CDT Weekly, March 13-19
CDT Weekly, March 13-19
Atlanta shootings, Wang Yu, Geng Xiaonan, policewoman's sentencing, and a journey to Xinjiang
Welcome to CDT’s weekly email newsletter. With these updates, we aim to provide an overview of new content across CDT’s English and Chinese sites, as well as the bilingual China Digital Space wiki, and related content elsewhere.
On Saturday, March 20, at 6pm Pacific, CDT will host a Chinese-language Clubhouse discussion in the wake of the fatal shooting of eight people in the Atlanta area on Tuesday, which took place against the backdrop of rising anti-Asian racist violence in the United States and beyond. The discussion will focus on the conditions for Asian massage parlor workers like several of those killed, including the institutional failings that leave them especially vulnerable.
Today’s entry on the CDT Chinese Sensitive Words calendar is Signal, the encrypted messaging app that was finally blocked in China this week. The week’s other entries:
人民智庫 Rénmín Zhìkù—“People’s Think Tank,” a public account affiliated with People’s Daily, which recently launched a public survey about the handling of the coronavirus outbreak. The survey’s subsequent deletion for containing “sensitive words” prompted an indignant outburst from the account’s administrator, who asked “don’t you think I know better than you what’s sensitive?”
王宇 Wáng Yǔ—one of the more prominent rights lawyers detained during the 2015 “Black Friday” or “709” crackdown, Wang was honored last week by the U.S. State Department, but prevented from attending an online ceremony by constant monitoring and obstruction of internet access. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that her son Bao Zhuoxuan, who was used by authorities to pressure Wang into making a televised confession, was later detained by ICE after fleeing to the U.S. to seek asylum, and is now awaiting possible deportation back to China.
送飯黨 sòng fàn dǎng—“Food-sending party,” a group founded by activist Geng Xiaonan, who was sentenced to three years in prison last month for alleged “illegal business activities.” Geng self-deprecatingly adopted a supporting role toward other, more “front line” activists, including efforts to organize grocery deliveries for fired Tsinghua law professor Xu Zhangrun after he was barred from using ubiquitous electronic payment services. These efforts were also blocked, illustrating the siege-style tactics commonly deployed against politically sensitive figures inside China. Geng was CDT Chinese’s “Person of the Month” for February.
互不聯網 hùbùliánwǎng—“disinternet,” an expression of frustration at user-hostile experiences, arbitrary limitations and restrictions, and thick spam and advertising commonly found in China’s closed internet ecosystem (though not, it is worth acknowledging, unknown elsewhere). The term plays on 互联网 hùliánwǎng, the Chinese term for internet, by inserting a negative in the middle.
潘瑞 Pān Ruì—overseas-based son of real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi, believed to be the target of a Beijing police notice issued this week. The notice referred to Weibo posts made in June last year insulting PLA “heroes and martyrs” killed in the Galwan valley clashes with India. Several others have recently been detained or declared subject to “online pursuit” over similar postings.
數據死刑 shùjù sǐxíng—“data death penalty” refers to the blacklisting and black-holing of especially sensitive figures on the Chinese internet, including the late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. Another example cited by CDT Chinese is mixed martial artist Xu Xiaodong, known for his humiliating victories against self-styled “Masters” of traditional Chinese martial arts, who has also expressed support for Hong Kong protesters in 2019 and his friend, citizen journalist Chen Qiushi, who disappeared while reporting from Wuhan last year.
CDT’s translators have been busy. Last week, we published an English version of Lu Yuyu’s farewell to Guangzhou following his recent expulsion from the city by Domestic Security Department agents, or “National Treasures.” This week’s translations include:
… a retired cadre’s 2008 account of a 1991 journey to southern Xinjiang, which has circulated online more recently for the light it sheds on the background of ethnic tensions in the region that foreshadowed the current mass detention campaign. CDT Chinese has also compiled an eight-year timeline charting significant developments in Xinjiang since 2013, responding to doubts raised about the situation there in recent Clubhouse sessions.
… the announcement by the creator of the two-year-old Github project “Fuck Xuexi Qiangguo” that his software for automating minimum requirements on the gamified ideological training app would no longer be updated. “I put it on Github so that more people could rid themselves of their mandatory ideological training, which promotes a cult of personality and fanatically controls people’s beliefs,” he explained. “I decided to stop updating the app because the people around me were no longer required to use Xuexi Qiangguo. If people are forced to use it again, I might change my mind.” CDT also translated comments from a number of users, including one low-level cadre claiming to have been assigned the job of maintaining activity on 67 Xuexi Qiangguo accounts belonging to his superiors.
… various materials on the case of a young Jiangsu policewoman who was sentenced last year to 13 years in prison for allegedly extorting several local officials with whom she had had sexual relationships. When the case came to light, it sparked angry online commentary suggesting that Xu Yan had been preyed upon by these older men, and then silenced using the legal system when she became an inconvenience. CDT translated excerpts from an interview with her father, two satirical cartoons on the case, some Tang-style poetry inspired by the subsequent censorship, and part of an essay by former Southern Metropolis Daily editor Yu Shaolei, who argued that “in front of those high officials, the policewoman is powerless. Even if the extortion is all proved to be true, it’s still just the revenge of the powerless.”
Other CDT English posts include updates on Beijing’s ongoing push to tame China’s tech giants, which now looks set to expand from Jack Ma’s Alibaba/Ant empire to Pony Ma’s Tencent; and coverage of this week’s fractious U.S.-China dialogue in Alaska and the trial of Canadian Michael Spavor which was suddenly announced to coincide with it.
Also at CDT Chinese, meanwhile, were the Chinese text of a ChinaChange interview with veteran Chinese journalist and editor Chang Ping; responses to a Taiwanese satire on China’s Foreign Ministry “wolf warriors”; comments on the E.U.’s announcement of sanctions against Chinese officials for human rights violations, the first in 30 years; and reactions to suggestions by Song Ruan, a central government official in Hong Kong, following official calls for the city to be led by “patriots,” that “when we say ‘patriotism,’ this is not at all about loving a cultural or historical ‘China,’ but about loving the present People’s Republic of China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.”