Why I gave up on Chinese social media
and perhaps on life in China altogether
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I lived in China for four years before returning to California in June of last year. The aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak—not the virus itself but the way that the government used it as a pretext to tighten the screws on an already very tight propaganda and surveillance apparatus—was the last straw for me.
I had moved to Shanghai in October of 2019 after two years of living and working in Shenzhen. The plan was to get settled and find a job after Chinese New Year. Having just left Shenzhen, which I sometimes describe as a factory dormitory with fifteen million inhabitants, Shanghai, with its beautiful architecture, its tree-lined boulevards, its countless coffee shops and bars, was a breath of fresh air.
At the end of December 2019 there were murmurs of a SARS-like virus emerging in Wuhan. By mid January it had turned into something of a national concern, and then by January 23rd, when Wuhan went into full-on lockdown, it became clear that my plan to find a job in Shanghai was going to be delayed for a while. After lockdown started and the job search stopped, I had something like 24 hours a day of free time on my hands.
I wasn’t particularly stressed about money so I did what every self-respecting millennial would have done, and tried my hand at social media.
China’s vast market is one of the most closed in the world. However to a certain kind of foreigner who can speak Chinese, the market is wide open. Over time, though, I found that I was not that kind of foreigner.
My initial foray into vlogging on Chinese platforms was met with a pretty good response. I talked about the pandemic, what life in Shanghai was like during those weeks after the country started going into lockdown, what life was like in America as people watched scenes of empty Chinese cities on international newscasts (before shit started to hit the fan in March 2020 at which point Americans generally lost interest in China).
After a little over a month, I had accumulated over 7,000 subscribers on BiliBili, a Chinese platform similar to YouTube, and my best video had been viewed over 150,000 times. Not bad, considering up to that point I had had a Twitter account for 10 years with 100 followers.
But to be successful in China as a foreigner on social media, you are best served by casting aside all dignity and shouting “I love China” at the top of your lungs at least once in every video. As it turned out, I did not want to be that kind of foreigner.
As it became clear that the Chinese government’s malfeasance led to the Covid-19 outbreak being orders of magnitude worse than it needed to be, something in me changed. From that point onwards, I wouldn’t be able to suppress the urge to criticize this government, an act effectively equal to suiciding any career prospects in China.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t have a certain amount of cognitive dissonance about making money in China before the pandemic. When I first went to China in 2016, I was working for a company that made equipment used by the country’s police bureaus. I later found out that the equipment may have had a role—although it would have been a minor one—in the crackdown on the Uyghur population in northwestern China. I left that company in 2018, in part because that did not sit well with me.
After learning enough Chinese to understand the nightly news broadcast and converse with people who did not speak any English, I came to the conclusion that the Trump administration was largely correct about the threat that China, under the Communist Party, posed to the future of American prosperity and security. In the long term, I knew I did not want to work for or draw a salary from a country that is so openly opposed to the values that make America what it is.
By late 2019 I had read the Xinjiang Papers, extinguishing any remaining shred of doubt about the atrocities the Chinese government was carrying out against its own people. I imagine I was close to a breaking point then. The crackdown on free expression that followed in the weeks after the government had bungled the outbreak in Wuhan was the final straw.
I felt I had an obligation to criticize the Chinese government openly, and in doing so, I would not be able to sustain any kind of career in China, social media or otherwise.
So after six weeks of making relatively milquetoast videos on BiliBili, I decided to abandon the endeavor in March and started looking for flights to get back home to California, at least until US-China tensions cooled down.
That, however, took three months and five cancelled flights, so I spent the remaining days in a sort of purgatory, knowing that my time in China had come to an end but unable to return home because Covid-related restrictions had turned the steady stream of US-China flights into something less than a trickle. When I finally did get home, it was in a $3,500 economy class seat that would have cost $300 in normal circumstances.
In parallel with the videos I was making for BiliBili, I had started tweeting in Chinese as well. While I was still in China, I took to Twitter to satirize some of the more unfortunate aspects of living there, poking fun at daily existence under a government that seeks to control every aspect of private life and instills an unhealthy level of nationalism in the majority of its populace.
My first “hit” tweet was a joke about the drudgery of using American (banned) social media applications in the country.
The joke reads: “Tweeting in China, I spend about 10 minutes a day writing tweets and 8 hours a day switching VPN servers.”
In the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak, there was a heavy and long-lasting crackdown on VPN services, as part of a greater campaign by the Chinese government to control the narrative of what led to the pandemic. Chinese Twitter users get around the Great Firewall with VPN. Judging by the number of likes and retweets, they too seemed to be feeling the effects of the crackdown.
The tweet that made me somewhat famous in Chinese language Twitter was a joke about nationalism. Hyper-nationalist Chinese netizens, referred to as little pinks, use the phrase “your mother died” as their DEFCON 1 insult. One night walking my dog around my neighborhood in Shanghai, in a moment of divine inspiration I came up with my best Chinese language joke to date.
It reads: “Recently I’ve been in China and my folks have been in America. The first time I tweeted in Chinese, I didn’t really understand the lay of the land and said something critical of China. Many of the comments that people left made me terribly worried about my family. I called my dad right away to ask if things were ok. To my surprise, my mom was still alive.”
To an extent I think people liked the joke because they had never heard anything like it. When you’re steeped in an environment where “your mother died” is a common insult, it takes an outsider to point out the absurdity of it. They also liked the mischievous approach to criticizing something that they might not feel comfortable criticizing from within the Great Firewall. In China, as a Chinese, there is a thin line between criticizing overtly toxic nationalism and being labeled a China-hating traitor. Most choose to stay far away from that line.
On a somewhat related note, I think one of the reasons so many Chinese Twitter users select nondescript profile photos and unintelligible handles is that they don’t want to get called in for a chat with the local police bureau or by their manager at work for liking the wrong tweet or saying the wrong thing. Even for those who have emigrated elsewhere, a transgressive tweet from overseas can still affect their family back at home. Anonymity is the only guarantee of safety.
In any case, after that joke, I quickly went from 5,000 followers to 10, then 15, then 20,000. A British expat friend once showed me a screenshot of one of my jokes on his WeChat timeline, meaning one of his Chinese friends had gone across the Great Firewall to Twitter, screenshotted the joke, and then shared it with their friends on an unblocked app (WeChat) and it ultimately found its way back to me. I also once tweeted a complaint about a BBQ restaurant in Shanghai where the waiter refused service to me during the pandemic because the restaurant’s landlord thought foreigners were Covid rats (this was due to the state’s propaganda barrage that convinced the majority of people that Covid originated abroad and was then imported to China). After I returned to America, some of my friends went back there and encountered the same waiter, who told them that other customers had come asking whether or not they had really refused to let Kevin dine there. In other words, my jokes had earned enough of a following that my online speech would sometimes resurface in the real world.
But for all the people who liked these jokes, there was an equally large army of little pinks who were deeply unamused. It became a daily thing for people to tweet at me saying “Get the fuck out of China, you white trash” or “If I ever see you walking around Shanghai I’m going to beat the shit out of you.” These kind of overt threats didn’t rattle me as much as the ones that said they had reported me to the government and looked forward to me getting kicked out of China. The former were ridiculous enough to be dismissed out of hand, the latter not as much.
Safety in China’s big cities—physical safety, at least—was less of a concern to me than in American cities. Perhaps this is the one benefit of having high-resolution surveillance cameras enhanced with facial recognition covering every inch of public space. As a result, there always seemed to be less of a threat from direct, physical confrontation. There were a thousand kinds of different scams to be wary of (one example that always struck me as rather ingenious were the scammers who would affix fake QR codes to shared bikes that would implant a virus on your phone when scanned), but I never worried that much about getting mugged walking home at night. When living in San Francisco, Oakland, or LA, that was very much a worry. So direct threats of physical violence from angry Twitter users never bothered me.
But being reported to and somehow targeted by an arm of the state was very much a worry. That would have been an indirect and much easier way for someone to get back at me for ridiculing their poor behavior online. Cases of foreigners being jailed in an act of political retaliation is not without precedent in China.
It got to the point that before posting to Twitter, I would send a nascent tweet to one of several Chinese friends to help me make sure I wasn’t crossing any red lines. Was I being paranoid? Sure. I am not a particularly important person nor am I a particularly big threat to the stability of the Chinese government. But that’s the point of censorship and outlawing certain kinds of speech. You never know where the line is, so trying to stay on the right side of the line is like crossing a wide open field that has a single land mine buried somewhere beneath the grass. You don’t know where it is and the chance of stepping on it is small, but you know it’s there so you dread that every step might be your last.
My fear of stepping on that mine increased with admonitions like the one below, a response I received from a Chinese Twitter user with a large following after poking fun at the Ministry of Home Affairs Spokesperson Hua Chunying: “Kevin, I like it. But somehow I have the feeling that one of these days you’re going to become a persona non grata to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
For people who have only lived in a free society, and more specifically those who don’t think cancel culture exists, this fear might not seem relatable. But the recent spate of dismissals from high profile jobs in America should put the debate over cancel culture’s existence to rest. In China, when you are canceled, you are canceled with the force of the state.
And so I cooled off in the months before I could fly back to America, trying to avoid saying anything that could get me, or, through guilt by association, my friends, in trouble. By the time I left, a month after the exchange above, I was ready to erupt with criticisms that I’d suppressed for the better part of four years.
When I got home, there was no longer a need to suppress them. For the first time since going to China in April of 2016 I openly criticized the ruling government, its leader, its repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, its absurd insistence that Taiwan, a country with its own passport and currency, in fact falls within its sovereignty. The blowback was swift and in a way justified the fear I felt over the threats to report me to the government that I described earlier. The little pink army went through every photo I ever posted and managed to pinpoint my Shanghai address and identify some of my acquaintances by name. This time their message had changed, only slightly, to “don’t ever come back to China you fucking white trash.” Again, not scary, especially so given the ocean between us. This time they didn’t have any other threats to make.
I have left high-paying jobs in the past because it didn’t feel right anymore. I am by no means wealthy enough that I can afford to make decisions in that way, and have heaped upon myself mountains of unnecessary stress for doing so nonetheless. When it’s time to move on, it’s time to move on. In a way, my constitutional incapability of following Fulafu’s footsteps, praising China all the way to the bank, was similar.
After the pandemic broke out due to a mix governmental incompetence and malice, and they summarily erased and rewrote the history of what had happened to deflect all blame from the Party, my urge to criticize passed the point of no return. I kept that urge sealed up until my plane home departed the tarmac, but by March the fire under the pot was beyond my control and I knew the lid would eventually fly off.
Even if I had managed to keep silent for another six months, another year, there would always be a day when my principles caught up with me, when the need to criticize overtook the need to make a living. And when that moment came, everything I had worked for would crumble. Careers in China can end for the simple transgression of liking a pro-Taiwan post on an American social network. Calling Xi Jinping a malevolent idiot would be not only career-ending, it would likely also be visa-ending. Perhaps worse.
If you are a person who has trouble staying silent when you see something wrong, a career as a foreigner in China is a castle made of sand. It will take time to build and look quite impressive when you’re done, but eventually the tide will come and wash it away.
i almost cried a bit when I read about how chinese people are afraid of using their own pictures as profile photos. i get nervous when i write in chinese on any websites that requires vpn services. I’m constantly worried that my gmail account is linked to my chinese phone number since i registered on every social media with it. i don’t think this kind of self-censoring will ever be erased from my brain. thank you for speaking out.
Kevin, abandon not your writing on the true nature of the CCP and its cravings for global hegemony over all free peoples. You have a clear voice, you have talent, and you have first hand experience. America slumbers before this giant. A persistent, level-headed call, such as you are capable, may yet awaken the dozing and the distracted.