Late last year, Duan*, a university student in China, used a private network to bypass China’s largest internet surveillance system and download Discord social media.
In just one night, he entered a community where thousands of people with different opinions debated political issues and held mock elections. People can join the chat room to discuss ideas like democracy, anarchism and communism. “Besides, it’s hard for us to do real politics, so we have to do it on social media,” Yang Minghao, a popular vlogger, said in a YouTube video.
Duan’s interest in the group was piqued when he watched one of Yang’s videos online. Yang, who goes by the name MHYYYY, talks about Discord chats, which like YouTube is blocked in China, and said he “wants to see where the group goes, as far as possible without interference”.
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 apart, were summoned for questioning by the police.
Duan says he was detained for 24 hours and questioned about his relationship with Yang, his use of a VPN and comments he made on Discord. He was released without pay after 24 hours, but he – and other followers of Yang – are worried about the well-being of the vlogger, who has not posted on the Internet since the end of July.
The incident is just one sign of China’s growing, albeit secretive, surveillance regime Followers of the wrong accounts can get into trouble.
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China’s Ministry of Public Security and the National Security Bureau handling Duan’s case could not be reached for comment, but he and his fellow Internet thinkers resented one of the founding principles of the Chinese Internet: don’t create a group, especially not. one about politics, even in private.
Punishment for comments made online is common in China, where the Internet is tightly controlled. As well as the digital firewall that blocks most internet users from accessing external sites such as Google, Facebook and WhatsApp, people who publish news that is considered critical or critical of the government are often banned from the site, or worse.
Last year, a man named Ning Bin was sentenced to more than two years in prison for posting “inappropriate words” and “falsification” on X and Pincong, a Chinese-language forum.
Even patriots are not protected. In recent weeks, government commentator Hu Xijin appears to have been banned from social media after commenting on Chinese politics that did not align with Beijing’s views.
Mr Duan said the call to the police was not unexpected. However, he says, the scale of the questions surprised him. “Complaining in public chats on external apps is not allowed”.
The web of online reviews is growing
In February, Li Ying, the owner of the popular Chinese account X, posted an “urgent notice” saying that her followers in China had been invited to “drink tea” by the police, a word for questioning. He urged people to unfollow him and make sure their X accounts don’t reveal their personal information.
Li, who lives in Italy, has an account called “Teacher Li is not your teacher”, which posts unedited stories about protests and repression in China, interests that would not be published in Chinese newspapers.
“The police started calling all the people who had registered Chinese phone numbers and asked them not to follow me,” Li said. People living overseas with relatives in China have been contacted by the police, Li said. He was forced to force an outsider to unfollow Li’s account.
Two other prominent Chinese bloggers, including Wang Zhi’an, a Chinese journalist living in Japan, reported that their followers were questioned by the police this year.
“Part of this has to do with the massive repression – the police have gone from harassing activists and people out there” working in plain sight to harassing those online because the scale of protests and dissent is now more 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 online disinformation”. Local authorities have been quick to take on the outfit: in July, Guangdong province said it had dealt with more than 1,000 cases of “online rumours” and “online trolls” this year.
William Farris, a lawyer who studies anti-government protests in China, said the campaign to clean up the internet is “an annual, or annual, event”. Such a campaign has been announced every year since 2013. He also said that in several judgments against people who were punished for their actions on the Internet, the authorities also considered what the people were following. In 2019, a man named Jiang Kun was sentenced to eight months in prison for posting on X, the court saying that he “follows some anti-China groups” on the platform.
However, Wang said the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between the authorities and those who think differently shows “the emerging situation that has crossed China’s borders. Although the authorities have been trying to eliminate these ‘international values’, they will continue to be in the middle of many people in China and in China.”
The Discord breach has been widely discussed on the Internet, in forums blocked by China’s firewall. On Reddit, one user wrote: “I sincerely hope that all those who lost contact can live a normal life again.” We will meet again in a place where there is no darkness!”
* Names have been changed.
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