Two prominent Chinese bloggers in exile said police were investigating their millions of followers on international social media platforms, in an escalation of Beijing’s attempts to clamp down on critical speech even outside the nation’s borders.
Former China Central Television journalist Wang Zhian (王志安) and artist-turned-dissident Li Ying (李穎), both Chinese citizens known for posting uncensored news, said in separate posts on Sunday that police were interrogating people who followed them on social media, and urged followers to take precautions such as unfollowing their accounts, changing their user names, avoiding Chinese-made smartphones and preparing to be questioned.
Li Ying, known as Teacher Li, came to prominence as a source of news about the “blank paper movement,” a rare moment of anti-government protests in mainland China in 2022.
Photo: AP
Li’s account on X now posts news and videos submitted by users, which cover everything from local protests to viral videos of real-life incidents that are censored on the Internet in China.
Li in a post on Sunday suggested that people unfollow his account.
“Currently, the public security bureau is checking my 1.6 million followers and people in the comments, one by one,” he wrote.
Li shared screen shots of private messages he received from followers over the past few months, which claimed that police had interrogated individuals, and that one person had even lost their job.
As of yesterday, Li had dropped down to 1.4 million followers on X.
International social media platforms such as X and YouTube are blocked in China, but can still be accessed with software that circumvents the nation’s censorship systems.
Wang, who has 1 million subscribers on X and 1.2 million followers on YouTube, also told his fans to unsubscribe.
In a written statement, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it “didn’t understand the situation” and that it was not a diplomatic matter.
Li and Wang did not respond to requests for comment.
Over the past decade, Beijing has cracked down on dissent on Chinese social media, with thousands of censors employed both at private companies and by the state.
Chinese users expressing critical opinions online have reported being called, harassed or interrogated by police, with some called in for questioning and ordered to take down certain posts or delete their accounts. In some cases, users have been detained, with some spending up to two weeks in jail and a small number sentenced to years in prison.
Beijing has extended its reach to track non-Chinese platforms such as Facebook, Telegram and X. A recent leak of documents from I-Soon, a private contractor linked to China’s top policing agency and other parts of the government, described tools used by Chinese police to curb dissent on overseas social media, including one tool specifically created to surveil users on X.
Hackers also created tools for police to hack e-mail inboxes and unmask anonymous users of X, the documents show. Sometimes, officers sent requests to surveil specific individuals to I-Soon, the leak revealed.
Li said he would not stop posting even if people unfollowed, but he urged his followers to take basic digital safety precautions.
“I don’t want your life to be impacted just because you wanted to understand the real news in China,” Li wrote. “You only want to understand what’s happening, but the price is quite high.”
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS