Clubhouse, a web-based audio communication software that communicates between the West and the East, was quickly banned by the Chinese government after its rapid rise to popularity. The end seems to have been expected. The window that briefly appeared on China’s Internet firewall revealed a number of sensitive political topics that the Chinese government had restricted, unveiling a suppressed public opinion in China.
The blocking of “Elite Club” seemed to come as no surprise to anyone.
On February 7, before the software was banned by China, the exiled Australian Chinese artist Ba Thou Cao created a chat room on Elite Club called “Has anyone had tea because of clubhouse?” The chat room was set up to ask users to tell us if anyone had been harassed by the Chinese government for using the software.
Clubhouse is blocked?
Our reporter sat in on the chat room for half an hour. Although there were mainland netizens in the chat room who expressed such concerns, no one testified to the existence of related instances.
In this chat, there was a vague prediction that Elite Club would be banned from mainland China.
Since the mobile audio messaging software once allowed Apple users in China to log in, they were able to join as many chat rooms as they liked on the software, including many sensitive political topics such as the Xinjiang re-Education camp and Hong Kong‘s national security law.
There is widespread concern among users who participate in these topics that the software will be blocked by the Chinese government.
On February 8, netizens in several Chinese cities reported that Elite Club was no longer available. In a chat room discussing the blocking of Elite Club, one user reported that it was blocked around 5 p.m. in Shanghai and around 7 p.m. in Beijing.
Liu Lipeng, a former content auditor for Sina Weibo who now lives in California, told the station that this kind of network blocking mainly works through the Great Fire Wall, “It doesn’t suddenly choke off everything in the country, it’s slowly broken off, in some nodes it works, in some nodes it doesn’t work, and then after a while it all works. It’s probably just like that. Network Firewall is a distributed network, you see this phenomenon, you know that the Firewall closed.”
According to Taiwan‘s technology and financial media “Digital Times”, the technology service provider behind the “Elite Club” software is the China-based “Sound Network” audio technology company. This has alerted many Elite Club users, who are concerned that their conversations in chat rooms will be tracked and their address books copied.
Liu Lipeng, who has expertise in Internet censorship, explained that it is indeed unsafe to go through a service provider such as Voice.com, and that the “Elite Club” software itself uses an address book invitation method that already makes it dangerous for users in mainland China.
“In mainland China, cell phone numbers are real-name operators, and SMS, verification codes and so on are intercepted, so you are extremely vulnerable to exposure with the operators.”
After the “Elite Club” was banned on the mainland, many netizens still joined the “Elite Club” discussion through the VPN wall tool, but in Liu Lipeng’s opinion, this does not avoid the risk factor of regulation.
In recent years, there have been several cases of Chinese police arresting and sentencing people for selling VPN wall climbing tools. According to mainland media reports, last October, Gong and Qin in Shenzhen were sentenced to seven to eight months in prison for such a reason. The charges include the crime of providing programs and tools for intrusion into and illegal control of computer information systems, and the crime of illegal business operation. Liu Lipeng referred to the former charge as the “wall crime”.
A short-lived spring for sensitive issues
Although “Elite Club” was a flash in the pan on China’s firewalls, the early spring software was still a ray of sunshine that comforted Chinese netizens.
Participation in a number of chat rooms discussing sensitive political topics was brisk. The chat room “Is There a Concentration Camp in Xinjiang?”, which discussed ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang, was filled with more than 2,000 people. was packed with more than 2,000 discussants at one point.
After exiting the chatroom, a participant named Alex tweeted, “[I] cried a lot on my phone. This is the first Time I’ve had so many friends who speak the same language standing with me, discussing things I care about most, but almost never dare to mention in Chinese. For the first time in a long time, I felt full of warmth and strength. Thank you all.”
Another chat room, “Want to know more about Tiananmen,” had a cap of 5,000 participants at one point, with a queue for those who came later, many of whom were from the mainland, eager to express their desire to learn the facts about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
Zhou Fenglock, a former leader of the June Fourth Movement and founder of the human rights organization Humane China, spent a long time in the chat room, sharing the facts he saw in the square back then.
“There are so many people who want to hear about this, and although they are often brainwashed by the officials, this interest in itself means that the brainwashing itself is not working, or that it is not having its full effect,” Zhou Fenglock told the station.
But some analysts say that the netizens who enter these chat rooms are not necessarily representative of the general Chinese public. “The “Elite Club” is currently only available on Apple phones, which means that only those who can afford Apple phones can access the “Elite Club.
“The exciting thing here is that such a group of people are of very high income in China because they can afford to buy an iPhone, and the fact that such a group of people are so interested in this matter shows that in China, factors such as affluence do not change the normal need of people, which is their desire to know the truth,” Zhou Fenglock said. Zhou Fenglock does not seem to be discouraged by this.
He also noticed that in chat rooms on the topic of June 4, netizens who shared their June 4 experiences still had an instinct for self-protection in their discourse strategy, “the so-called telling of personal stories, often they are a mixture of official narratives and their personal experiences, sometimes in a very implicit way, which may not be clear to people who are not familiar with it.”
But what really disappoints Zhou Fenglock is that the mindset of the people in the Elite Club chat room shows that the Chinese people have generally accepted the reality of the Internet being blocked, and it is difficult to see how this situation will improve in the near future.
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