Help us break the echo chamber – Guerrilla style
Imagine picking up a glossy travel magazine in your dentist’s waiting room or airport lounge—stunning landscapes, glossy paper, and an invitation to explore. But flip past the photos, and you’ll discover that these aren’t vacation packages at all. They’re forced “escorted holidays” imposed by the Chinese Communist Party on its most vocal critics, taken at sensitive moments to silence them.
The length to which the CCP is willing to go to silence critics is sometimes absurd, which explains why we lampoon it (with victims’ blessings) in our satirical China Travel Magazine: Dissident Edition. In fact, some police fight over who gets to take dissidents on these forced holidays, because they can use it as an excuse to go sightseeing, eat fancy food, and drink, which their meager pay can rarely otherwise cover.
Now for the good part – you can help us in our guerrilla campaign, to break the echo chamber, and get this into the hands of people who normally would not spend their time thinking about human rights, China, or reading long and heavy reports on the subject.
Traditional reports, of which SD has released many, don’t reach everyday readers. Few people have the patience or the time to sift through dry human-rights analyses. By disguising these human rights abuses in the familiar format of leisure reading, we aim to lure in unsuspecting audiences. Someone picks it up to kill time, admires a few shots of mountains or cityscapes— and only then realizes what they are actually reading.
Distribution is aimed to be as clever as the concept. Copies land in gyms, cafés, libraries, bookstores, pop-up markets, and yes, even clinic and dentists’ waiting rooms—venues where idle people reach for easy glossy distractions. Airport lounges and airplanes get their share, too, ensuring travelers will accidentally stumble upon it. Each copy is a Trojan horse, so to speak.
The surprising nature of it all likely also means people won't just experience it, but chances are they will mention it as "something funny happened" to friends, family, or coworkers.
This autumn, be part of spreading the message, and testing a new model for how to get human rights information out there, to everyday people, and not just among the experts, the activists, and those in our own echo chamber.
Drop a DM on twitter (@SafeguardDefend), BlueSky (@safeguarddefenders.bsky.social), or email us (all emails are Protonmail) with your location and some distribution ideas. We’ll send you a bundle of magazines—keep a few for yourself and a friend or two, and place the rest in public spaces, and help break the echo chamber.
If you prefer, you can also request a print-ready PDF complete with bleed marks—simply send it to any local print shop to produce your own high-quality edition.
Want to spread the word digitally? The complete China Travel Magazine - Dissident Edition is also available on our website as a PDF, but nothing beats a real, hard copy, magazine. But please do share the link, post the visuals, tweet it with #ChinaTravelMagazine.
