In China, the government is making a 180 degree turn too fast, people don’t know exactly what they are supposed to do. Some Twitter users documented what they saw on Chinese social media:
On Dec 2nd, Hangzhou train station let people with yellow health code out without PCR tests, people were so stunned that they have to be confirmed several times.
Same day, in Guangdong, when it was announced that people can eat in restaurants at 3pm, many restaurants opened at 5pm for World Cup parties.
In Beijing, people were just shocked that their lives were changed so fast so quickly.
In Lanzhou, all the quarantine centres were ordered to be emptied overnight.
People are calling it the “Chinese speed”.
But this speed is not the same across China. For example, as of Dec 3rd, some city in China announced that to use the public toilet, health code and PCR test have to be strictly checked.
Teacher Li is actively updating the reality in different cities in China as reported by local residents. Shanghai is still in strict lockdown at residential area level. Some small cities may still be in city wide lockdown.
In Beijing, most of the PCR stations are gone, but most of the public places require PCR test results to enter, except public transports. This created long waiting lines at the few remaining PCR stations.
On Dec 4th, some people in Beijing were reporting that banks and ATM stopped working and people can not withdraw money, markets were not allowed to source product from different districts and were not allowed to sell live fish (cooking live fish is important for many Chinese recipes). People are suspecting that, in the government, there are two factions: the Zero-COVID gang and the Doing-Nothing gang, and they are fighting.
Overall, the government have changed its propaganda on the harm of the COVID virus. It used to be super deadly with long symptoms, now it is less severe than a flu.
To ‘manage’ the protests, the government is flexing its muscles and its AI surveillance system to track and find the protesters. According to Chinese social media, the police beat up protesters, stripped them naked to “check” them, forbid them to talk and sleep.
Although many were let go afterwards, we don’t really know how many were arrested and if all of them have been released. People know for sure that some protesters have been arrested for 9 days and their family have not been able to find out where they are jailed.
While the surveillance system looks all powerful and overwhelming, there are young people who managed to dodge it. Many people feel hopeless in the face of the state power, but some feel inspired by the sheer experience to meet like-minded people on the street and express themselves and have collective power.
Even though this wave of protests got much international attention, because they were taking places in big cities and university campuses, and the protesters were very adept at using social media to spread their messages, mass protests in China are actually more frequent than people know (in or out of China). For example, Anthony (Lu Yuyu, whose story we told in our newsletter 57 ) recalled on Twitter of all the mass protests he documented up to 2014. He said it was common to see more than ten thousand people gathering together for justice for a person they did not know personally. According to China Dissent Monitor, a database run by the Freedom House, there have been around 800 protests in the last 6 months, although most are of very small scale.
We don’t know if the forces squashed this time will come back stronger next time. Xi Jinping has disbanded all independent organizations in China, making it almost impossible for people to organize themselves. If there is any silver lining, it is the human desire for freedom and dignity, and so far the draconian surveillance system has not totally suffocate it.
We introduced Teacher Li in our newsletter 104, he was among the first to report to the world about the riots in Foxconn. Back then, he had only 200,000 followers. But he seemed to be especially trusted and followed by young people in China. He was also the first one to report on the Urumqi uprising, and the protests in Shanghai and other major cities in China. He is very good at navigating social media inside China, and he became the sources for many out-of-China news media. He gained massive followers and quickly became the biggest Twitter account for Chinese, with more than 800,000 followers now and growing.
According to a profile on him by Technology Review, he is a 30 year old painter based in Italy, without journalistic training.
While he has long talked about Chinese social issues online, sometime in 2021 he started receiving private messages on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter (which is banned in China), from people asking him to post on their behalf. They feared exposing their own identities.
His posts would get removed by Chinese censors, and by February, his account was banned. Over the next two months, another 49 of his accounts were suspended. But his followers generously allowed him to borrow their phone numbers to keep registering for more. In April 2022, after he could no longer access new Weibo accounts, he finally moved to Twitter. There, he quickly grew a large following of international accounts and Chinese people accessing the blocked social media platform via VPN.
Teacher Li got a surprising enemy on Twitter, the former number 1 Chinese on Twitter, Mr. Fang Shimin, aka Fang Zhouzi. The moment Teacher Li passed him on number of follower, Fang tweeted:
Recently a “Teacher Li” is encouraging people to send him breaking news and he is receiving lots of interviews by foreign media. It is obvious that this is not a personal account, who knows which group is behind it?
And this started a fight in Chinese Twitter community. It is because this Mr. Fang has a reputation for sealioning influential citizens in China. He likes to pose as a science writer who is the most intelligent person in China, and never ever acknowledges mistakes. He is sealioning Teacher Li as aggressively as he can, accusing mostly of Teacher Li to be a scamming operation, trying to discourage people from sending Li information. Teacher Li tried to respond to Fang’s accusation, Fang simply blocked him. When many followers of Fang explained to him that he might be wrong about Teacher Li, Fang blocked them or hide those reasonable responses. Instead, he posted the most extreme response to his accusations, and blamed them on Teacher Li.
sealioning: a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.
Many people were so angry at Fang that they started digging up the stories of Fang, listed in Chinese Wikipedia that shed very bad light on the personality of Mr. Fang. Fang’s English Wikipedia, in comparison, looks much better. And according to his Chinese Wikipedia, Fang said:
Fortunately, I usually only use the English version of Wikipedia, and have no need or intention to use its Chinese version. Wikipedia’s reputation is built on its English version. The difference in the quality of the writers and editors of the two versions is there. The content of the English version is quite professional, while the content of the Chinese version can be seen as sloppy and biased just from the entry of ‘Fang Zhouzi’.
At some point, people also noticed that Teacher Li has been shadow banned, and search on his user name returned totally unrelated accounts. This is probably because a large number of people reported Teacher Li to Twitter. (As of now, the ban seems lifted)
Fang also doxxed Teacher Li, with his name and an old newspaper report from 2012. He even took screenshot of Teacher Li’s QQ moments to prove that Teacher Li is a fan of Xi Jinping. Teacher Li asked who could have access to the information that Fang is publishing, apart from Chinese police? Especially his QQ moment, which he has locked long time ago.
Fang is trying hard to discredit Teacher Li, Cui Bono? Is that to make sure no one can pass information in time to help Chinese protesters, which is a crucial reason that the protests grew so large in scale, as NYT reporter commented on Twitter:
Our story last week showed the importance of Li’s account. He is one of several who have turned Twitter into a repository for documentary evidence of protests/zero COVID abuses. Videos can be sent to him, and re-downloaded in China after they get censored.
In addition to the fight started by Mr. Fang, there are also dozens of Teacher Li (李老师不是你老师) impersonators on Twitter.
Interestingly, on Dec 4th, Musk was asked about supporting the protesters in China in a Twitter Space event,
This Twitter Space is about to be about “citizenship journalism,” but a questioner asked about what Twitter can do for Chinese protesters, then gets shouted down by some moderators before Musk can give an answer. They say Musk isn’t the one banning Twitter in China.
The questioner himself described:
I asked Elon if his commitment to free speech, which he says is crucial to the future of humanity, extends to Chinese & Iranian protestors (earlier he ducked a question about Twitter supporting them). Elon scolded me & the right-wing hosts jumped in & kicked me out. Free speech!
Evergrande’s value has shrunk by 90% compared to the beginning of the year. The CEO, Mr. Xu Jiayin, is under lots of stress from the creditors.
Rumours that he committed suicide were spreading on social media on the morning of December 2nd. Early in the afternoon, the company issued an announcement that he was alive and in conference.
But on social media, people still believed that he jumped from the 19th floor, but he was jumping into air cushions prepared by the fire department.
The rumour was started by a post on Weibo:
The Weibo account of the public security bureau in Yuexiu district in Guangzhou apologized on Friday for any public disturbance due to a post it “mistakenly” sent, which contains Xu Jiayin’s name and nothing else. The post has been deleted.
It is widely reported alt that Apple is speeding up the process to move some of its production out of China.
But one Chinese is not satisfied. He just started a hunger strike outside Apple Park, in Cupertino to demand:
We now reiterate our four major demands:
1. IMPROVE worker conditions at the Foxconn facility
2. STOP censoring Chinese AppStore
3. RESTORE AirDrop function on iPhone in China
4. CONDEMN the mass incarceration of Uyghurs