Why I Don’t Use Chinese Social Media Anymore…

Note: This post is an English adaptation of my original Chinese article. Some parts have been modified for clarity, cultural relevance, or to better fit the English-speaking audience. The original Chinese text is provided on the next page (2nd page) of this post for reference and comparison.

Preface: Due to identity-related reasons, I will not discuss details related to politically sensitive topics extensively.

First off, I want to say that I love China and the culture and people there, as it is where I grew up. However, I am not particularly fond of China’s political environment in certain aspects, especially the excessive control over the internet.

I remember during my junior high school years (around the second or third year (grade 7 or 8), which would be 2017 or 2018), in our ideology and morality class, our textbook (Shanghai Education Edition) mentioned that China is a democratic country and that the Chinese people have the human right to freedom of speech. But we know that’s not entirely the case.

Suppose you express some sensitive truths about China online or present views that diverge from the official Chinese narrative. In that case, if your comments do not receive much dissemination, the online punishments you might face, ordered from least to most severe, include:

• Your comments being systematically deleted, or your comments being “swallowed” (meaning it looks like your comments were posted, but in reality, only you can see them, indicating that your comments have been secretly hidden by the system).

• Apart from comments being deleted or hidden, your account may also be temporarily muted by the system. If the comments you post are more direct or radical, your account might even be permanently banned. Also, since China enforces a real-name system on the internet, once you’re punished online for such sensitive comments, your name will be marked on a system list. This will lead to your account being “specially monitored” on all other Chinese platforms in the future.

However, once the comments you post online gain a certain level of dissemination (whether intentionally or not), there’s a high probability that you will be summoned to the police station or the public security bureau for questioning (commonly referred to as “being invited for tea,” and this invitation is compulsory). Additionally, the charges against you could be baseless, such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (since this charge is vaguely defined, it’s also known as the “universal charge” or “pocket crime”) or “defamation” (even though you were just stating objective facts), and so on.

Nevertheless, the Chinese government cannot regulate the internet beyond China’s borders. Therefore, they have launched two types of countermeasures:

• Full control over the internet information accessible by Chinese citizens within the country includes:
  
  • Setting up the “Great Firewall” (officially called the “Golden Shield Project“), which aims to thoroughly filter out information considered sensitive by the Chinese authorities from the domestic internet, thereby controlling all online content visible to Chinese netizens (I guess the “wall” uses a blacklist mechanism because when I first purchased my website domain, I had friends in China test it, and they could access it directly from within the country). This leads to a significant portion of Chinese netizens being isolated from the outside internet world, potentially causing some level of cognitive bias. What concerns me most is that due to the existence of the “Great Firewall,” we are unable to efficiently learn or keep up with the technological era, such as Chinese scholars being unable to access foreign forums or academic documents normally (there was a funny official mishap recently, haha, click here), and the recent ChatGPT cannot be used in China at all, etc. (March 10, 2024: Update, a while ago I even set up a VPN with a Raspberry Pi for my family back in China so they could use ChatGPT normally, since around December 2023, all ChatGPT access node IPs used by our ClashX VPN were blocked by OpenAI. Click here to check).

• Forcefully preventing the publication of information sensitive to the Chinese authorities on the internet outside China includes:
  
  • In 2015, Chinese authorities employed DDoS attacks (which were not traditional DDoS attacks but utilized Man-on-the-Side Attacks, different from MITM Attacks). In simple terms, Baidu, the largest search engine in China at the time, was injected with malicious JS code, turning all normal internet requests sent by Chinese netizens at that time into targeted malicious traffic access, unwittingly turning them into temporary “puppet machines” for the Chinese side. Some technical details can be viewed here. This was aimed at overseas websites containing sensitive information about China, such as Github (the non-traditional DDoS attack caused the Github website to be paralyzed temporarily) because it hosted repositories containing sensitive information regarding China. Although this attack was not officially acknowledged by the Chinese authorities, the analysis and the bulk of the technical evidence suggest Chinese official involvement. The intent of this attack by Chinese authorities was to deter such websites and consequently force them to remove content sensitive to China.
    
  • Using human flesh search to locate the individual origin of the information and coercing them to stop the spread through various means of force.

Now let’s return to the main topic: Why I no longer use Chinese social media?

After experiencing the following incident, I realized how important the basic human right to freedom of speech is.

Starting from March 2022, due to the lockdown in Shanghai caused by the pandemic, residents were required to quarantine at home. Actually, for me, a typical homebody, this didn’t seem to have much impact…since I generally don’t like going out unless necessary, such as only going out for school or family dinners, so usually, the virtual world created by electronic devices (phones, computers, game consoles, etc.) is my main activity area.

In fact, at the beginning of the home quarantine policy, I even felt quite happy because, firstly, all schools in Shanghai (including my high school) shifted from offline to online education, so I didn’t need to go to school, haha. At the same time, I could spend all day in front of my computer at home, with my family around, without worrying about food and drink, which felt really great!

However, the drawbacks of this policy gradually became apparent.

(March 10, 2024: Update, actually, I originally wrote a lot about this, but considering my identity-related reasons, I decided to delete them. If you’re curious, you can search online with the keyword: Shanghai quarantine)

Therefore, in the early morning of May 1, 2022, I posted a singing video in my WeChat Moments (below). I didn’t make it very clear but subtly expressed my complaints through singing. However, not long after, I learned that a few of my WeChat friends had been permanently banned, seemingly for political reasons. At the same time, friends advised me that posting such Moments could be risky and suggested I delete them. Then, about 6 hours after posting, I deleted the video from my Moments. But later, I couldn’t escape the “big gift” – I received a 24-hour ban from WeChat.

(March 10, 2024: Update, I just re-uploaded the video on YouTube because I realized that the Bilibili video I initially embedded here was forcibly taken down on Bilibili…)

After that, I no longer wanted to use any Chinese social media, such as WeChat, Zhihu, Bilibili, etc.

However, since my family and friends, for various reasons, cannot completely detach themselves from these Chinese social media platforms, I also cannot fully separate myself from these Chinese apps.

But my main battlefield has completely shifted.

Well, that’s it.

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