A Chinese Software Engineer Says No One Is Yours: Stop and Think, or Leave China Until Elections Comes to an End

The online persona of a Silicon Valley-based software engineer from China says he likes facts and one is one, zero is zero. “I think it’s my responsibility to rebut this nonsense.”

More Less asked not to be identified by his real name because his posts might attract harassment. His Chinese-language fact-checking blog is part of a grassroots movement fighting political misinformation spread by US users of Chinese-language social media, such as Weibo and WeChat. His recent posts have taken on claims that California Democrats made it legal to shoplift up to $950 in goods or that widespread voter fraud distorted the 2020 presidential election.

With the US elections two weeks away, More Less and other activists are worried that misinformation about the elections could sway voters to stay home, or at least not cast their ballot.

Messaging app WeChat is seen as one of the main venues for Chinese-language misinformation in the US. In China, the version that is offered called Weixin, is used for a lot more than chatting, with functions such as hailing taxis and storing vaccine codes. The US version has limited capabilities and a lower profile, aside from being the target of an attempted ban by then president Donald Trump in 2020. Millions of Chinese Americans and Chinese people with friends and family in China use the text messaging service to organize their political activity. In 2022, WeChat groups played a role in the recall of members of San Francisco’s school board, and New York City officials’ decision to pause plans to scrap testing requirements for some public high schools.

“We only get the garbage. Jin Xia Niu is a manager at the Chinese for Affirmative Action. In June, the San Francisco organization launched a Chinese-language fact-checking initiative called PiYaoBa, which posts articles to its website and public WeChat accounts that are written in a similar style to fact-checking organizations such as Snopes and FactCheck.org.

In recent years, Beijing has extended its crackdown on dissent to the foreign platform, detaining and jailing Chinese Twitter users who criticized the government. The anonymous voices of dissent were amplified through Li.

The account “Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher” live-mailed the demonstrations in real-time, offering a very rare glimpse into how quickly and widely the emergence of dissent unfolded across the country.

Behind the account is Li, a bespectacled 30-year-old painter, who spent most of his waking hours glued to a chair in front of a curved monitor and a pastel-colored keyboard – hundreds of thousands of miles away from the protests in a living room corner in Italy.

He received thousands of private messages in his private inbox, many of which were from people in China who were following the protests. He posted them on their behalf, shielding the senders from the scrutiny of Chinese authorities.

“I didn’t have the time to react at all. My only thought at the time was to record what was happening. The influence is beyond my imagination. I didn’t expect billions of clicks on my feed in such a short period of time.”

The father of Li knew how to be on the wrong side of politics. Born to a Nationalist army officer in 1949, he was persecuted as a “counter-revolutionary” growing up under Mao Zedong’s tumultuous reign. In his adolescence, he could no longer stand the torment and fled to the hills in southern China, where he found work in a factory.

It was on Saturday that Li got a phone call from his parents in China who told him that they had just had a visit from the police.

“As soon as I started to update Twitter, they called my parents to tell me to stop posting. And then they went to our house at midnight to harass my parents,” Li said.

Li told his parents he wasn’t working for anyone, and no money was involved. His father begged him to stop posting.

In the latter half of the Cultural Revolution, which swept China in the 1960s and 1970s, he was enrolled into a college as a “worker-peasant-soldier” student (admitted not on academic merit but class background), and stayed after graduation to work as an art teacher.

There were slogans against Covid tests and lock downs in China’s largest cities, from the eastern financial hub of Shanghai to the capital Beijing. Many young people held up sheets of white paper in a symbolic protest against censorship, demanding the government give them back the freedom of speech, the press, movies, books and arts.

But under leader Xi, that implicit deal is looking increasingly precarious. His zero- Covid policy has hampered economic growth, pushed youth unemployment to a record level, and he has an authoritarian agenda that has resulted in tightened ideological control and squeezed personal freedoms to an extent unseen in decades.

Living Under the Tides: Portrait of a Communist Teacher in China During the World Wide Outburst, and How to Keep Your Censorship

Their calls made it feel like Li was growing up when China seemed freer and more open to the world, and he knew how to paint and watch cartoons and films.

He said he didn’t seek out politics but was swept up by currents when he took to the streets. He described himself as someone who was pushed along by the tides and chose to document an important chapter of it.

Things got even worse during the pandemic. Many accounts were banned for speaking out on feminism, zero-covid and other issues. In two months, Li lost 52 accounts. “My accounts would survive for about four or five hours – with the shortest record being 10 minutes,” Li said. I treated it like a performance art.

Liberal intellectuals, lawyers and journalists and other influential commentators led critical discussions on social issues – sometimes issuing scathing criticism or ridicule of officials.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

Piasso at the Circus: Portrait of a Uyghur Girl at the Shanghai Demonstration in July 2012

By 2012, Li had become more critical of society. At 19 years old he held his first personal exhibition at a gallery in Jinan. He named it “Picasso at the Circus” – meant to “mock this absurd society, which is like a circus filled with funny animals,” according to an introduction of the event.

He lost his account on Weibo after he posted a picture of a young Uyghur girl in police custody. I wanted to be brave for her. It was well worth it,” he said on Twitter. “Having seen her face, I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight if I just sit by and not retweet it.”

After exhausting all of the ways to set up a new account, Li gave up on creating new ones. He said it felt good to no longer use code names.

“We can’t even discuss him on the internet. It is beyond everyone’s imagination that such a slogan would be shouted out on Urumqi Road,” Li said, referring to the site of the Shanghai protest.

“I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that I froze for a second when I heard the slogan. I told myself that if they shout, I have to document it. He said that he wrote it out in a micro-messaging post.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

Li was a student and the Chinese government had given up their zero-covariant policy in the wake of the December 13 protests in Beijing

Death threats were one of the thousands of direct messages that Li received. He said that he gets a lot of anonymous harassment saying that he knows where you are and will kill you.

He focused on the protests and ignored them. He would come back to haunt him when he stepped away from his computer.

“This account is more important than my life,” he said. “I will not shut it down. I’ve arranged for someone else to take over if something bad happens to me.”

By the first week of December, the demonstrations had largely petered out. Protesters were warned not to take to the streets again by the police, some were taken away for questioning, and some remained in jail.

The Chinese government caved in to the protesters on Wednesday, announcing it was removing some of the strictest restrictions on healthcare, in the clearest sign yet they’re giving up their zero-covid policy.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

He laughed at himself for living in China during the Pandemic — The most dangerous cat on the Chinese internet, a parody handle of the foreign ministry

He said that when he saw people holding up pieces of white paper, he had to sacrifice something of himself as well. “I’m mentally prepared, even if authorities won’t let me see my parents again.”

People in his home province can’t distinguish the vowels in his name, “Li” and “ni”.

He has a parody handle of the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman that said that foreign reporters should “chuckle to themselves” for living in China during the Pandemic. The phrase has since been used to criticize zero- Covid on Chinese social media.

“The cat is now known to the Chinese diaspora around the world. He said that it had become the most dangerous cat on the Chinese internet.

State-level restrictions on social media users using TikTok, a social media company owned by ByteDance, released during the Biden administration

The app had only become more popular in the intervening months. “We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, told the assembled group. “So we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.” The Biden administration was months into negotiations with ByteDance, the Chinese company that created and owns TikTok, about national security concerns. The White House staff who briefed the creators of TikTok were forbidden from using their work phones to download the app.

The United States would have to block and prohibit all transactions by social media companies with at least one million monthly users who are based in or under the influence of countries that are considered foreign adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba.

Some Republican governors have introduced state-level restrictions on the use of TikTok in government-owned devices. In the past two weeks, at least seven states have introduced such measures.

The flurry of activity contrasts with the lengthy negotiations TikTok has been having for years with the US government on a potential deal that may allow the company to address the national security concerns and to continue serving US users.

“We will continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the United States,” McQuaide added.

TikTok has previously said it doesn’t share information with the Chinese government and that a US-based security team decides who can access US user data from China. Employees based in China can currently access user data at TikTok.

Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the White House hosted a call with TikTok creators. The creators had tens of million of followers, and were briefed by the White House press secretary and members of the National Security Council on the White House goals and priorities. The meeting followed a similar effort the previous summer, in which the White House recruited dozens of TikTokers to help encourage young people to get vaccinated against Covid.

The company has been accused of censoring content that is politically sensitive to the Chinese government, as well as banning some accounts that posted about China’s mass internment camps. The US State Department believes there are up to 2million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in these camps.

Security experts have said that the data could allow China to identify intelligence opportunities or to seek to influence Americans through disinformation campaigns.

“Look, I think there are many human rights violations that are happening in China and around the world,” Beckerman said. “I think these are very important. I’m not here to be the expert on human rights violations around the world.”

TikTok and the Center for Countering Digital Hate: How Can the Chinese Government Attempt to Disrupt Our Kids from Within?

In addition to security and privacy concerns, TikTok has also been criticized for surfacing potentially harmful content related to suicide and eating disorders to teenagers.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate found that it can take less than three minutes after signing up for a TikTok account to see content related to suicide and about five more minutes to find a community promoting eating disorder content.

Beckerman dismissed concerns raised by Tapper that some American parents may see that study and believe “the Chinese government may be trying to destroy our kids from within.” Beckerman nodded to the app’s parental controls, but he called Tapper’s argument hypocritical.

Beckerman said there are people that are complaining about employees in China, and they want to apply Chinese-style media rules to the US. “We have freedom of speech, among other things here in the United States.”