I returned to California last June after living in China for almost four years. My Time in China after the outbreak of 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 Chinese 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 curious when they saw the empty scenes of these Chinese cities on the news at that time (by March after the virus spread in the US people couldn’t care less).
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 found out that the only way to succeed on Chinese social media as a foreigner is to abandon all your dignity and shout “I love China” at least once in every video. ” in every video. As it turns out, I don’t want to be one of those foreigners.
The “Great China! ” is one of the most successful foreigners on Chinese social media, with pictures of his consistent facial expressions in every video.
It is clear that the new epidemic is several orders of magnitude worse than the original situation due to the incompetence and deliberate cover-up by the Chinese Communist government. As the facts continued to emerge, my heart changed. Since then, it has felt difficult to suppress my desire to speak out and criticize the government, which in China would certainly be tantamount to career suicide.
That’s not to say I didn’t suffer from the “cognitive dissonance” of making money in China before the New Crown epidemic. The first time I went to China on business was in 2016, when I worked for a U.S. company whose clients included Chinese police departments. I later discovered that the Chinese Communist Party may have used such devices in the surveillance of 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 about their unvarnished views of the United States, I came to the conclusion that China under Communist rule was a threat to the future stability and prosperity of the United States, and that the Trump administration was largely 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 Chinese government’s continued harsh suppression of the people’s freedom of expression was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
As an American with relatively good knowledge of China, 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 Chinese social media or, for that matter, any other field.
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 flight cancellations, making those remaining days I spent in China a purgatory. Knowing that my chapter here had come to an end, the flights between China and the U.S. were pitifully few and far between due to the “five-one” restrictions of the new Chinese epidemic. The number of flights between China and the U.S. was pathetic 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 trying to tweet in Chinese. While I was still in China, I used to tweet humorous accounts of life in China, describing what it was like to live under a government that tried to control the population from all sides while promoting nationalistic fervor.
My first “trending” tweet was a humorous segment documenting the difficulties of using American (off-wall) social media in China.
@kevinonchina
I tweet from China, spend about ten minutes a day writing tweets and then eight hours a day changing VPN servers
VPN services in China have been continuously suppressed in the wake of the New crown outbreak as part of the CCP’s increased propaganda efforts in the New Crown public opinion war. Twitter users who are in China have to use VPNs to bypass firewalls, and judging by the number of likes and retweets on this tweet, everyone is probably feeling the effects of the suppression of VPNs.
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 lightning bolt of humor, my most popular Chinese joke to date.
@kevinonchina: I’ve been in China recently, my Parents are in the US
I didn’t know much about Chinese tweeting for the first time, so I said something critical about Brother Azhong
Several people’s messages made me worry about my parents’ situation
I quickly called my father to ask
Surprisingly, my mom is not dead
I think people liked the segment in large part because they hadn’t heard such an angle before. If “your mother is dead” is a conventional insult in your environment, sometimes it may take an outsider to realize the absurdity of such a curse. This kind of playful criticism may also be preferred because it is not safe to say such playful things inside the walls. For Chinese netizens, “openly criticizing nationalist fanaticism” in China and being “labeled as a traitor who hates the country” is basically just a thin line. Most people must make a conscious effort to stay away from that line.
Since we’re talking about this I also want to mention that the vast majority of Chinese Twitter users don’t use their own photos as their avatars and try not to involve themselves in their Twitter names, the biggest reason being that people don’t want to be called by the local police department to “have tea The biggest reason is that people don’t want to be called by the local police department for tea or be interviewed by the unit leader. Like a “should not like” tweet, say a The most important reason is that people don’t want to be called by the local police for a “tea” or be interviewed by the head of the unit. Even for those who have emigrated overseas, their tweets can still affect their loved ones back home 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 sent me a screenshot of his WeChat circle of friends, where someone had posted one of my Twitter segments. That means a Chinese 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 Chinese to believe 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 China’s big 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 threats of 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 stick them on roadside bike-sharing bikes, and when you scanned them and tried to ride, your phone would (being implanted with a virus). 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 are angry after being disliked by me, 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 got to the point where I would often show a few Chinese friends a draft tweet 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, it is. 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 V after I teased Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying about her tweet: “Zan, but always feel like you’re soon to be declared by the Foreign Ministry as “persona non grata”.”
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. However, recent cases of “cancellation” of high-profile public figures in the U.S. are frequent, and the question of The existence of a “cancellation culture” should not be controversial. The difference in China 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 China about a month after the above tweet, and by that time had a stomach full of criticism and condemnation of the Chinese Communist government.
Back in the United States I was safe for the time being and no longer had the worry of speaking out. For the first time since I first went to China 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 China were correct. The pinkos 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 China, you fucking white trash.” Of course, now I’m not afraid, especially considering the Pacific Ocean separating us. The little pinkos can’t make any substantial threats now.
In the past, I’ve 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 and tout China in exchange for the wealth code.
My desire to speak out grew stronger and stronger as the Chinese 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 in China for another year and a half, there would come a time when my principles would drive me to speak out, when 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. In China, 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 thug,” 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, your career as a foreigner in China is equivalent to a castle made of sand on a beach. Even if you work hard to achieve something and look shiny, eventually the dictatorial wave will sweep in and wash away everything you have.
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