Late last year, Duan*, a college student in China, used a virtual private network to bypass China’s Great Firewall of Internet censorship and download the social media platform Discord.
Overnight, he entered a community where thousands of members with diverse opinions debated political ideas and organised mock elections. People could join the chat to discuss ideas such as democracy, anarchism and communism. “After all, it’s hard for us to do politics in reality, so we have to do it in a group chat,” Yang Minghao, a popular vlogger, said in a video on YouTube.
Duan’s interest in the community was piqued when he saw one of Yang’s videos online. Yang, who vlogs under the handle MHYYY, was talking about the chat on Discord, which like YouTube is blocked in China, and said he would “like to see where this group will go, as far as possible without intervention.”
The answer to Yang’s question came less than a year later. In July, Duan and several other members of the Discord group, in cities thousands of miles away, were summoned for questioning by police.
Duan says he was detained for 24 hours and questioned about his relationship with Yang, his use of a VPN and comments he had made on Discord. He was released without charge after 24 hours, but he – and other followers of Yang – remain concerned about the well-being of the vlogger, who has not posted online since late July.
The incident is just one sign of the increasing severity of China’s censorship regime, under which even private media Followers of unfavorable accounts can get into trouble.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen influencer followers challenged to this extent before,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch.
Neither China’s Ministry of Public Security nor the local public security bureau handling Duan’s case could be reached for comment, but he and his fellow online idealists violated one of the fundamental principles of the Internet in China: do not form a community, especially one related to politics, even in private.
In China, where the internet is strictly regulated, it is common to receive sanctions for comments posted online. In addition to a digital firewall that prevents most internet users from accessing foreign websites such as Google, Facebook and WhatsApp, people who post content on topics deemed sensitive or critical of the government often find themselves banned from the websites or worse.
Last year, a man called Ning Bin He was sentenced to more than two years in prison for posting “inappropriate comments” and “false information” on X and Pincong, a Chinese-language forum.
Even the most staunch nationalists are not immune. In recent weeks, influential pro-government commentator Hu Xijin, It seems that it has been banned from social media after making comments about China’s political path that did not align with Beijing’s vision.
Duan said the police call was not entirely unexpected. Still, he says, the intensity of the questioning took him by surprise. “It is not allowed to complain in a group chat about foreign software.”
The online surveillance network is expanding
In February, Li Ying, who runs a popular Chinese-language X account, aware An “urgent notice” said his followers in China were being called to “have tea” with the police – a euphemism for interrogation. He urged people to unfollow him and to be careful to ensure his X accounts did not reveal their personal information.
Li, who is based in Italy, runs an account called “Master Li is not your master,” where he posts an unfiltered stream of news about protests and repression in China that would never be published in China’s domestic media.
“The police started calling all the users who had registered with Chinese phone numbers and asked them to stop following me,” Li said. The police contacted the relatives in China of the people living abroad, Li said. They pressured them to convince the person abroad to stop following Li’s account.
Two other popular Chinese bloggers, including Wang Zhi’an, a Chinese journalist based in Japan, also said their followers were questioned by police this year.
“Part of this has to do with deepening repression: police have moved from harassing activists and people ‘out there’ active in physical spaces to harassing those who are online because much of the activism and dissent is now more deeply hidden,” says Wang.
In December, Li Tong, an official at the Ministry of Public Security’s cybersecurity bureau, said the government had designated 2024 as “the year of a special campaign to combat and rectify online rumors.” Local authorities have taken up this task with enthusiasm: in July, Guangdong province saying which had addressed more than 1,000 cases of “online rumours” and “online trolls” this year.
William Farris, a lawyer who studies state prosecutions for free speech in China, said internet cleanup campaigns are “an annual or semiannual tradition.” Similar campaigns have been announced every year since at least 2013. He noted that in several rulings against people who had been punished for their online activity, authorities also paid attention to who the people followed. In 2019, a man named Jiang Kun was sentenced to eight months in jail for posts on X, with the court noting that he “followed certain anti-China forces” on the platform.
However, Wang said the cat-and-mouse game that is playing out between the authorities and those who think differently indicates “an emerging set of shared values that transcend China’s borders. Even though the authorities have always tried to eradicate these ‘universal values,’ they have persisted among significant sections of the population in China and other countries.”
The crackdown on Discord has been widely discussed online, on forums blocked by China’s firewall. On Reddit, one user wrote: “I sincerely hope that all those who have lost contact can come back to life safe and sound. We will meet again in a place where there is no darkness!”
*Names have been changed.