Late last year, Duan*, a Chinese university student, used a virtual private network to hop around China's Great Firewall of internet censorship and download the social media platform Discord.
Overnight, he joined a community where thousands of members with diverse views discussed political ideologies and held mock elections. People could join the chat to discuss ideologies such as democracy, anarchism and communism. “After all, it's hard to do politics in real life, so we have no choice but to do it in group chats,” popular blogger Yang Minghao said in a YouTube video.
Duan became interested in the community after watching Yang's videos online. Yang, who runs a video blog under the nickname MHYYY, talked about their Discord chats, which, like YouTube, are blocked in China, and said he wanted to “see where this group goes with as little interference as possible.”
Yang's question was answered less than a year later, when in July Duan and several other members of the Discord group were summoned and questioned by police in a city thousands of miles away.
Duan was reportedly held for 24 hours and questioned about his relationship with Yang, his use of a VPN, and his Discord comments. He was released without charge after 24 hours, but Duan and other followers of Yang remain concerned about the well-being of the blogger, who hasn't posted online since late July.
The case is just one example of China's increasingly stringent censorship regime, under which private Following undesirable accounts can get you into trouble.
“I don't think we've ever seen an influencer's followers interrogated to this extent before,” said Maya Wang, deputy China director at Human Rights Watch.
China's Ministry of Public Security and the local public security bureau handling Duan's case could not be reached for comment, but Duan and his fellow online idealists are violating one of the cardinal principles of China's internet: not to form communities, even private ones, especially those related to politics.
Punishment for online comments is common in China, where the internet is tightly regulated. Not only is there a digital firewall that blocks most internet users from accessing foreign websites like Google, Facebook and WhatsApp, but people who post content on topics deemed sensitive or critical of the government often find themselves banned from websites or worse.
Last year, a man Ninh Binh He was sentenced to more than two years in prison for posting “inappropriate remarks” and “false information” on the Chinese forums “X” and “Ping Chong.”
Even ardent nationalists are not exempt. In recent weeks, influential pro-government commentator Hu Xijin said: Seems like it's forbidden He was removed from social media after making comments that were not in line with Beijing's views on China's political direction.
Duan said the call from police wasn't unexpected, but he was surprised by the intensity of the interrogation: “It's not acceptable to complain in a group chat on overseas software.”
The web of online surveillance is widening
In February, Li Ying, who runs the popular Chinese-language X account, Posts In the “urgent notice,” he wrote that his Chinese followers had been summoned by the police to “drink tea,” a euphemism for interrogation. He urged his followers to unfollow him and to be careful not to leak personal information on his X account.
Li, who is based in Italy, runs an account called “Mr. Li is Not Your Teacher” where he posts a steady stream of first-hand news about the protests and crackdowns in China that are never reported by domestic media.
“The police started calling all users who registered with Chinese mobile phone numbers and asking them to unfollow me,” Li said. People living overseas were told by police to contact their relatives in China, Li said, who were pressured to convince them to unfollow Li's account.
Two other popular Chinese bloggers, including Japan-based Chinese journalist Wang Zhi'an, also said their followers had been questioned by police this year.
“This has to do with an escalation in repression. Police have moved from harassing activists and people in physical spaces to harassing people online, because a lot of the activism and dissent is now much more hidden,” Wang said.
In December, Li Tong, an official at the Ministry of Public Security's Cybersecurity Bureau, said the government had designated 2024 as a “year of special campaigns to combat and rectify online rumors.” Local authorities have taken up the task enthusiastically, with Guangdong province announcing a special campaign in July. said The company said it had dealt with more than 1,000 cases of “online rumors” and “online trolling” this year.
William Faris, a lawyer who studies state prosecution of speech in China, said internet clean-up campaigns are an “annual or biannual tradition.” Similar campaigns have been announced annually dating back to at least 2013. He noted that in some sentencings of people punished for their online activism, authorities have also looked at who people follow. In 2019, a man named Jiang Kun was sentenced to eight months in prison for posting on X, with the court finding he “followed certain anti-China forces” on the platform.
Still, Wang said the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between the authorities and those with different views “shows the emergence of common values across China's borders. Although the authorities have always tried to eradicate these 'universal values' they still persist among a significant part of China and people of Chinese origin.”
The Discord crackdown has been widely discussed in online forums that are blocked by China's firewall, with one Reddit user writing: “I sincerely hope that all those who were lost find their way back safely. See you in a place without darkness!”
*Name has been changed.
