Peng Lifa is the man on the bridge. A 48-year old scientist from Heilongjiang province, his hometown, Tailai is near the border of Inner Mongolia. He lived in Xicheng district in Beijing and worked at a computer services company.
His singular act of defiance led to his arrest but he has awakened people around the world to the dangers of dictatorship, personality cult and one party rule.
Dressed as a worker, he hung two protest banners from Sitong Bridge in Beijing's university district. He created a smoky fire to bring attention to his protest. He had a tape recorder playing protest slogans as well.
Numerous motorists caught the sight on camera, but were quickly warned not to share anything on the topic at risk of being banned from social media or worse. Even saying "I saw it" was an actionable offense.
Yet someone posted close-up footage from the top of the bridge itself.
Taken from inside a police car, the video below is believed to be among the last messages sent from Peng Lifa's phone, after he was detained but before his phone was confiscated.
The observer, presumably Peng, was inside the police car early enough to observe motorcycles and police vans arrive while the fire was still burning.
The footage appears to be taken from the back seat of the police car. It seems in the initial confusion, the person filming it is left undisturbed. The banners have not been torn down yet. They were secured to the bridge with sandbags to hold them in place.
Near the end of the video, the person filming the scene made an attempt to get out of the car.
The video abruptly ends.
Seen from another angle, a man in a reflective jacket and wearing a hard hat is seen being led away by police.
Clearly anticipating such a fate, the lone protester left numerous messages online in various social media accounts, including the virtual research community known as research.gate.net
He called for a general strike to oppose the Xi dictatorship.
The protest was an immediate social media event and news of its swept across limited channels in China and then more widely around the world.
His famous banner, done to the tune of "say no to this, yes to that" is translated on the Twitter post below.
Other angles on the event include cars traveling parallel to Sitong Bridge on the ground crossing of Third Ring Road near Friendship Hotel and from a tall office building overlooking the intersection.
In the lower right hand corner, a man can be seen being "escorted" into the white police vehicle.
At least ten policemen are now on the scene.
Within hours posters in sympathy and solidarity with the bridge man went up on walls around the world.
Peng's Tiktok and social media accounts in China were instantly closed down and even his US based Twitter account was mysteriously edited, stripped of all political content, perhaps by the police who had him in detention
He posted cat pictures and spring blossoms among other things; these too were taken down.
This rare photo of him with his family on vacation was on one of his Twitter accounts.
Both Twitter accounts were new and had only a handful of posts. One was named in reference to his passion for physics.
But that didn't stop him from mixing science and politics.
There has been no news of Peng since the day he was arrested, though one timed tweet was released after his arrest. It was an excerpt of Sun Yatsen's farewell speech, which is well known in China and Taiwan.
His tweets and Tiktok posts show his deep displeasure with the severe lockdown measures and draconian "Zero-Covid" policy of the CCP under Xi.
Almost immediately, sympathizers responded with poetry, words of praise and song.
Eason Chan's rousing anthem "You are the Hero" (guyongzhe) was cited as a song appropriate to the moment.
Peng's words were repeated around the world, from bathroom stalls and back alley walls in China to open displays on cars and bridges and college campuses outside China.
In a manner as silly as it was predictable, all bridges were viewed with suspicion and many police posted.
Campus copy machines came with warnings not to reproduce "seditious" materials
Virtual versions of Peng's banners have unfurled around the world.
His message, rendered in various formats in far-flung places, range from a trilingual signboard on a campus in Japan to America's Route 66!
"Say no to dictatorship, say yes to freedom and democracy!"
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