Fang Lian Talks: The History of China's Internet Bans! How Did Chinese People Step by Step Lose Freedom of Speech? What Chinese People Lost Is Not Just Freedom, But Also the Self-Correction Mechanism!
This episode reviews the history of the Chinese internet from its first connection in 1987 to the establishment of the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield Project, tracing the escalation process of successive speech controls and internet blockages, analyzing how the tightening of the speech space caused society to lose its self-correction mechanism, and discussing the long-term impact of this phenomenon on public crises and economic policies.
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On the night of September 14, 1987, inside Courtyard No. 10 at Chedaogou, Beijing, at an organization called the China Ordnance Industry Computer Application Technology Institute, a dozen Chinese and Germans gathered around a Siemens 7760 mainframe. On this machine, China connected to the internet for the very first time.
And what was done right after the connection? An email was written. The content of this email was not long—just one paragraph in English. Translated into Chinese, the general meaning was: Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner of the world.
Of course, the irony is that the internet Great Firewall that subsequently hindered China from connecting to the world has the English name Great Firewall.
In the end, the Chinese people still failed to cross that wall. Hello everyone, I am Toronto Fang Lian, who has already been sentenced to cyber death. Today, let's talk about the past and present of Chinese internet blocking.
Although we have always criticized the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a dictatorship, the CCP is indeed among the smartest of all dictatorships.
The CCP is extremely diligent and frequent in monitoring the internet and various emerging technologies.
As early as February 1, 1996, less than 10 years after the Chinese internet was first connected to the world, the then Premier Li Peng signed a regulation called the "Interim Provisions Governing Computer Information Networks International Networking." This regulation explicitly stipulated that if China wanted to connect to the international internet, it had to use official channels of the CCP.
The department managing it at the time was the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, which has now disappeared. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications only opened a total of 4 portals for China, which were the Ministry itself, the State Education Commission, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Ministry of Electronics Industry.
Don't think this is nothing; this regulation is actually the cornerstone of the Great Firewall of the Chinese internet.
I previously discussed a concept in the VPN episode: the reason why the CCP's Great Firewall could be built and why Starlink could never enter China is because the channels connecting China's internet to the outside are very few—currently only three, which are China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile.
This concept is equivalent to viewing China as a residential compound. The entire compound actually has only three exits, and the internet Great Firewall is essentially security guards standing at these three exits, monitoring the background of people entering and leaving at all times.
However, in the United States, there are nearly 3,000 compound exits, and every American even has the right to open a front door in this American compound.
If the number of exits in the Chinese compound were in the thousands like the United States, the difficulty of internet censorship would be drastically increased at the technical level.
However, when Li Peng instituted this regulation at the beginning, he probably didn't have such long-term vision, and his perspective wasn't that grand. Doing this was probably not to build some internet Great Firewall, but rather to treat connecting with the world as a privilege—a state-monopolized privilege, a privilege enjoyed only by high-ranking CCP officials and intellectual cadres.
However, with the rapid development of the internet, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) soon realized that something was amiss.
By 1997, the number of internet users in China far exceeded the CCP's expectations. According to official Chinese statistics at the time, the number of internet users nationwide reached 620,000, and the number of computers directly connected to the internet reached 300,000. For a time, the entire internet had become a lawless zone.
Well, the CCP looked at this and thought it was unacceptable; could this be tolerated? On December 11, 1997, the "Measures for the Security Protection of Computer Information Networks Connected to the International Internet" were promulgated. In these measures, nine prohibitions were mainly mentioned. These nine prohibitions roughly stated that you were not allowed to engage in pornography, and you were not allowed to criticize the CCP.
However, because the number of people accessing the internet across China was not large at the time, after the nine prohibitions came out, no one cared.
Of course, theoretically speaking, for Chinese people without voting rights, caring about it was of no damn use either.
As for the first person arrested because of the nine prohibitions, it happened in 1998. By that time, quite a few people from the 1989 Democracy Movement had already fled overseas. Among them, a person named Li Hongkuan published a publication called *Reference News* (《大参考》). This *Reference News*, of course, was an anti-communist digital periodical. In order to spread it better during that emerging internet era, *Reference News* would regularly send emails to mailboxes in mainland China, sending out its periodical.
At this time, Lin Hai, a software engineer in Shanghai, provided about 30,000 email addresses of Chinese people he had collected to *Reference News* so that it could regularly distribute the magazine.
Because of this action, Lin Hai also became the first person in China to go to prison because of the internet, and he was ultimately sentenced to two years in prison.
Of course, also during this stage, there was another major event in China, which was the siege of Zhongnanhai by Falun Gong practitioners, as everyone knows.
When Falun Gong first emerged, because Deng Xiaoping was superstitious about qigong, Falun Gong was initially an honored guest of the CCP, which allowed it to accumulate a large number of domestic followers in the early days.
Later, during Jiang Zemin's era, Jiang Zemin, who did not believe in traditional Chinese medicine qigong, began to crack down hard on Falun Gong.
In order to resist Jiang Zemin's crackdown, under the direction of Li Hongzhi, the event of tens of thousands of people surrounding Zhongnanhai broke out in China. At this time, Li Hongzhi had already arrived in the United States. How did Li Hongzhi, living a happy life in the United States every day, manage to organize tens of thousands of people to surround Zhongnanhai overnight in China? Naturally, it relied on the internet.
Although Falun Gong members might seem a bit out of touch with the times nowadays, back in that era, they were also trendsetters of the times. Falun Gong leaders everywhere used emails to network and connect with Li Hongzhi.
These two events had a huge impact on the CCP. The CCP instantly realized the power of the internet and its penetrating power, and the CCP began to think about how to further control the internet. How to obstruct the inflow of overseas information and use the internet to control the Chinese people became the primary task of the CCP at that time.
Meanwhile, two projects were launched: the Golden Shield Project and the Great Firewall.
Of course, these two projects are often confused by everyone, but if you look at their responsibilities, they are actually very clear and very easy to distinguish: one is internal, and the other is external.
The internal one is the Golden Shield Project. On September 22, 1998, the Ministry of Public Security launched a national public security informatization project, which is what later became known as the Golden Shield Project.
What is the significance of this project? Actually, it is not to prevent Chinese people from accessing foreign websites, but to collect information on Chinese people. A single ID card contains all information; you can check your household registration, educational background, residential address, and even hotel check-in records.
For Chinese people today, these things are taken for granted, but if you have been abroad, you will find that this situation is not common worldwide; in fact, only China can achieve this.
Why did such a situation appear in China? It is entirely thanks to this Golden Shield Project, the purpose of which is to connect the information of Chinese people online.
When most people had barely played with computers in 1998, the CCP was already thinking about how to rely on the internet to suppress and control the Chinese people.
Even the subsequent Skynet system and facial recognition system were actually derived from the Golden Shield Project.
Of course, the pros and cons of this setup are also very obvious. The advantage is that the Golden Shield Project makes it much easier for Chinese police to arrest people, but the disadvantage is that now only China in the whole world can achieve one-click doxxing.
However, because the Golden Shield Project itself does not have much to do with freedom of speech, we will not go into detail about it in this episode. In this episode, we will focus on another important project, which is the internet Great Firewall.
As for the specific time it appeared, it is actually hard to say. As early as around September 1996, foreign media reported that the CCP blocked about 100 overseas websites all at once, including some overseas news websites and some anti-communist websites. This is the earliest blocking record that can be found, and these records even predate the regulations made by Li Peng.
However, the technology and goals at that time were far from what the Great Firewall is today. The true contemporary Great Firewall originated in June 1999. Under the leadership of Fang Binxing, a professor at Harbin Institute of Technology, an organization called the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Coordination Center was established. The sole purpose of this organization was to technically prevent Chinese people from accessing the foreign internet.
Fang Binxing was quite capable, and development proceeded quickly. By 2002, the technology had matured, and a set of DNS technologies that are still in use today had been born.
On August 29, 2002, Google in China was inexplicably blocked for two weeks. This was Fang Binxing's first large-scale test.
However, even though the test was successful in 2002, the CCP remained relatively restrained for a long time. During this period, the Great Firewall mainly targeted websites that the CCP considered extreme, and the methods were relatively mild; sites would be blocked and then unblocked, unlike later when a block meant a permanent ban.
But there has always been a principle in China, which I call the principle of power maximization. That is, within an authoritarian system, an official or a department has only one goal: to pursue the maximization of their own power. Because the expansion of a department's power equals the expansion of the official's own power, this leads to a situation where if a department or a person in China is granted power, it becomes very difficult to strip them of it. Moreover, this power will eventually expand more and more, far exceeding the original expectations.
The 'Dabai' (pandemic prevention workers) during the pandemic followed this logic. At first, they only exercised basic powers, but soon they became little emperors, eventually even locking residents in Urumqi inside their buildings and watching them burn to death.
The same is true for family planning. Once the number of bureaucrats enforcing family planning reached a certain level, these bureaucrats themselves became the obstacle to abolishing the policy.
This logic also appears repeatedly in the issue of internet control.
The first expansion of power here occurred in 2004, which is generally referred to as the first year of China's internet control. However, the trigger was an incident that occurred in 2003: the death of Sun Zhigang.
What happened? Sun Zhigang was a 27-year-old from Hubei who had been working as a designer at a clothing company in Guangzhou for less than two years after graduating from college.
On March 17, 2003, he went out to use the internet. Because he did not have his temporary residence permit with him, he was taken away by the police and sent to a detention center. That night, his two friends rushed to the police station, willing to help him obtain the permit and bail him out.
However, the duty captain blocked the two friends with the excuse that there was no need for verification.
Shortly after, on March 20, Sun Zhigang died unexpectedly in the detention center. When he died, his body was covered in injuries from being beaten.
Many friends today might find this unbelievable, but in that era when temporary residence permits existed, this was the norm. People without permits were concentrated by the CCP into detention centers similar to prisons. In places like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, several people died every month, but because most of those who died were migrant workers, it did not receive much attention.
Sun Zhigang, however, was a promising college graduate, which was the same identity as many netizens at the time. This incident directly ignited the internet, and the case spread rapidly with the help of the web.
Of course, to deal with this problem, on one hand, the State Council abolished the detention system, and on the other hand, the CCP began its first round of speech control.
For example, on September 13, 2004, the 'Yita Hutu' (One Big Mess) forum at Peking University was shut down. Yita Hutu was one of the largest campus forums in China at the time, with over 300,000 registered users and over 20,000 daily active users. Especially considering the liberal arts focus of Peking University, Yita Hutu became the largest political discussion platform in China at the time, filled with various anti-CCP remarks and very active discussions about the Sun Zhigang case.
After the Sun Zhigang case went viral, to prevent the discourse from further fermenting, the CCP shut down the forum, and in the same year, the '50-cent army' (wumao) began to officially appear.
In October 2004, the Publicity Department of the Changsha Municipal Committee established a team of internet commentators with a base salary of 600 yuan per month, plus subsidies based on the number of posts—50 cents per post. This is the origin of the term 'wumao'.
Of course, Changsha was not the only city to recruit wumao. For example, in my hometown of Suqian, in April 2005, they also publicly recruited 26 internet commentators. Now that I am a rebel overseas every day, it is also a form of atonement for my hometown of Suqian.
When many people are still arguing about whether internet commentators exist, or whether the 'water army' exists, they do not realize that the water army has actually existed for a very long time, even longer than many of the audience members have been alive.
These were originally just temporary measures to deal with the Sun Zhigang incident, but after the Sun Zhigang incident ended, they became permanent measures, and the principle of maximizing power began to play out.
However, at this stage, because the the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was under the administration of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, it generally still looked much more human than it does now.
Take the matter of circumventing the Great Firewall, for example. Starting in 2002, China had already mastered a certain capability to block overseas websites. However, the blocking situation back then was vastly different from what it is now. Unlike today, when VPNs are collectively blocked around the June Fourth and the Two Sessions, back then blocks on overseas platforms only occurred during specific event time nodes. For instance, around the June Fourth anniversary in 2009, the CCP blocked Google, YouTube, and Facebook. After IMDb listed a film about the Dalai Lama in 2010, the CCP also punitively blocked IMDb.
At that time, the CCP was more magnanimous than it is now, and China had some cooperation with these Western companies. For example, as early as 2002, Yahoo took the lead in cooperating with the CCP, signing the Self-Discipline Convention of the China Internet Industry and launching a special China-only version of Yahoo that deleted the cache function and some sensitive information.
For example, in December 2005, a large-scale police-civilian conflict broke out in Dongzhou Village, Shanwei, resulting in 14 deaths and 50 injuries. When searching for "Dongzhou" on yahoo.com, the foreign Yahoo, there were 370,000 results, and the top-ranking ones were reports about the police-civilian conflict and police opening fire. On Yahoo China, however, not a single mention of suppression appeared in the first three pages.
Google initially stood its ground and was unwilling to make cuts, but it later compromised. Around January 25, 2006, the special version google.cn was launched. This google.cn had certain filtering functions. Google's explanation at the time was that filtering search results clearly violated our mission, but completely failing to provide Google searches to one-fifth of the world's population violated it even more. At the time, the Chinese market was also Google's second-largest market after the United States.
Although these companies and the CCP had some friction later on due to freedom of speech issues, generally speaking, the CCP still acted like a reasonable human being.
For example, looking at the timeline of Google squaring off against the CCP, the earliest falling out between the two sides was in April 2009. If we click on google.cn now—a website that basically nobody visits anymore—we will find a link to google.com.hk hanging at the bottom. Young netizens might not know what this means, but older netizens, like myself back in the day, would first click google.cn and then get redirected to google.com.hk, because there was no censorship on the google.com.hk website.
In April 2009, the CCP officially requested that Google delete the link leading to google.com from the homepage of google.cn, but Google refused. Immediately afterward, on June 18, 2009, the Internet Society of China issued a notice strongly condemning Google for spreading obscene, pornographic, and vulgar information. Following that, CCTV's Xinwen Lianbao and Focus Interview took turns making programs to criticize Google, and Google was also subjected to periodic disconnections during this period.
However, this did not last long, and Google back then did not take the CCP's bullying lying down. By December 2009, Google launched its own counterattack. In mid-December 2009, Google reported a cyberattack originating from the CCP, stating that the attackers attempted to steal Google's internal information as well as the Gmail accounts of some dissidents. This operation was later known as Operation Aurora.
Faced with this accusation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs naturally came out and denied everything. Of course, to retaliate against Google, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs once again deployed its ultimate blocking magic. What was the result of this escalating war of words? Google directly announced its withdrawal from China.
Of course, faced with such a defiant Google, Xi Jinping would undoubtedly smash the other party's head to pieces nowadays. But back in the Hu-Wen era, the CCP still only temporarily blocked Google. Right up until the end of the Hu-Wen administration, Google was not completely blocked by the CCP, and a sliver of space was still left.
Therefore, although online surveillance had already emerged during the Hu-Wen era and the Jiang Zemin era, the overall intensity was not high. I previously chatted with some people from the China Democracy Party. Back in that era around 2010, they could even set up QQ groups to collectively oppose the CCP. When I was in college, I could also directly rant and curse at the Communist Party in my QQ Zone space without causing too much of a problem. At that time, there was also some
We often face a question now: is the overwhelming presence of Little Pinks the result of brainwashing, or is it a choice made by the Chinese people themselves? In fact, the answer is quite obvious. In that era of relative freedom, critical voices dominated the Chinese internet, and Little Pinks were like rats crossing the street, despised by everyone. Of course, in those days, these people were not called rebels, but public intellectuals. Freedom prevented the Chinese people from being generally brainwashed by the CCP.
Of course, this freedom did not last long. By the era of Xi Jinping, things were clearly different. In China under Xi Jinping, internet censorship entered the fast lane.
At first, Xi Jinping did not personally get involved in this; instead, he found someone named Lu Wei to execute it. This person was later known as the 'Internet Tsar.'
On August 10, 2013, less than a year after Xi Jinping took office, he had Lu Wei hold a meeting in Beijing called the 'Forum on the Social Responsibilities of Internet Celebrities.' The meeting invited many internet influencers and tech company bosses of the time, such as Xue Manzi, who had 12 million followers on Weibo, and Pan Shiyi, who had 15 million followers. At the meeting, Lu Wei proposed 'seven bottom lines.' Of course, aside from some polite rhetoric, the overall message was still about not opposing the CCP.
I don't know how the people at the meeting responded, but most likely, they thought this meeting was just a routine one, like those during the Hu-Wen era. Even if they agreed to everything at the meeting, they would still go their own way afterward.
However, Xi Jinping would show them that the times had changed. On the evening of August 23, 13 days after the meeting, one of the participants, Xue Manzi, was arrested in a residential compound in Anhui Beili, Chaoyang District, Beijing, on charges of prostitution.
Afterward, to humiliate him, Xue Manzi was forced to make a 10-minute televised confession.
Of course, the main point of Xue Manzi's confession was not the prostitution, but his online speech, claiming he had spread false information.
Coincidentally, during this same period, two mid-tier influencers—professional Weibo writers known as Qin Huohuo and Li Er Chai Si—were arrested. At the same time, well-known investor Wang Gongquan, who had 1.5 million followers, was arrested, as was the prominent journalist Chen Yongzhou.
Regardless of whether it was Xue Manzi or those smaller influencers, this wave of crackdowns targeted all the so-called liberal influencers, or the group then known as public intellectuals.
While Xue Manzi was caught on prostitution charges, when they arrested Qin Huohuo and Chen Yongzhou, they just found some random excuse.
Later, to achieve what Xi Jinping called 'governing according to law,' the supplementary laws soon followed.
Although the essential reason for arresting these people was their anti-CCP stance, the Constitution still protected freedom of speech, so it was inappropriate to arrest them just for saying a few anti-CCP words.
Thus, on September 9, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate jointly issued a new judicial interpretation titled 'Interpretation on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Defamation and Other Crimes Using Information Networks.'
The most important point of this interpretation was that if a piece of information is false and is clicked or viewed more than 5,000 times, or forwarded more than 500 times, it is considered 'serious' and can be prosecuted as defamation.
Even if the view count does not reach 5,000 or the forwarding count does not reach 500, as long as the information is deemed false, the CCP can characterize it as 'picking quarrels and provoking trouble.'
This was a case of arresting people first and legislating later—very dishonorable.
In fact, after this law was introduced, all CCTV reporters should have been the first to go to jail. However, in practice, this law basically became the internet version of the 'picking quarrels and provoking trouble' charge for internet influencers and netizens.
After this day, it became impossible for influencers to directly criticize the CCP in public. Most people could only resort to sarcastic, double-edged remarks.
After all, this is normal. Before 2013, if you said the wrong thing online and criticized the CCP, the worst result was that your post would be deleted or your account banned. But after 2013, the worst result could be that you yourself would disappear.
This day was actually a very important turning point for the Chinese internet. Regardless of how you view those public intellectuals from 15 years ago, whether you think they were right or wrong, they did play a significant role in supervising society and even providing help.
For example, half of Xue Manzi's early Weibo content was about receiving tips, exposing various social phenomena, and reporting on issues like corruption, forced demolition, and food safety.
According to Xue Manzi himself, before he was arrested for prostitution, he would wake up every day to over 1,000 private messages on Weibo, most of which were from people seeking justice and complaining about social injustice.
He would forward some of these, giving these people a chance to be exposed and helping them seek redress.
In essence, Xue Manzi's status on the Chinese internet back then was the same as Teacher Li's status on the overseas internet now.
The other half of Xue Manzi's content was mainly focused on three projects: launching an anti-trafficking campaign on Weibo, spending money to promote free lunches for schools in mountainous areas, and pushing for medical insurance for children in rural areas suffering from serious illnesses.
Although these policy-related comments were unfavorable to the CCP's rule and shook social recognition of the CCP, they were certainly positive for society.
However, after this day, all similar content and bloggers simply vanished.
Of course, after this day, a self-correction mechanism in China also began to disappear.
Subsequently, this kind of management became normalized, and on February 27, 2014, the CCP Central Committee Leading Group for Cyberspace Security and Informatization was announced to be established.
The establishment of this group actually marked the creation of our modern Cyberspace Administration of China.
Prior to this, although the Cyberspace Administration of China existed, it theoretically belonged to the management of the State Council, which means it was under the administration of Li Keqiang at that time.
Li Keqiang himself came from the Communist Youth League faction and didn't care much about speech control. However, after the establishment of the CCP Central Committee Leading Group for Cyberspace Security and Informatization personally led by Xi Jinping and its takeover of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the control over the Cyberspace Administration of China was seized by Xi Jinping.
Afterwards, it was controlled single-handedly by Lu Wei, which is why Lu Wei was called the internet tsar.
As the internet tsar, after taking over the Cyberspace Administration of China, Lu Wei quickly discovered a problem: relying on Cyberspace Administration of China civil servants to manually search online one by one to crack down on so-called illegal information was too inefficient. This could only target some major influencers (Big Vs), while the vast majority of ordinary people were still running wild as outlaws beyond the law.
To fundamentally solve this problem, Lu Wei started taking action against the platforms.
Among them, the first to suffer were naturally those disobedient foreign platforms. Google, which had managed to keep half its life during the Hu-Jintao era, had to say goodbye in my Xi Jinping era.
At the end of May 2014, all of Google's websites began to become inaccessible in China.
At that time, everyone thought it was just a temporary ban specifically for June Fourth, but no one expected that this ban would become permanent. Foreign websites also shifted from the past blacklist system to a de facto whitelist system. You could only access foreign websites permitted by the CCP. The distance between Chinese people and North Korea actually only lacked a VPN.
Of course, the CCP couldn't make foreign Google kneel, but these domestic websites were much easier to handle.
Usually, when we curse the Communist Party within the Great Firewall or make sarcastic remarks about the social status quo and get banned, who do people blame? Their first reaction might not be to blame the Communist Party, but instead the platforms, such as blaming Bilibili or Douyin, blaming their content moderators for acting inhumanely, or blaming them for being so strict with moderation.
People's actions in this regard are actually understandable; after all, it is the platform that directly bans us.
However, if you really calculate it, this actually cannot be blamed on the platforms at all. Do you think platforms want moderation to be this strict? Platforms don't want it at all.
There are two reasons for this. First, platform operators are mostly purely commercial companies without any political leanings of their own. Whether you oppose the CCP or support the CCP doesn't actually have much to do with them, so most companies actually don't care about such content. They only care about traffic, and whether it's pornography or politics, such content actually belongs to high-traffic content. Wouldn't cutting off this content be like breaking their own arms? For platforms like Zhihu, to a certain extent, they probably wish there were a few more sarcastic, anti-regime remarks within their site just to attract this batch of users.
The second reason is that back in 2012, in an internet wave where AI had not yet emerged, moderation was actually an extremely costly endeavor.
When I used to work in China, I also drifted through several internet companies, and the number of moderation personnel in each internet company was shockingly high.
For example, Douyin (or Douyu) where I used to work had a total employee count of only 2,000 at its peak. But when you clicked on Enterprise QQ, the number of people in the moderation department alone exceeded 1,000, accounting for half of the total number.
Although the moderation salaries in most companies are not high, spending half of human resources on moderation is obviously a huge waste for the company. Spending money just to reduce my own traffic? For those profit above everything merchants, wouldn't that be equivalent to killing their own mothers?
So how did the Communist Party force these enterprises to submit?
In November 2016, a regulation called the Cybersecurity Law was passed, and it was subsequently implemented in June 2017. At the same time, several other rules and regulations were passed successively.
Summarizing these legal provisions, there is only one core: guilt by association (lianzuo).
Previously, if someone opposed the CCP or engaged in pornography on a platform, as long as you didn't deliberately build an anti-CCP or pornographic platform like KuaiBo, the platform bore no responsibility. However, after the introduction of these new legal regulations, if anti-CCP or pornographic content appeared on your platform, it wouldn't just be the poster who had a problem; the platform would also be held responsible. Moreover, according to the legal interpretation at the time, if you created a chat group and someone in the group opposed the CCP, the group owner would even be penalized.
Of course, a law is just a law, and how strictly a law is enforced actually determines its power. Therefore, after the introduction of these laws and regulations, the CCP also needed to kill a chicken to scare the monkeys (make an example of someone). So who was the first chicken? That was Zhang Yiming.
In the early morning of April 11, 2018, Zhang Yiming, the founder of Toutiao, published an open letter. The reason was that on the previous day, April 10, Neihanduanzi, the largest app under ByteDance at the time, was ordered to be permanently shut down. The direct reason for the shutdown was non-compliant content management. An app with 200 million registered users and 20 million daily active users was instantly obliterated by the CCP, making it the first major internet company to be sacrificed as a warning to others.
Faced with this situation, what could entrepreneurs in China do? They could only kneel.
Zhang Yiming was forced to write in his apology letter that his product had taken the wrong path, contained content inconsistent with socialist core values, and failed to properly implement public opinion guidance.
Afterward, other enterprises also began to follow suit on a large scale, drastically increasing the number of content moderators. This is why a situation emerged within the Great Firewall where posting a single comment could result in a swarm of censors hunting you down.
Of course, to interject here, current control over the internet is no longer limited to the platform level. In the recent Cyberspace Administration of China Order No. 23, MCN companies have even been placed on the same level as platforms. If a streamer under an MCN causes a problem, the entire MCN could be held collectively responsible and banned. Soon, MCNs will likely have to worry about their own moderation and closely monitor their streamers.
Returning to Zhang Yiming's story, fortunately in 2018 China's economy was still in its golden phase. After Neihanduanzi went under, Zhang Yiming still managed to create Douyin (Douyin); otherwise, this app with the greatest global influence from China might have vanished from the long river of history due to a single speech control policy.
In fact, labor issues in China have been causing a huge uproar recently, and many people claim it is a problem of capital. However, if the Communist Party had even one-ten-thousandth of the care for labor issues that it has for internet speech control, China's labor issues would have been resolved long ago.
Of course, amidst the entire internet censorship wave, there was also a rather comical episode. In 2017, Lu Wei, the once-all-powerful internet tsar, fell from grace due to corruption. Later in 2019, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison—longer than many of the internet VIPs he had personally had arrested—which could be considered karmic justice for an evil person.
Yet, although Lu Wei left, the system he left behind did not change. Subsequently, upholding the principle of maximizing power and under pressure from the Cyberspace Administration of China, internet company moderation began to grow increasingly strict, and even increasingly absurd.
Just how absurd? As when I used to work at Douyu, with over 1,000 censors hanging around, it was actually very difficult for any truly non-compliant content to exist anymore; any violating content was dealt with immediately. However, the Cyberspace Administration of China was unhappy, feeling that its power could not be fully exercised. Therefore, a regular tribute mechanism emerged within the platforms.
What does this mean? Every year, the Cyberspace Administration of China conducts a Qinglang special campaign, which is equivalent to a periodic internet sweep against pornography and illegal content. But the problem is, under such high-intensity management, wasn't there already hardly any pornography or illegal content left? To satisfy the performance metrics of the Cyberspace Administration of China personnel and make it easy for them to report results, platforms had no choice but to randomly pick a few unlucky bloggers—those who crossed the line slightly or liked to swear—treat them as typical examples, and report them. Moreover, the scale of these reported streamers was not small; if they were too small, the Cyberspace Administration of China would feel unhappy, thinking you were toying with them and not taking them seriously. I previously calculated that these lists could generate at least 100 million yuan in turnover for Douyu annually. This was practically an act of corporate suicide, just playing along with the Cyberspace Administration of China.
Aside from Douyu, as far as I know, places like Bilibili and Douyin had similar situations; they all had to pay regular tributes.
Of course, later my former employer Douyu also went under, and the boss went to prison. By 2024, the number of moderation staff had been cut down to just 500, so if you go on Douyu now, you might actually find that speech control is a bit looser.
By this point, China effectively no longer had just an external wall, but an internal wall as well. This internal wall was even stricter and more effective than the external wall, and the internet speech control mechanism as we understand it today was thus formed.
Naturally, under this ultimate speech control, a major disaster arrived—the COVID-19 pandemic that broke out at the end of 2019.
At 5:43 PM on December 30, 2019, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, sent a message in a WeChat group named Wuhan University Clinical Class of 2004. The message stated that 7 cases of SARS had been confirmed at the South China Seafood Wholesale Market.
After a while, he added another sentence saying that coronavirus infection had been confirmed, viral typing was underway, and he urged everyone not to spread the news and to tell their families to take precautions.
Li Wenliang had not even posted this information on a public platform; he only posted it in a private WeChat group. However, very soon, by January 1, 2020, the Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued an announcement stating that 8 rumor-mongers had been investigated and dealt with according to the law. This announcement quickly made it onto CCTV.
Subsequently, on January 3, Li Wenliang was summoned to the Zhongnan Road Police Station of the Wuchang Branch and signed a letter of reprimand.
Meanwhile, to echo the government's propaganda at the time and for the sake of stability maintenance (weiwen), rhetoric downplaying and minimizing COVID was also widely spread online.
Take well-known Little Pinks like Jiangning Popo, the deputy head of the internet security brigade of the Jiangning Branch of the Nanjing Public Security Bureau. At the time, to refute Li Wenliang, she claimed that Wuhan had a P4 laboratory, telling everyone not to panic, and that if Wuhan could not handle it, no one could.
Of the subsequent events, we are all aware: Wuhan did indeed experience a COVID-19 outbreak that swept across China. The full English name of COVID-19 is SARS-CoV-2, which translates directly as second-generation SARS coronavirus. In other words, what Li Wenliang said in that WeChat group about SARS was not a rumor at all.
Yet judging from the outcome, Li Wenliang was reprimanded because of COVID-19 and passed away because of COVID-19, while those patriotic big Vs—those who told everyone not to panic and even encouraged everyone not to wear masks—not a single one of them was ever incriminated for spreading rumors.
We do not know whether, had he lived before 2013 in that relatively free environment, Li Wenliang would not have been reprimanded and could have even publicly warned all Chinese people on Weibo, allowing everyone to discover the outbreak of COVID-19 in advance. Would the COVID-19 pandemic not have turned into a global disaster then?
But I know that, at least in Wuhan, it would have been much better.
When the COVID-19 outbreak first began, I happened to be in Wuhan. In stark contrast to the terror surrounding COVID-19 during the subsequent lockdown, at that time the state media of the Chinese Communist Party and Little Pink big Vs were unanimously downplaying the hazards of COVID-19. Unlike China today, that era coincided with the upward trajectory of China's national power, and most people firmly believed in the propaganda of the Little Pinks and the Chinese Communist Party.
Influenced by this propaganda, very few of my friends in Wuhan were willing to wear masks or engage in basic protection.
Speech control by the Chinese Communist Party at the very least caused the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan to escalate significantly.
In fact, the biggest problem brought by speech control and internet control has never been merely the loss of freedom, but the fact that it deprives the entire society of its self-correction capability.
Today, the Chinese Communist Party clearly possesses far stronger social control and mobilization capabilities than it did during the 2003 SARS outbreak, but the handling results of COVID-19 were obviously far inferior to those of SARS.
Naturally, the logic behind how the Three Years of Great Famine broke out back then is essentially the same.
From 1956 to the spring of 1957, Mao Zedong first launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign, calling on everyone to offer criticisms and suggestions to the Chinese Communist Party. Then, after sufficient suggestions had been gathered, in June 1957, the Anti-Rightist Campaign began. Those who offered suggestions were targeted one by one, subjected to struggle sessions, imprisoned, or even persecuted to death. This is what people later jokingly referred to as the Hundred Flowers Campaign: luring snakes out of their holes.
This directly produced a chilling effect in China at the time, which meant that even when the overwhelming majority of people knew that the Great Leap Forward was unrealistic, that surpassing Britain in 3 years and catching up with America in 5 years was impossible, and that a yield of 10,000 catties per mu was definitely false, no one dared to speak to Mao Zedong about it. Because once you said it was false, you would be slapped with the label of a rightist at that time.
Under such circumstances, Mao Zedong could only make mistake after mistake, and the Chinese Communist Party could only make mistake after mistake, until the Three Years of Great Famine broke out.
And in China today, under the internet speech control, has it not fallen into a similar situation? During the COVID-19 pandemic, the expansion of the outbreak caused by speech censorship failed to awaken Xi Jinping. Speech control in China has not relaxed up to today; instead, it has become increasingly strict. By now, it is no longer just those who make sarcastic remarks about the Chinese Communist Party who get their accounts banned; even some individuals offering economic policy suggestions end up banned.
For example, Gao Shanwen stated in an internal speech on December 3, 2024, that during the years of the pandemic and the bursting of the real estate bubble, GDP growth might have been overestimated by 3% annually, totaling around 10% cumulatively.
This speech was published in full by Chinese financial media on the very same day and went viral across the internet.
So what awaited Gao Shanwen for these heartfelt words? Not having his speech valued or discussed, but being completely banned across the entire internet.
Of course, Gao Shanwen is not an isolated case. In this recent phase, financial big Vs who dared to openly speak true data and criticize China's economy—such as Ren Zefeng, Dan Bin, and Fu Peng—as well as renowned economists like He Bin from the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Zheng Yuhuang, associate professor at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, have all been periodically muted, completely banned, or even stripped of their positions.
Criticizing China's economy is now directly defined by Xinhua News Agency as economic capitulationism.
Meanwhile, however, internet personality Lao A’s
Deng Xiaoping once established a rule when he came to power: treat scientists and economists well. Deng said that if these people are not allowed to speak the truth, then if China's policies are wrong, no one will be able to correct them.
However, today, this rule has disappeared.
So, how long will China's erroneous economic policies last this time, now that there is no error-correction mechanism?
Perhaps, like in the Mao Zedong era, it will continue until an irreversible catastrophe arrives before it can be corrected.
This is also an inevitable result of the maximization of power in China; a wrong policy often has to cause a devastating disaster before it can be ended. The Great Leap Forward was like this, the one-child policy was like this, and the zero-COVID policy was also like this. Finally, thank you all for watching today's program.
I am Toronto Fang Lian.
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