The other major aspect was the ever-changing definition of what was sensitive or not, and the unclear rules about what could be said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, somebody got their account frozen for posting this and that, maybe you shouldn’t post that kind of stuff’, they say.” “I think that the terrifying thing about censorship is that it brings about self-censorship, and everyone is censoring each other,” Guo said. She’s so courageous.”įor the feminist writer Guo Jing, who also faced difficulties posting reports during and after the outbreak, suffering censorship and penalties for speaking out had the cumulative effect of altering what people thought they could discuss both on and offline. In that sense, she represents a kind of personality that doesn’t belong to this century, or the last century, but one from the future. “Zhang Zhan showed with her actions that all those rules are ridiculous,” Ai said. It is another layer of censorship that is not often challenged. In China, the government requires journalists to carry state-distributed press cards, and forbids most independent journalism. Guo Jing has been censored for writing about domestic violence. Zhang was sentenced for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” by reporting from a locked-down Wuhan and posting videos and snippets of information to YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms. That punishment, of course, pales in comparison to the four-year sentence doled out by a Shanghai court to 37-year-old lawyer turned citizen journalist Zhang Zhan on 28 December. “For a professional writer, not being able to publish and release their work is a very cruel punishment,” she said. “The consequences of that will naturally be dangerous,” she said.įang Fang said that publishing houses in China had stopped releasing works that she was contracted for, including her latest novels, though previously published books can still be found in bookstores. The selective blocking of certain kinds of speech while allowing other “frenzied” speech to flourish is an obstacle toward further reform and opening in China, she believes. And while she was constantly censored, other voices attacking her were allowed free rein.Īlthough Fang Fang’s WeChat and Weibo accounts had not been suspended, they were still occasionally blocked, she said. In her lockdown diary, the Wuhan resident relayed her constant battle with censors and commenters when posting pieces of her diary to WeChat and Weibo, the social media platform owned by Sina. “Political correctness is so prioritised that when we’re in a crisis, even weeping and mourning are deemed bringing shame on the country and delivering the sword to the outside world,” she told the Observer. Her diary posts were initially read and reshared by millions in China, but the entries began to be censored. Her Wuhan Diary was published in English in June last year, though that has also led to problems for her at home after hardcore nationalists hounded her for publishing the account abroad. Wang Fang, who writes under the pen name Fang Fang, is the most well-known of the three. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty ImagesĪi, who previously chronicled HIV-infected villagers and corruption that led to schools collapsing in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, had her WeChat account – on the ubiquitous social media platform owned by tech giant Tencent –permanently shut down during the lockdown. Chinese novelist Fang Fang has been criticised for calling for free speech.
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