He has endured 120-degree heat in the Mojave Desert, below-zero cold in northern Minnesota, and being hit by a car on a rural North Dakota highway.
Undaunted, Alex Lee is continuing on a cross-country bike trip, partly to raise awareness of pro-democracy struggles in Hong Kong, partly to test his own limits.
"Yesterday I made almost 73 miles from St. Cloud to Minneapolis," Lee said during a Saturday stop in the Twin Cities. "It was crazy windy. it was snowy sometimes. Some parts of the highways on the county roads are full of ice and snow so they were slippery, and it was hilly going up and down, up and down. I want to test myself — I want to know my real capacity."
Lee, 37 and a native of a small city in China near Beijing, is seeking asylum in the United States.
"I'm a symbol of the new generation of progressive Chinese students," said Lee, who has studied sociology.
Growing up, Lee loved his country and had no objections to the Communist Party, he said. But when he started spending time on social media, he found people who held different opinions, prompting him to research.
"From that point on, I knew quite a lot of the things in [China's] history textbooks are false," he said. "I was shocked. We learned quite a lot of fake things, fake history."
In 2016, he moved to Tokyo and enrolled in a university but left school in late 2019 to join pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, where he spoke publicly to crowds sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. Now he believes that if he returned to China he'd be imprisoned.
