So I began to ask myself: what can I do? I can write. I know how to capture feeling in words, how to lay bare the human heart. I also have years of experience as a queer activist on the Chinese mainland.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
Content Advisory: Discussion of atrocities
Echoes of History
China’s history spans over five thousand years, carrying the memories of a nation, a people, and countless individuals. As someone Chinese, I always feel a surge of national pride when the topic comes up. From the first year of middle school, history becomes a compulsory subject for every Chinese student, roughly divided into three sections: ancient Chinese history, modern Chinese history, and world history—in that order. A truly great history teacher lectures like a storyteller, weaving dramatic plots that captivate the entire class. From the very first lesson, I fell in love with the subject.
The earliest historical tales, shrouded in the haze of antiquity, have mostly taken on mythological hues, forming the foundation of the Chinese historical imagination. The tale of Yu the Great taming the floods during the Xia dynasty (c. 2070–1600 BCE) tells of how he passed his own home three times without entering—an enduring story that has taught generations to put the greater good before the self. During the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BCE), King Wu’s campaign to overthrow the tyrant King Zhou of Shang later evolved into one of China’s most iconic mythological epics, The Investiture of the Gods. Deities like Nezha, the God of Wealth, and the pagoda-bearing Heavenly King Li Jing—all household names in China—were born from these tales.
The Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BCE) laid the groundwork for how Chinese people view the world and understand life. It was a time of warring kingdoms and rising heroes, but also a golden age of cultural and philosophical explosion. Thinkers such as Laozi, Confucius, Zhuangzi, Mencius, and others each developed their own doctrines and visions for stabilising society and improving the lives of the people, together ushering in the golden age of “the Hundred Schools of Thought”.
Laozi proposed the philosophy of “Dao follows nature,” advocating a life aligned with the natural order and a mode of governance grounded in non-action. This principle became the heart of Daoist thought and profoundly shaped the later development of Daoism as a religion.
Confucius, honoured as “the teacher of all ages,” had his words and deeds compiled by disciples into The Analects, a cornerstone of Confucian thought. His teachings run deep in the Chinese psyche and continue to shape our ways of thinking and living. Even children can recite his sayings with ease. “When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers” teaches humility and the spirit of learning. “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire” reminds us to act with empathy. “The superior man is calm and at ease; the petty man is always fretting” stresses integrity and inner composure. “To know what you know and to know what you do not know, that is true knowledge” encourages a clear-eyed pursuit of truth.
The Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) is my favourite era. In culture, politics, diplomacy, the arts, even in the integration of diverse peoples, it represented the height of Chinese civilisation.
If I had to capture the spirit of the Tang on paper, the first thing that comes to mind is the poetry of Li Bai. His verses carry a wild, intoxicated freedom—an unbridled, romantic grandeur that only an era as vast and open-hearted as the Tang could have nurtured. He is the greatest and most revered poet in China. Even after all these centuries, when people search for words to match a feeling, it is often his lines they turn to first. “Alas, my white hair is thirty thousand feet long! As the sorrows of separation — it’s as strong” captures the aching bitterness of disappointment; “Lifting my head I see the moon, Looking down I long for home” echoes in the hearts of every wanderer; “A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves; I’ll set my cloud-like sail to cross the sea which raves” is an enduring faith for the lost; And “Looking up at the sky, I laugh aloud and go. Am I a man to crawl amid the brambles low?” is a defiant laugh hurled into the open air of life.
And Li Bai was far from alone. Poets in that era glittered more brightly, and more abundantly, than the stars. There was Du Fu, the Poet Sage, who wrote of national ruin and the suffering of the people; Wang Wei, the Poet Buddha, whose landscape poems flowed seamlessly between painting and Zen-like stillness; Bai Juyi, the Poet Demon, who sang of love and loss in The Song of Everlasting Regret and The Pipa Tune; and Li He, the Poet Ghost, who died young but left behind verses as dazzling and surreal as fever dreams. These names, these verses, together upheld the summit of Tang poetry. They wrote of wind and moon, of joy and grief, of rivers and mountains, of the vast cosmos and the fleeting world. In just a few lines, they could speak across centuries and distil the essence of all things. Their verses lit a flame that still burns today—unrivalled, unreachable, and eternal.
Chang’an, the capital of the High Tang, was perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in Chinese history. It drew not only Han Chinese from the Central Plains, Guanzhong, and Lingnan, but also merchants from the Western Regions, Persian traders, Indian monks, and envoys from Japan, Korea, and Central Asia. In the markets, foreign tongues mingled freely. Persian pastries, music, and fashion swept through everyday life. Buddhism, Daoism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity coexisted in remarkable harmony.
The Tang was an open and daring age. Same-sex relationships were visible and accepted. Men paid great attention to their appearance, while women were no longer expected to be slender—instead, curves were in vogue. One of China’s most iconic beauties, Yang Yuhuan, was celebrated for her voluptuous figure. During the Tang, women could choose whom to marry, and even divorce and remarry. Poets could soar on talent alone, earning eternal fame. Merchants could trade across oceans and amass great wealth. Ordinary people, too, could live in ease and contentment.
Whenever I think of the Tang, I picture moonlit Chang’an: a jug of wine beneath a blooming peach tree, a chance meeting between a gifted scholar and a beautiful courtesan, poets raising their cups and singing into the night. Every stroke of history painted in this age shimmers with intoxicating beauty.
I love the Tang not just because my surname, Li, was the imperial name of the dynasty, nor simply because the legendary figures I admire—Li Bai the Poet Immortal, Wu Zetian the only woman to rule China, or Xuanzang the great monk—all lived in that time. What draws me most is its spirit: unafraid of feeling, unashamed of display, bold in its confidence. It embraced flamboyance and welcomed ambiguity. It sought sincerity over restraint. That fearless spirit is all but lost in later times. I’ve always felt there’s something of the Tang in my bones—I resist rules, have little taste for moderation, sometimes reckless, sometimes too tender, but always feeling the world with my whole being.
The Tang dynasty gave the Chinese people their deepest sense of cultural confidence. Whenever we reached this chapter in history class, our teacher’s gestures would grow the most animated, and we, the students, listened with rare focus and pride, each picturing our own version of that glorious era.
After the Tang, history shifted from splendour to steadiness—moving through the Song (960–1279), the Yuan (1271–1368), the Ming (1368–1644), and the Qing (1644–1912). Then came the late Qing, when British cannons blew open China’s gates, and with that, modern Chinese history began. The tone of the class changed in an instant—the brush of history turned heavy, and page after page was filled with wounds and humiliation.
Starting in the 1760s, Britain became the first country to launch the Industrial Revolution. With steam engines and mechanised production, it rose swiftly to become the world’s most powerful capitalist nation. In contrast, the Qing court clung to the illusion of the “Celestial Empire,” enforced a closed-door policy, and refused to engage with the West. The empire appeared stable on the surface, but it had long fallen out of sync with the times—plagued by internal decay and systemic stagnation.
After industrialisation, Britain urgently sought new overseas markets. But in China, it ran into repeated setbacks. Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain were all the rage in Europe, while British goods—like woollen cloth—held little appeal for Chinese consumers. The Qing government refused to open its markets, accepting only silver in exchange. Yet Britain, bound to the gold standard and short on silver, had to buy it at high cost from Europe. Every year, two to three million taels of silver flowed into China.
To reverse this, Britain began smuggling opium into China on a massive scale.
As many modern Chinese thinkers have said, The poison of opium was a calamity unprecedented in three thousand years. Opium devastated Chinese society. Six million taels of silver drained from China’s economy annually. The national treasury emptied, families collapsed, entire communities drowned in addiction.
In 1839, the Qing court sent Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu to Guangzhou to suppress the opium trade. Over twenty-three days, he destroyed 2,376,254 pounds of opium—a feat known in history as the “Destruction at Humen.” This decisive act dealt a blow to the opium crisis, but it also enraged Britain and sparked war.
In June 1840, Britain used the Humen incident as a pretext to launch its invasion. Two years later, the Qing was defeated and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing: Hong Kong Island was ceded, 21 million taels of silver paid in indemnities, and five treaty ports opened. With this, China entered a long era of diplomatic humiliation—the age of the “unequal treaties.”
After Britain had pried open China’s doors, other imperial powers quickly followed. Sensing an unprecedented opportunity, they used threats of war or diplomatic coercion to force the Qing court into signing one unequal treaty after another, further stripping China’s wealth and sovereignty.
In 1858, the Treaty of Tientsin (signed with Britain, France, the United States, and Russia) opened ten more ports and required China to pay 4 million taels to Britain and 2 million to France.
That same year, the Treaty of Aigun (with Russia) ceded some 600,000 square kilometres of land—stretching north of the Amur River and south of the Outer Khingan Mountains.
In 1860, the Convention of Peking (with Britain and France) ceded the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain and raised the indemnity to 8 million taels for each country.
In 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki (with Japan) ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan and imposed an enormous indemnity of 200 million taels of silver.
To me, modern Chinese history feels like it all began with a quarrel between two families in a village. One side tries to settle things by handing over money and land—only to expose just how rich and defenceless it really was. Instantly, the rest of the neighbourhood swarms in, each hoping for a piece of the spoils. Greed snowballs. In those years, almost any imperial power could barge into China, impose an unequal treaty, seize territory, and loot wealth.
According to the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, from 1842 to 1912, the Qing court signed a staggering 268 unequal treaties. Through these, the Qing court was gradually reduced to a tool of colonial control. China’s land, seas, legal system, tariffs, and trade sovereignty were all severely undermined. A once independent nation was steadily hollowed out, becoming a semi-colonial, semi-feudal state.
In 1900, the Qing dynasty—already gasping its last breaths—declared war on the foreign powers under the influence of the Boxer Rebellion. The Eight-Nation Alliance—comprising Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Russia, Japan, Austria-Hungary, and Italy—swiftly marched into Beijing. According to the private diary of the Allied commander, Waldersee, the occupying troops were officially granted three days to loot the city. The pillaging, however, continued well beyond that. They plundered the imperial treasury, the Imperial Ancestral Temple, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, and the Forbidden City—stripping every visible relic and treasure to ship back home. Civilians were slaughtered and violated indiscriminately. The streets burned, smoke hung thick in the air, and cries of grief rang through the broken city.
In the end, the Qing court was forced to sign the humiliating Boxer Protocol with eleven nations—not only the eight invading powers, but also Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain, who joined only to demand their share of reparations. China was to pay 450 million taels of silver over thirty-nine years—nearly a billion with interest. Foreign troops were allowed to garrison Beijing. China forfeited the right to conduct independent diplomacy. Missionaries were granted full access across the country. From that point on, China had completely lost its diplomatic and military autonomy. The nation’s dignity lay in ruins. The age of unequal treaties had reached its tragic peak.
Ever since I started learning modern Chinese history, I’ve found myself seething with rage after every class. I knew full well these events were long over, impossible to change. I understood that even if the wealth, treasures, and territory hadn’t been looted, none of it would’ve belonged to me. Still, a nameless anger and dread surged through me, as if I were living through that era all over again.
Our teacher told us: “We study history so that shame may give rise to courage. Only by understanding the pain of the past can we strive to become strong. You must study hard—for the rise of China.” But back then, I couldn’t see anything so grand. All I knew was that after every history class, my chest felt tight, my head throbbed, and I was furious at the Qing court’s incompetence. Why had the Qing been so weak?
I couldn’t bear to open the modern history textbook, let alone memorise the details of wars, unequal treaties, or their so-called historical significance. My grades soon collapsed. When we had to choose between arts and sciences in high school, I made my decision by elimination—I picked science. And that was the end of my history classes.
I thought I had said goodbye to history for good. But history wouldn’t let me go. It hid on television, in the cinema, and deep in my memory—always ready to tap me on the shoulder when I least expected it.
Chinese television has an entire genre called “War of resistance dramas.” When I was a child, the national movie channel would repeatedly broadcast classics like Tunnel Warfare and Landmine Warfare. Even when I played war games with my cousins, we all wanted to be the Eighth Route Army—no one wanted to be a “Japanese devil” (a derogatory term for Japanese invaders). Most of these dramas were about fighting Japan. Only a rare few depicted resistance against Western powers. That’s largely because Chinese attitudes toward the West and Japan have never been the same.
Both were invaders, but the West came as a group. History textbooks often bundled them together under collective labels like “the Eight-Nation Alliance” or “Western imperialist powers,” turning them into a faceless mass. Faced with such a bloc, it was hard to focus on any one country or individual. Japan, though, was different. It came alone. And compared with the West, the crimes it committed in China were even more brutal, more appalling, more devoid of humanity.
I still remember how, in primary school, we were taken to the cinema once a year for something called “patriotic education.” We always watched an anti-Japanese film—sometimes a documentary made from historical footage, sometimes a dramatization based on real events.
What left the deepest mark on me was Japan’s notorious Unit 731, which conducted brutal human experiments on Chinese civilians in northeast China for twelve years. If evil ever took human form, it was them. They injected deadly viruses into living bodies and watched coldly as their victims died in agony. They shut civilians in overheated chambers and baked them alive, just to measure how much moisture the human body could lose before death. To study the nervous system, they amputated limbs and stitched them onto different parts of the body—without anesthesia. They exposed victims’ limbs to -40°C winds, froze them solid, then burned, scalded, or struck them, sometimes even peeling off the skin, while the victims lay helpless, watching it happen. In the end, they used this data, extracted from the suffering of living Chinese victims, to manufacture biological weapons and wage germ warfare. Over 200,000 people were killed.
As a child, I couldn’t understand—how could human beings treat others with such cruelty? All I wished for, in that moment, was to have a hand of God, so I could reach through the screen and stop it all.
Another wound no Chinese person can forget is the Nanjing Massacre. On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops captured Nanjing and massacred approximately 300,000 defenseless civilians in six weeks. It wasn’t hatred or military necessity. It was pathological entertainment. They herded people into crowds and mowed them down with machine guns—old people, children, women—none were spared. They tied victims to stakes and stabbed them with bayonets, calling it “bayonet training.” They cut open pregnant women, ripped out the babies, and smashed them on the ground. They broke into homes, raped daughters in front of their parents, then slaughtered entire families.
In truth, China and Japan have shared close ties since ancient times. As early as the Tang dynasty, when Japan was still weak, it sent large numbers of students and monks to China to comprehensively study Tang civilisation—from political institutions and legal systems to medicine, calligraphy, martial arts, tea culture, cuisine, and more. The Kyoto that tourists visit today is, in essence, a living echo of Tang-era Chang’an. And yet, the neighbour that once looked to China in awe would one day rise in strength, draw its sword, and become the cruelest oppressor of modern Chinese history.
One of our teachers once said in class: “Weakness is not a right. Once you’re too weak to resist, you will come face to face with the darkest side of human nature.”
Perhaps that is why Chinese feelings toward Japan remain so conflicted. On one hand, there is a natural sense of familiarity and even fondness. On the other, a deep resistance shaped by historical trauma. The wounds have never healed. And our history education keeps those memories alive. Anti-Japanese War dramas are filmed and replayed time and again, simply because the wounds run too deep and the past still hurts. So at the end of every story, we win—again and again—as if, by winning on screen, we could reclaim what we once lost.
Later, I went to university. I began working, earning money, travelling, falling in love. I read the books I liked and watched the films I was drawn to. Step by step, I built my own worldview and gradually learned to look at history more objectively—not letting the past trap the present, but facing both present and future with open eyes. Most of my generation have gone through a similar journey.
I’ve been to Japan. I love Japanese culture—I’m a devoted fan of Hayao Miyazaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami, and Hikaru Utada. I’ve also been to Nanjing, wandered around Xuanwu Lake, visited the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum and the former comfort women site, but I still couldn’t bring myself to step into the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. Even a glimpse of it in a childhood history textbook left me profoundly disturbed. I cannot imagine what it would feel like to walk inside and face the souls of three hundred thousand slaughtered people.
Last year, I spoke with my niece and nephew—both in primary school—and learned that their generation is no longer taken to the cinema for patriotic education. I felt relieved.
China has indeed grown stronger and more prosperous. It is no longer the impoverished, feeble nation once bullied by foreign powers. As it accelerates its integration into the global community, it has also become more open and inclusive. And yet, beneath this confident façade, the space for free expression has steadily shrunk in recent years. Films can no longer feature ghosts; politically sensitive topics are off-limits; sex scenes and queer characters in foreign films are cut; LGBTQ+ stories in domestic cinema and literature have all but vanished—as if they never existed at all.
As someone who loves literature and cinema, I crave good stories. And as a queer person, I especially long to see stories about people like us—stories from our own generation. But whether in books or on screen, it’s hard to find any trace of “us.” I have to climb the firewall just to watch Maurice, A Single Man, Call Me By Your Name—or dig up queer Chinese films from twenty or thirty years ago. Back then, China could still release works like Lan Yu and East Palace, West Palace, and even dared to make Farewell My Concubine—a film that touched not only on queerness but also on the Cultural Revolution, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Today, none of these stories could be told.
The narrowing of subject matter and the tightening of censorship have pushed Chinese culture into a kind of self-contained, self-soothing loop—a new kind of cultural closed-door policy. Chinese artists and writers can only cling to the glory of five thousand years of civilisation, while quietly envying the freedom and vitality of contemporary culture next door in Japan and South Korea. They have Parasite, Shoplifters, Monster, Han Kang…
And once again, I thought of the history classes. Without written records, I would never have known that in 496 BCE, Confucius began his sixteen-year journey across the states, searching for a society built on ritual, music, and moral virtue. I would never have known that in 742, Li Bai arrived in Chang’an, the centre of the world at the time, on his way to the summit of Chinese poetry. Or that in the Tang dynasty, where power belonged almost exclusively to men, there was a woman named Wu Zetian who seized the throne and presided over a golden era as glorious as any emperor’s. Do it—what if I succeed?
So I began to ask myself: what can I do? I can write. I know how to capture feeling in words, how to lay bare the human heart. I also have years of experience as a queer activist on the Chinese mainland. My mind is filled with real, moving stories—of queer lives as passionate as Call Me By Your Name, as enduring as A Single Man, as tender and radiant as Maurice.
If we don’t record them, our emotions go unrecognised. And without records, there are no LGBTQ people in our generation’s China.
And so, on 15 September 2024, a Chinese man named Yi, a Chinese gay man, boarded a flight to the United Kingdom, with confidence and pride. Like his ancestors before him, he set out to do what he believed was right, to walk his own path. This time, he was no longer a passive receiver of history. He came with stories—to speak for himself.
Yi Li is a writer, creative video director, and television director from China, currently pursuing a Master’s in Creative Writing in the UK. His work explores themes of identity, memory, and the experiences of sexual minorities, drawing on years of involvement with LGBTQ+ community work. He is committed to creating work that bridges cultures and sheds light on underrepresented lives.