As the first young person in China to engage in Greta Thunberg-inspired Fridays for Future climate strikes, Howey Ou says she has become a target for the authorities who see that activism as a challenge to their control.
The 17-year-old claims she has been told to ditch her climate activism as a condition for her restarting studies at Guangxi Normal University affiliated high school in Guilin, where she studied until late 2018.
It is not necessarily her concerns for the climate that have sparked a pressure campaign from authorities, Kecheng Fang, an assistant professor at the school of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the Guardian. He said: ‘Most importantly, because it is about collective action … No matter what kind of collective action it is, it’s considered highly sensitive’