Ku’er Guerrilla: Policing Chinese Higher Education, Queer Youth Community-Building as Resistance

This study interrogates forms of resistance forged by queer youth communities that have spontaneously emerged across Chinese universities amid intensifying state repression. Grounded in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, we chronicle the ten-year evolution of a pseudonymous community, RainbowsArc, which remains unregistered and deliberately operates guerrilla-style outside conventional NGO structures. We emphasize the microdynamics of how spontaneity and decentralization function as everyday tactics of survival and subversion, distinguishing these grassroots student groups from conventional NGOs. In the face of heightened policing and censorship in the 2020s, the community’s adaptive and transformative actions illustrate a resilient defiance against authoritarian control. We conceptualize loose solidarity as the assemblage of commitments — captured in the ethos of “generating electricity with love” — that binds this community together. This loose, yet resilient and transformative solidarity resists the commercialized and hierarchical logic of conventional queer NGOs, fostering an alternative mode of organizing. By highlighting resistance as both a theoretical lens and a practical necessity, our research suggests that this alternative ku’er solidarity offers a framework for reimagining queer activism, community-building, and social movement mobilization beyond the confines of neoliberal and authoritarian governance.