Twitter Users in China Face Detention and Threats in New Beijing Crackdown...Tech giant 'declines to comment' on govt campaign...
Twitter Users in China Face Detention and Threats in New
Beijing Crackdown
Twitter is blocked in China, but users in a small but
active community in the country gain access with special software.
By Paul Mozur Jan. 10, 2019
SHANGHAI — One man spent 15 days in a detention center.
The police threatened another’s family. A third was chained to a chair for
eight hours of interrogation.
Their offense: posting on Twitter.
The Chinese police, in a sharp escalation of the
country’s online censorship efforts, are questioning and detaining a growing
number of Twitter users even though the social media platform is blocked in
China and the vast majority of people in the country cannot see it.
The crackdown is the latest front in President Xi
Jinping’s campaign to suppress internet activity. In effect, the authorities
are extending their control over Chinese citizens’ online lives, even if what
they post is unlikely to be seen in the country.
“If we give up Twitter, we are losing one of our last
places to speak,” said Wang Aizhong, a human-rights activist who said the
police had told him to delete messages criticizing the Chinese government.
When Beijing is unable to get activists to delete tweets,
others will sometimes do the job. Mr. Wang refused to take down his tweets.
Then, one night last month while he was reading a book, his phone buzzed with
text messages from Twitter that contained backup codes to his account.
An hour later, he said, 3,000 of his tweets had been
deleted. He blamed government-affiliated hackers, although those who were
responsible and the methods they used could not be independently confirmed.
A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment on the
government campaign.
China has long policed what its citizens can see and say,
including online, but the recent push shows that Beijing’s vision of internet
control encompasses social media around the world. Messages on WhatsApp, which
is blocked in China, have begun to appear as evidence in Chinese trials.
The Chinese government has increasingly demanded that
Google and Facebook take down content that officials object to even though both
companies’ sites are inaccessible in China. After the exiled Chinese
billionaire Guo Wengui used the platforms to lob graft accusations at top
Chinese leaders, Facebook and Twitter suspended his accounts temporarily,
citing user complaints and the disclosure of personal information.
Twitter may be banned in China, but the platform plays an
important role in political debate and the discussion of issues in the country.
To access the service, a small but active community uses software to circumvent
the government’s controls over what people can see online. According to an
estimate based on a survey of 1,627 Chinese internet users last year by Daniela
Stockmann, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Germany, only 0.4
percent of China’s internet users, roughly 3.2 million people, use Twitter.
While it remains off limits for people in China, official
media outlets like the Communist Party-controlled People’s Daily newspaper and
the Xinhua news agency have used Twitter to shape perceptions of the country in
the rest of the world.
“On the one hand, state media takes advantage of the full
features of these platforms to reach millions of people,” said Sarah Cook, a
senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group
based in the United States. “On the other hand, ordinary Chinese are risking
interrogation and jail for using these same platforms to communicate with each
other and the outside world.”
LinkedIn, the business networking service and one of the
few American social media outlets allowed in China, has long bowed to the
country’s censors. It briefly took down the Chinese accounts of Peter Humphrey,
a British private investigator who was once imprisoned in China, last month and
Zhou Fengsuo, a human-rights activist, this month. The company sent emails to
both containing language similar to the messages it sends users when it removes
posts that violate censorship rules.
“What we’ve seen in recent weeks is the authorities
desperately escalating the censorship of social media,” Mr. Humphrey said. “I
think it’s quite astonishing that on this cloak-and-dagger basis, LinkedIn has
been gagging people and preventing their comments from being seen in China.”
Both accounts have been restored. In a statement,
LinkedIn apologized for taking the accounts down and said it had done so by
accident. “Our Trust and Safety team is updating our internal processes to help
prevent an error like this from happening again,” the statement said.
With Twitter, Chinese officials are targeting a vibrant
platform for Chinese activists.
Interviews with nine Twitter users questioned by the
police and a review of a recording of a four-hour interrogation found a similar
pattern: The police would produce printouts of tweets and advise users to
delete either the specific messages or their entire accounts. Officers would
often complain about posts that were critical of the Chinese government or that
specifically mentioned Mr. Xi.
The police have used threats and, sometimes, physical
restraints, according to Twitter users who were questioned. Huang Chengcheng,
an activist with more than 8,000 Twitter followers, said his hands and feet
were manacled to a chair while he was interrogated for eight hours in
Chongqing. When the inquiry was over, he signed a promise to stay off Twitter.
Those pulled in for questioning do not necessarily have
the biggest presence on the social network. Pan Xidian, a 47-year-old
construction company employee in Xiamen with about 4,000 followers, posted a
comic by a dissident cartoonist known as Rebel Pepper, along with criticism of
human-rights crackdowns. In November, the police called him in for 20 hours of
questioning. After being forced to delete several tweets, he was allowed to go,
and he thought his ordeal was over.
But officers showed up at his workplace a short time
later and threw him into a car. They asked him to sign a document that said he
had disturbed the social order. He complied. Then they showed him a second
document, which said he would be detained. He spent the next two weeks in a
cell with 10 other people, watching propaganda videos.
“In this era, we certainly know fear, but I can’t control
myself,” Mr. Pan said while crying during a phone interview after he was
released. “We’ve been living a very suppressed life.”
“We’re like lambs,” he added. “They’re taking us one
after another. We have no ability to fight back.”
The crackdown is unusually broad and punitive. When
censoring domestic social media in the past, officials have targeted prominent
users. People were questioned or detained less frequently and more haphazardly.
The current push appears to be well coordinated between
local and national law enforcement authorities, said Xiao Qiang, a professor at
the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Actually taking nationwide action, physically calling in
all of these people, we’ve never seen that before,” he said.
The new approach involves broad action by China’s
powerful Ministry of Public Security, which oversees law enforcement and
political security. Several Twitter users said local authorities had
specifically cited the internet police, a branch of the security ministry that
monitors online activity. The agency, which refers to such local enforcement as
“touching the ground,” was taken over last summer by a hard-liner known for a
crackdown on telecom fraud in Xiamen, a city on the southeast coast.
The security ministry and the Cyberspace Administration
of China, which regulates the internet, did not respond to faxed requests for
comment.
The police have impressed upon activists that they can
see posts outside China’s wall of censorship. After a four-hour grilling of a
Twitter user with a small following who had complained in a post about the
environment, a police officer offered him some advice. The user, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity for fear of further reprisal, recorded the
interrogation and provided a copy of the audio.
“Delete all your tweets, and shut down your account,” the
officer said. “Everything on the internet can be monitored, even the
inappropriate comments in WeChat groups,” a reference to a popular Chinese
messaging app.
“This is truly wholehearted advice for you,” the officer
added. “If this happens a second time, it will be handled differently. It will
affect your parents. You are still so young. If you get married and have kids,
it will affect them.”
The efforts have dampened debate on Chinese-language
Twitter, said Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher with Human Rights Watch, who
chronicled the crackdown in November. Still, not all users have gone quietly.
“Many activists want free speech,” Ms. Wang said in an
interview. “Even when they’re harassed and intimidated, they’re very brave and
continue to tweet. This is an act of defiance to censorship and oppression.”
Li Yuan contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Qiqing Lin
contributed research.
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