After the fall of China's internet czar

Fang Kecheng relaunched his NewsLab on Facebook in May. The first lecture on media and social development in mainland China was taught by him. The assignment centered around Archaeology, a mainland Chinese website that had been shut down.

The same fate would soon befall NewsLab itself.

On Jan. 10, a WeChat post by the YouthAssemble (Qingnian Dayuan) website opined: "Without the Australian wildfires, I would never have known how powerful China was 33 years ago." It was retweeted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party official newspaper, the People's Daily, and went viral. "Refuting this kind of anti-narrative is a duty," Fang says. He posted in response: "I'm sorry, but we shouldn't sing the praises of [the government's handling of the] wildfires 33 years ago." Fang cited a China Youth Daily report from the time, and hit out at YouthAssemble for inciting nationalistic sentiment and distorting history. But his post was deleted, and the original post carried on spreading through the Chinese internet.

Chinese internet users found comments Fang had written on Facebook and accused him of supporting independence for Hong Kong. Three days before Fang's WeChat account was shut down, YouthAssemble posted that Fang's account was a "newcomer that had been banned from Weibo and Bilibili for supporting Hong Kong independence. The person behind the account is Fang Kecheng, and we think he will get blocked pretty soon."

"It was pretty obvious from the way they wrote it that this was the organization that reported me," Fang says. "There are considerable vested interests involved here, and maybe I trod on somebody's toes."

"I didn't think it would get shut down by the platform itself, because NewsLab brought traffic and content to WeChat," Fang says. "But they must have gotten a directive from the Cyberspace Administration."

People lamented that even such a soft-spoken moderate as Fang would get shut down. But Fang himself admits that his reputation as a moderate came from self-censorship. He was just better at figuring out where the red lines were before, he says.

The head office of the Curiosity Daily was in an old, three-story house on Fuxing Middle Road in Shanghai. One afternoon in July 2018, it was raided by about 30 people, comprised of officials from the city's Cyberspace Administration, cultural law enforcers and a few uniformed police officers.

Reporter Chen Liya was the only employee from Taiwan there. At the time of the raid, she was in the editorial office on the second floor. The intruders ordered her and her colleagues to stop working immediately, not to touch the computers and to hand over their phones. Chen Liya and several of her mainland Chinese colleagues protested that the officials and officers had no search warrant.

To which the reply came: "You know who we are. What do we need a warrant for?"

Then they herded all of the staff into the conference room. One of them had some sheets of A4, possible evidence of "criminal activity." They had two articles printed out in very large, thick font, according to Chen. She says the two articles weren't considered sensitive enough to have triggered the raid, but the two authors were interviewed as part of the investigation anyway. She also heard one of the raiders say into their phone: "These people really won't play ball!"

"I knew that there were controls on free speech in China, but I really hadn't expected to encounter something like this," Chen says. For Chen, who was born in Taiwan after the lifting of martial law and the end of the authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) regime, the incident recalled the white terror of Taiwan's own past.

Later, the Shanghai Cyberspace Administration issued a document saying it had received online tipoffs that the company behind the Curiosity Daily had illegally set up a news operation and editorial team, provided news and current affairs content in violation of regulations, ran original news copy, and published a large number of articles on current affairs and politics from the foreign media.

The Curiosity Daily announced it would be suspending operations for one month to undergo "rectification." Its app was removed from stores, and the entire platform ground to a halt. Some articles were also deleted.

This wasn't the first time Chen Liya had had her work deleted. Her most short-lived report -- about Peking University student, #MeToo whistle blower and labor activist Yue Xin -- only existed online for 36 minutes. Articles about a lack of support for Putin's constant "re-election" by younger people in Russia, the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Student Games in Europe, the 10th anniversary of Shanghai Pride, the beating of a Beijing security guard, a gender transition service center in Guangzhou, and the shutting down of the Feminist Voices Weibo account, also got deleted -- or "harmonized," Chen recalls. Chen also remembers being detained by police and chased out of a court building; none of which would have happened in contemporary Taiwan.

The war on independent media in China was also waged on individual social media influencers. Wuhan writer Fang Fang felt the pain of this keenly after the coronavirus emerged in that city. Her Lockdown Diary had already had several entries deleted. But then she was overwhelmed with online threats and abuse after she started to prepare the diary for publication as a book in English. The wave of hate also engulfed Liang Yanping, a professor at Hunan University, and Wang Xiaoni, a retired professor at Hainan University, both of whom expressed support for Fang Fang. They were subjected to investigation by their universities, and their accounts on Weibo shut down.

Even media that makes money hasn’t been spared. In February 2019, the authorities shut down the Weibo and WeChat accounts of Talent Limited Youth -- the brainchild of mega-platform MiMeng -- after it published an article titled "The death of a humble-born champion." The Beijing News and The Paper -- formerly cutting-edge publications -- applauded the move.

But Fang Kecheng doesn't agree with them. "As long as there are enough people to keep reporting, the government will continue to intervene and ban things. But such an approach will promote populism," he says. He says the fact that some organizations have stayed out of reach, while others have been targeted is "the highest expression of nationalism."

He says the war on independent media has hurt public discourse and the creative industry. "I always wanted a wider audience for my work, but the practise of informing has made a lot of people very nervous," Fang says. "Now, we are less likely to let people outside of our immediate bubble see what we write, so they can't report us. But this is also bad for public discourse."

Chen Liya went back to Taiwan, where she was hired by Initium Media. She has since filed a number of influential reports for them from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China.

Fang Kecheng continues to teach in Hong Kong. Copies of his WeChat posts are available outside the Great Firewall of Chinese internet censorship. They can only be viewed by those in mainland China with circumvention tools, or sent to followers who leave their e-mail address. His Reading the Foreign Media paid course is now on hold.

Fang makes light of the crackdown for himself, noting that in working alone he is not bringing collective punishment on others, as he would be if he were working for a newspaper. "I'm just a single person; but if it were the case of something like The Wall Street News, the entire company could be affected," he says.

NGOCN's editorial team have each gone their separate ways, doing their own thing, but have been hard to track down during the pandemic. "Some enrolled in college, some switched to research, some are still freelancers, and some have gone over to traditional media organizations," says An An. "We need to make a living, at the end of the day, and we need to protect ourselves first and foremost, given the current climate," he says.

Guo Yijie, one of the disbanded NoonStory team, wrote an article looking back on the past five years. At the end, he quotes Taiwanese writer Tang Nuo. "Everything that is beautiful, even the truth, can so easily be suppressed and subjected to persecution. But the most moving thing of all is that it will never disappear forever."

"History shows us, again and again, that [beauty and truth] will always return, maybe in a different time or place, or among a different people, rolling in like the waves on the ocean, until they happen upon the right kind of soil for their growth and survival."

(The names of the interviewees have been replaced with pseudonyms.)

^{Background photo: Chen Liya, NGOCN web photo}