humanities student and loved reading history books from a young age, but the teacher would say, ‘We’re done with this page. Let’s move on to Chinese class,’” she recalled.
Switching gears
Her own family history also shaped her thinking. Wan said relatives who were teachers had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, while her great-grandfather, whom she described as one of China’s early aviators, was persecuted and eventually died. “I used to treat Mao Zedong as an idol,” she said, until friends studying law began sharing historical material with her.
After moving to Canada, Wan began attending events concerning Chinese human rights, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Falun Gong. Also known as Falun Dafa, Falun Gong is a spiritual practice rooted in the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. Despite being peaceful in nature, the CCP launched a brutal campaign to eradicate the practice in July 1999 after seeing its rapid rise in popularity as a threat to its authoritarian regime. Since then, thousands of practitioners have perished at the hands of Chinese police, with many today still undergoing routine monitoring, arbitrary travel bans, and arrests.
The transition has left her uncertain whether she can safely return to China, but she said her attachment to the country itself has not disappeared. “I still hope China can become better,” she said. “If the Communist Party can be replaced, then whoever comes after can come. That is still my home. How could I not miss home?”
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