BEIJING – “It was a girl, alone, who started the protest inside the campus yesterday morning. She stood in front of the entrance to the canteen with a blank sheet in her hand, completely silent. Little by little more and more people joined . Everyone started to imitate her and raise their blank sheets. They were there for about three hours. They did it in solidarity with the ten killed in the Urumqi fire and also because they locked us inside the university again,” she says. Sabrina (the name is fictitious) an Italian student who has recently arrived at Tsinghua di Beijingone of the most prestigious universities in all of China, where around three hundred kids yesterday demonstrated against the eternal lockdown.
What is the atmosphere like inside the university?
“The gates are closed, so from today even the professors will not be able to enter and we will do the lessons online. We can neither enter nor leave the campus. However, we are still quite free inside: unless they confine us to our rooms. We students In any case, internationals have a slightly better advantage than the Chinese: we have single or double rooms with en-suite bathrooms, while they stay in rooms for four and without an internal bathroom”.
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What do the Chinese kids you meet on campus tell you?
“Covid and the restrictions don’t allow us much to socialize with local students. We live in different buildings, we attend different classes. Those I’ve met tell me they’re fed up. For me, coming from abroad, the lockdown is like a news, in Italy by now we have forgotten it. For them, however, it is something that is repeated continuously, without end. At the same time they are frightened. After the protests, many young people have made a special request to be able to go home, to Beijing and in their other hometowns. They leave campus because they don’t feel safe.”
Why did you decide to come and have this experience in China?
“I’m enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano and I came here with two other colleagues of mine to do my last year of master’s with a double degree program in Industrial Engineering. It fascinated me as a destination because it leads you to discover a very different culture. And then It’s a great opportunity because this is one of the best universities in the world.”
What experience is it?
“Totally different from how we are used to experiencing university in Italy, where you go to class and then go home and go out with friends. Here it is a life apart, you are completely estranged from what is outside. We live well in here but with the Covid situation it is not what we expected as we are confined.There are things which of course continue to seem exaggerated to us: if the cleaning lady entered my room a week ago it is absurd that seven days later the campus locks me up for another week in my room for suspected contagion”.