I returned to California last June after living on the mainland for almost four years. The Time I spent on the mainland after the New Guan outbreak (not the New Guan virus itself, but the Chinese Communist government using it as an excuse to further tighten the screws on public opinion propaganda and public surveillance) was the trigger that made me finally decide to leave.
After living and working in Shenzhen for two years, I moved to Shanghai starting in October 2019, when I was planning to start looking for a new job after the Lunar New Year. As someone who had just left Shenzhen (which personally felt like a giant factory dorm with 15 million workers), Shanghai’s European and American architecture, French sycamores, and countless coffee shops and bars were truly refreshing.
At the end of December 2019, rumors of a SARS-like virus in the Wuhan area began to spark national concern by mid-to-late January. a full city closure was declared in Wuhan on January 23, and major Chinese cities went into quasi-closure, at which point it became clear that my plans to find a job in Shanghai would have to be postponed for a while. The closure at Home, combined with the fact that my job search was temporarily on hold, meant that I had about 24 hours of free time each day.
There was no financial pressure, so like most young people on social media platforms, I started to do self-publishing with a playful mindset.
The mainland market is one of the most closed markets in the world, but as a Chinese-speaking foreigner, it is still a vast world. However, as time passed, I realized that I didn’t want to be that kind of foreigner.
At first, I was posting vlogs on Chinese social media platforms and received a pretty good response. At that time, I was talking about my Life in Shanghai after the new crown Epidemic closed the city, and the reaction of the people back home in the US at that time, and so on. After all, the American people were still very curious when they saw the empty scenes of these mainland cities on the news at that time (they couldn’t care less after the virus spread in the US by March).
A month or so later, I had about 7,000 followers on BiliBili (B Station), a Chinese platform similar to Oil Tube, and my most popular video had over 150,000 views. The results were good, after all, I hadn’t been very involved in this area before, and my Twitter account had only had about 100 followers in ten years.
But I soon discovered that the only way to succeed on mainland social media as a foreigner is to abandon all your dignity and shout “I love China” at least once in every video. As it turns out, I don’t want to be one of those foreigners.
It is clear that the new epidemic is several orders of magnitude worse than the original situation due to the CCP government’s incompetence and deliberate cover-up. As the facts continued to surface, my heart was changing as well. Since then, it has felt difficult to suppress my desire to speak out and criticize the government, which in mainland China would undoubtedly be tantamount to career suicide.
It’s not that I didn’t have the “cognitive dissonance” of making money in mainland China before the New Crown epidemic. The first time I went on a business trip to the mainland was in 2016, when I worked for a U.S. company whose products were used by police departments on the mainland. I later discovered that the Chinese Communist Party may have used such devices in the process of monitoring fellow Uighurs in the northwest. Despite the insignificant role these devices played, I resigned in 2018, in large part because the business practices were unacceptable to me.
Then after learning enough Chinese that I began to understand the nightly news broadcasts, plus the usual interaction with the general public in Chinese and learning their unvarnished views of the United States, I came to the conclusion that the mainland under Chinese Communist rule posed a threat to the future stability and prosperity of the United States, and that the Trump administration was essentially correct on this point. In the long run, I know I don’t want to work in a country that is so openly opposed to American liberal democratic values.
In late 2019, I read the New York Times’ Xinjiang Papers documenting the atrocities committed by the Chinese Communist Party against its own people, shattering any remaining illusions about this government. I think it was also at that time that I approached a turning point in my own life. In the weeks following the Wuhan outbreak, the continued harsh suppression of freedom of expression by the Chinese Communist authorities was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
As an American with relative knowledge of the mainland, I felt obligated to publicly criticize the Chinese Communist government. Of course doing so would also mean that I would not be able to get a job in social media or, for that matter, any other field on the mainland.
So after posting some irrelevant videos on the speech-censoring B-site, I decided in March to stop updating and start searching for a flight back home to California until the situation in the U.S. and China de-escalated.
But the journey home took three months and five cancelled flights, making those remaining days I spent on the mainland a purgatory. Because I knew my chapter here was over, but due to the “five-one” restriction of the new crown epidemic on the mainland, flights between the US and China were pitifully few and rapidly changing. I finally got a $3,500 economy class seat back home, which is normally $300.
Around the same time I was posting videos on B-site, I started to try tweeting in Chinese. While I was still on the mainland, I used to tweet humorous accounts of life on the mainland, describing what it was like to live under a government that tried to control the population from all sides while promoting nationalist fervor.
My first “trending” tweet was a humorous account of the difficulties of using American (off-wall) social media in mainland China.
The continued crackdown on VPN services in China in the wake of the New Guinea outbreak is part of the Communist Party’s increased propaganda efforts in the New Guinea opinion war. Twitter users who are in China have to use VPNs to bypass firewalls, and judging from the number of likes and retweets on this tweet, everyone is probably feeling the effects of the VPN suppression.
And then a later tweet that made me a bit of a celebrity in the Chinese Twittersphere was a joke about Chinese nationalism. Nationalist Chinese netizens (commonly known as pinkos) use the phrase “your mother is dead” as a surefire way to get into an online cursing match. I was walking my dog around the house one night when I came up with this humorous Chinese joke, which is currently one of my most popular.
I think people like it in large part because they haven’t heard this angle before. If “your mother is dead” is an agreed-upon insult in your environment, sometimes it takes an outsider to realize the absurdity of such a curse. This kind of playful criticism may also be preferred because it is very unsafe to say such playful words inside the wall. For mainland netizens, there is basically a thin line between “openly criticizing nationalist fanaticism” and “being labeled as a traitor who hates the country” in the mainland. Most people must consciously stay away from this line.
Since we’re talking about this, I’d also like to mention that the majority of mainland Twitter users don’t use their own photos as their avatars and try not to tweet about themselves, the biggest reason being that they don’t want to be called by the local police for “tea” or interviewed by their unit leaders. Like a “should not like” tweet, say a “should not say” words, are likely to be targeted. Even for tweeters who have emigrated overseas, their tweets can still affect their loved ones in China. Choosing to remain anonymous is the only guarantee of safety.
Anyway, since that segment, my Twitter feed quickly grew from 5,000 followers to 10,000, then 15,000, and later to 20,000. A British friend had sent me a screenshot of his WeChat circle of friends where someone had posted one of my Twitter segments. That means a mainland friend of his had crossed the firewall to Twitter, swiped my segment, cut the picture, and then sent it back to the wall to share with his friends, and the segment floated around and found me again. Another time, I tweeted a complaint about a barbecue restaurant in Shanghai. At the time, during the New Crown epidemic, the waiter refused to serve me after seeing me because the landlord of that restaurant believed that foreigners were the walking New Crown virus (due to the Chinese Communist Party’s night and day brainwashing in the country that has convinced most mainlanders that New Crown originated abroad). Later when I returned to the US, some of my Shanghai friends went back there to eat and met the same waiter. The waiter said that other customers came in later and asked them if they really refused to let Kevin eat there. In other words, the attention some of my tweets get sometimes breaks through the confines of the internet and surfaces in the real world.
But since there are internet users who enjoy these segments, there is an equally large legion of pinkies who jaw at the content. It’s almost a daily occurrence that I’m often told to “get the white trash out of China” or “don’t let me see you in Shanghai, or I’ll beat you to death. Compared to such threats of physical violence, the Red Guard comments like “I’ve reported you to the government, wait until you’re kicked out of China” are more damaging. The former is so ridiculous that it can be laughed off, but the latter is so real that it makes people a little uncomfortable.
Having lived in many cities in the United States, I feel relatively less worried about personal safety in large mainland cities, which is probably the only so-called “advantage” of the pervasive surveillance system. The result of these high-resolution cameras with facial recognition covering almost every inch of public space is that the likelihood of direct physical violence decreases, while thousands of scams emerge from behind the scenes (one example that surprised me was that scammers would print fake QR codes and put them on bike-sharing bikes on the side of the road, and when you scanned them and tried to ride, your phone would (a virus will be implanted). On the point of being robbed at night alone, I had to worry a little more when I lived in San Francisco, Oakland or Los Angeles before. So when I see angry wolves sending me threats of physical violence, I’m never too worried.
However, the threats that say “report me to the authorities” are more worrisome. For those pinkies who were infuriated by my dislike, this kind of shady behavior is as simple as lifting a finger. It is not unprecedented for foreigners to be jailed for political retaliation in China.
It developed to the point where I would often show a few of my mainland friends a draft of my tweets before I tweeted, asking them to help me see if I had stepped over the red line. Was it a bit of a straw man? Yes, indeed. I’m not a big enough figure to pose a threat to the CCP, but that’s what the CCP does with speech censorship: you never know where that red line is. It’s a bit like crossing a vast lawn with a landmine buried somewhere under the sod; you don’t know where it is, and the chances of stepping on it are very small, but there is no doubt that the mine is there. So you don’t know which step you’re taking will be the last one.
My fear of stepping on a landmine grows with each passing day as reminders like the one below become more and more common. This is the feedback I received from a Chinese tweeter after I teased Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying with a tweet: “Great, but it feels like you’re going to be declared “persona non grata” by the Foreign Ministry soon.
For people who have only lived in free societies, especially those who don’t believe in a “Culture of cancellation,” this fear may be hard to resonate with. But with recent cases of high-profile public figures being “canceled” in the United States, there should be little debate about whether a “culture of cancellation” exists. The difference in the mainland is that the person who “cancels” you is the government of the country.
So in the months leading up to my flight back to the US, I tried to keep a low profile and avoid saying anything that would cause problems for myself or even my friends around me. I finally got out of the mainland about a month after the above tweet, and by that time had saved up a bellyful of criticism and condemnation of the Chinese Communist government.
Back in the U.S. I was safe for the time being and no longer had any worries about speaking out. For the first time since my first trip to the mainland in April 2016, I was able to fully and freely criticize the CCP government and leaders for their repression of the people of Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and for their absurdity on the issue of Taiwan: a country that is clearly an independent country with its own passport and currency, over which the CCP must claim territorial sovereignty. These statements soon led to an overwhelming human search for me by the little pinkos, and indirectly proved that my concerns about those reports before I left the mainland were correct. The pinkies went through every photo I had ever posted, deduced my address in Shanghai, and even searched for the names of some of my friends. This time, their threat changed slightly, “Never go back to the mainland, you fucking white trash.” Of course, now I’m not afraid, especially considering that there is a Pacific Ocean in between. The little pinkos can’t make any substantial threats now.
I have, in the past, quit jobs that paid well because I didn’t feel like I fit in. At that time, I definitely did not say that I had enough wealth freedom to make that decision, and the process itself repeatedly torn, but finally chose to leave. Just like I couldn’t follow in Volav’s footsteps and sell my soul, I couldn’t sell my soul and tout the CCP for the code of wealth.
My desire to speak out grew stronger and stronger as the CCP government, through its own incompetence and deliberate cover-up, led to the outbreak of the New Crown epidemic and has since been trying to rewrite public opinion to shift the blame. By the time the plane home left the tarmac, the anger that had been suppressed since March had finally erupted.
The assumption was that even if I could convince myself to remain silent on the mainland for a year and a half, there would come a time when my principles would drive me to speak out and my sense of duty would override my need to make a living. When that moment comes, all of my previous career efforts will have dissipated. On the mainland, your career can be destroyed in an instant by a small gesture, such as liking Taiwan’s independence on a social media platform outside the walls. If you call Xi Jinping an “idiot villain,” not only will your career be over, but you could have your visa revoked or worse.
If you are a cynical person who is not used to authoritarian bullying, then your career as a foreigner on the mainland is equivalent to a castle made of sand on a beach. Even if you work hard to achieve something and look shiny, eventually this dictatorial wave will sweep in and wash away everything you have.
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