In the week since Clubhouse, an invitation-only App, began attracting a flood of new users in China, many inside the country have been worried about a crackdown on the app.
Communist Party censors appear to have shut out Clubhouse, Silicon Valley’s latest social media hit. It comes a week after the audio-only chat app set off a rare lively and free-wheeling debate in the Chinese-speaking world over taboo topics.
Some of the chats dealt with the plight of Uighur Muslims in China or the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. But on Monday evening, Clubhouse users from Beijing to Shenzhen said they dropped out of the conversation midway through and their phones displayed error messages.
Thousands of people then quickly flooded the newly created Clubhouse chat room using a virtual private network (VPN) to bypass China’s Internet firewall, confirming that the app had been blocked.
Some said new users were no longer able to register because their phones were not receiving text messages with access codes.
After exchanging views, they concluded that Chinese censors should be behind the culprit. In the week since the invite-only app began attracting a flood of new users in China, many Chinese Clubhouse users have been speculating that the app would be suppressed.
“I thought it would last through the Lunar New Year,” said Lai Fu, a China-based journalist. “But if the censors don’t respond to the chatter about Xinjiang and the Tiananmen incident, then they’re being unprofessional.”
(Photo by: thomas peter/Reuters) Some of the chatter from Clubhouse users concerned the plight of Uighurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. Many people there are held in centers like the one pictured.
Since signing up for Clubhouse a week ago, he has been listening to Uighurs living in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region share their personal stories as soon as he wakes up, then speaking in an online debate about Taiwan and mainland China, and in another room criticizing overseas Chinese users for being extremely complimentary about Beijing’s handling of the New crown outbreak.
Since its launch, Clubhouse has captured the attention of Silicon Valley, quickly gaining a reputation as an exclusive gathering place for the elite in sports, entertainment and technology.
While Clubhouse initially made a splash in the U.S. last year, it didn’t catch fire in the Chinese-speaking world until last month, and some of the political issues on Clubhouse quickly became particularly eye-catching. On the usually heavily monitored Chinese Internet, people are starting to engage in open political discussions.
For advocates of free speech in China, the Clubhouse craze harkens back to a decade ago. For others, Clubhouse is reminiscent of the mid-2010s, when China’s domestic Twitter-like platform Weibo was on the rise. Shortly thereafter, the government also began tightening rules to curb online criticism.
On Clubhouse, the range of topics extends well beyond politics to Music, business and other areas. Some users have created a group called “Waiting for Jack Ma.” —- The Chinese billionaire had suddenly disappeared from the public eye in recent months, raising concerns that the tech giant he founded, Alibaba Group Holding Limited, 9988.HK, BABA, or Alibaba for short).
In another chatroom featuring employees of a Chinese takeaway app, two product managers of the app joined the chatroom and the discussion quickly turned into a heated argument. Users continued to discuss the treatment of takeaway workers long after they had left that chat room.
A Clubhouse chat group expressed the voices of the delivery guys, sparking a debate about their treatment.
Photo credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
It was not immediately possible to determine how many Chinese users have joined Clubhouse, and the San Francisco-based company did not return a request for comment.
Several users on Taobao, Alibaba’s online trading platform, previously offered Clubhouse app sign-up invitations for about $10 each. After access to Clubhouse was blocked, results for the term Clubhouse were also unavailable in the search bar.
Calls made by reporters to the State Internet Information Office of China also went unanswered.
Shortly before the Clubhouse chatroom became inaccessible, the Global Times, a Communist Party media outlet, criticized Clubhouse for being too one-sided in its political discussions and for silencing pro-Beijing voices.
Monday’s blocking had been a concern for Chinese users from the start. They found the app on the one-year anniversary of the death of Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang; Li helped draw attention to the New Crown virus in Wuhan, the epicenter of the original New Crown outbreak.
Chinese users discovered the app on the one-year anniversary of Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang’s death. Li Wenliang had helped draw attention to the New Coronavirus.
Photo credit: Ropi/Zuma Press
Some of Li Wenliang’s last words, such as “A healthy society should not have only one voice,” sparked a brief storm of dissent in China that hadn’t been seen in years. Even before China largely managed to contain the Epidemic last summer, the country’s social media platforms had been largely tamed and prominent critics kept their mouths shut.
On Saturday, users created a chat room on Clubhouse for a moment of silence to pay tribute to Li Wenliang.
Hours before problems with access to Clubhouse in mainland China, thousands of users gathered in a chat room created by cartoonist Ba Dou Cao to discuss whether users of the app had been interrogated by Chinese authorities. Ba Tiu Cao, his pen name, is a Chinese activist now living in exile in Australia. The group attracted about 5,000 participants, including exiled artist Ai Weiwei, who shared his experience of living under surveillance.
An hour after the app was blocked, several new chat rooms for exchanging security precautions emerged, with some marveling at the social media platform’s short Life in China.
Renowned feminist activist String (real name Zhou Xiaoxuan), 27, was temporarily out of touch with her 6,700 Clubhouse followers, but reached 90 Monday evening after circumventing network restrictions and registering a new account.
Meanwhile, in one chatroom, thousands of users continued to share memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and in another, hundreds of Hong Kongers with anti-government stances answered questions from some Cantonese-speaking users from the mainland Chinese city of Guangzhou.
Like many others, Lai Fu, a Chinese journalist who continues to use Clubhouse with the help of a wall-scrambler, got rather fed up with hearing arguments in defense of China’s political system in Clubhouse chat rooms over the past week and created a chat room for users from across the Chinese-speaking world to comment on their own governments, including local officials — but only in a critical way.
More than a thousand people joined the chatroom, spouting what they saw as the poor design of public transportation in Wuhan and Taiwan, and complaining about Australia’s refugee policy and what they called China’s political propaganda.
Lai Fu admitted that starting such a chat room was a risk within his means, adding that he probably could only do so much after authorities signaled that the app was overstepping its bounds. He said he is unlikely to host a chat room about Xinjiang or Tiananmen.
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