"I used to say that I was a proper patriotic youth. I was the flag bearer in school. Do you know what a flag bearer is?" Darou said with a smile, "That's the one who rushes out of the classroom as soon as it rains to lower the national flag and put it away. I was that person." In the beginning of 2013, as the "Southern Weekend" incident was going viral, Darou made a special trip to the gates of the newspaper in Guangzhou to support the editorial department. Back home from Guangzhou, the flag bearer received a call from the police: "You’re X, I finally found you. If you didn't answer the call today, we...". The first time he was “invited for tea” by the police wasn’t exactly a happy experience, but he doesn’t want to look back on it. During the 2019 Hong Kong anti-National Security Law protest movement, Darou felt that it was essential to open a space under the mainland's overwhelming control of the public opinion, bring together those who care about Hong Kong and want to pursue the truth, and rely on each other to conduct fact-checking on information circulated online One afternoon in a cafe, he hit it off with Juan Juan and others, and soon a dozen like-minded friends were brought in, and a WeChat "rebel group" was born. “A living person who drinks and laughs” The group announcement reads: “This group is first off for the better dissemination and verification of information, and then for chatting. It is impossible for people to all have the same views, but we all need truthful and comprehensive information." When he first formed the group, Darou didn’t give the group name much thought, so he asked the first few members in the group. My friend Amao was in a cynical mood and set the group name as "The Crowd Stinks". Surprisingly, the group members thought it was pretty good. "This name is very cutting edge!" “The Crowd Stinks” grew bigger and stronger. There were students unfamiliar with politics, ordinary office workers, and scholars engaged in research. As "rebel" members, the only things they had in common were that they didn’t accept the mainstream media’s use of nationalist narratives, were willing to share information from different sources, and were willing to think truthfully and independently. "In real life, you’re usually surrounded by two kinds of people. The first type are the nationalists, including the popular ‘little pink army’ [cyber-nationalist youth]. Any topic you bring up will soon become ‘Brother China is God and can never do wrong.’ Even if there’s an occasional mistake it’s ‘for the good of the country’, or ‘someone has to be willing to sacrifice a little more.’ The other type is the politically indifferent. They aren’t interested in politics and current affairs. They think those ideas are only dark and dangerous. ‘Why should we discuss it? Why lose sleep over something you can’t change anyway. It’s not something you should worry about,’ or ‘you’d better be careful when you speak, so that you don’t know if you will be reported one day.’” Amao had lost hope a long time ago that there were people out there able to practically understand and communicate these things. So at the beginning, he was drawn into the group “with a little excitement and some trepidation, not unlike joining an underground Communist Party organization.” Amao soon discovered that there were quite a few other "rebels" who needed the comforting warmth and support of such a group. At one time there were nearly 300 members, through members adding other friends. Too many members inevitably affected the quality of discussions, and several cities established "Foul” sub-groups to discuss current affairs, labor issues, women's rights, etc., and occasionally in-person "meal drunk activities" (饭醉)，[a homophone of “commit a crime” (fàn zuì 犯罪) meaning to discuss politically-sensitive issues, usually as a group over a meal] to get to know each other. “A living person who drinks and laughs, not just a WeChat avatar that vibrates on a screen," Amao said. "In the beginning, the atmosphere in the group was considered pretty harmonious, maybe because everyone wasn’t too familiar with each other. Although some issues were discussed with opposing views, the overall tone was still quite polite." Darou added, "At least it was like this before the first time the group was blocked." "Blocking a group" and "Blocking users’ accounts" "Blocking groups" - when WeChat groups are forcibly disbanded and members can send messages but cannot see each other's content - are fairly normal to many "rebels.” After the second "group blocking," Darou devised a trick: build two new groups at the same time, one of them a backup, so the main group could immediately activate the backup group after the main one was blocked, without having to search for "missing persons.” But if a personal WeChat account is blocked, it becomes a much bigger hassle. "Social media accounts determine our personal identity in this era," said Guang Mo, an overseas scholar researching China. Not to mention that if your relatives, friends, colleagues, and bosses learn that your WeChat account was banned for “spreading malicious rumors,” it would be a ”social death.” What's worse, permanently banning your WeChat account means everything that you had accumulated is erased. The articles and photos you collected, the chat records with relatives and lovers, the thoughts and feelings and the life moments you wrote down to your circle of friends over many years... all disappear. "It's like the only photo album from your whole life that can leave behind a little memory of you and your life, but it doesn't belong to you. The punishment for saying something that shouldn't be said on WeChat is to take this photo album away and burn it. It's that kind of feeling." Amao echoed. (Author’s note: After the WeChat update was released, users can now temporarily log in within 48 hours after being banned to export their property and other information.) Xiao Ang's first experience of "blocking" was related to a "rebel group.” In the beginning of 2019, Xiao Ang saw a satirical political picture in a WeChat group and reposted it to the "rebel group.” The picture was a Disney cartoon image of Winnie the Pooh, with an adaptation of the love song "Write Poems for You,” with the lyrics saying "Write poems for you, stand still for you, do the impossible for you..." Even being blurred by Photoshop to hide most of the picture’s content, it didn’t escape WeChat’s review. The day after the repost, Xiao Ang’s WeChat account was automatically logged out. When she re-logged in, she was told: “The WeChat account was permanently banned for spreading malicious rumors and other illegal content.” Xiao Ang used a backup WeChat account to inform everyone that she had been "blocked," but no one in the group responded. After some confusion, a group member pulled her into a new group, and Xiao Ang learned that the "rebel group" had also been blocked. A few days later, Xiao Ang received a call from the police, informing her she had to go to the police station the next day. At first, Xiao Ang wasn't quite sure what the police officer was referring to when he said, "You posted something online.” A few days after her account was blocked, she posted some news about a sensitive topic on Weibo, her views on the forced demolitions of illegal houses witnessed by some friends, and later some reports on Xinjiang to her friends. That night when some group members tried to teach her a lesson on how to deal with the police, they thought: "It certainly won't be because of that picture." Everyone agreed it was ridiculous. One group member asked seriously: "(regarding the content of the picture) Can the police ask me where I got it?" But the moment the police officer showed the picture the next day, "a long series of ellipses” floated through her mind. Her head was pounding and she barely was able to suppress the pain in her stomach from breakfast. She was filled with a bewildering mix of emotions, not knowing whether to laugh or cry - but she forcibly held them back, maintaining an ignorant and cleverly worried expression. Another young police officer picked up the picture, frowned and tried to identify the lyrics, "Pooh...write history...Pooh forbids, Pooh...do the impossible...Pooh...I...no term limit..." After murmuring for a few seconds, it suddenly dawned on him, "Oh, there’s a problem with this! Don't you know that Pooh is Big Brother Xi?" The police officer warned her: "Don't randomly send anything online! We can see it! Random posting will cause trouble." After the tedious process of checking her identity, taking notes, writing pledge notes, signing documents, and taking her fingerprints, Xiao Ang took a sip of the hot water the police officer gave her, relieving her stomachache a little before leaving the police station. The “stratosphere" is an illusion Tom served as the group leader in a foreign media reading exchange group, and the news discussing this report made the "rebel group" become more active. "There was definitely an idealistic atmosphere in the group mostly because the community operation of this type of media is pretty good, and the voices of readers in the group have a good chance to be represented in the media, which can then influence the public." Tom, who is studying in Hong Kong, has a passion for ideology, history and politics, and feels lucky that he runs a free-thinking WeChat group. “For the first time, I have experienced that communication in the stratosphere is extremely valuable. In the past, I used to post just about superficial topics on Weibo and didn’t have any real communication... but then I became the owner of this group, and even though I don’t take a salary to help run this community, it can be said that I use love to generate electricity." What the group members didn't know was that in the first two years of coming to Hong Kong, Tom was a staunch supporter of the Chinese government. "Coming to Hong Kong really made me a ‘true supporter,'" Tom said. "On the one hand, when I first came here, I encountered many contradictions on campus between China and Hong Kong that gave me pause. For example, Hong Kong University students demonstrated during Li Keqiang's visit and middle school students protested the state’s education. Hong Kong students and mainland students have some friction on campus from time to time; some of this is also due to cultural differences. Hong Kong students’ ‘dorm hall’ culture makes me feel that they (the local students) are not friendly to newcomers, this kind of xenophobia gives me the feeling of a ‘newbie’ who has just come from the mainland has a direct impact on me." Like many overseas students who are "leaving home from the well" [Internet slang term, "well" is taken from "frog at the bottom of the well," pointing out that the emigrant is still holding onto looking at the outside world from the view of the mainland], what he heard and felt in Hong Kong gave Tom a "defensively natured nationalist identity.” “The antipathy towards Hong Kong made me think that the mainland is truly the better side, so at that time I often talked dismissively about foreign countries, and Hong Kong and Taiwan's great ‘public knowledge.’" It wasn’t until he saw the Hong Kong government's unjust reaction to the "Occupy Central" movement in 2014 that Tom began to change his mind. "At first I thought that the Hong Kong government officials were either stupid or bad, but later discovered that they were both good and bad." He read the mainland official media and believed that many reports on the movement ignored the facts and took advantage of the inability of mainland citizens to obtain first-hand information while discriminating against Hong Kongers and spreading rumors that supported the propaganda. He once relied on simple patriotic sentiments to reconcile the conflict between reality and rationality: "The standing ‘fifty cent’ army [citizens paid small sums by the mainland government to promote government propaganda online] in the mainland's official propaganda department are either poor or weak-willed. True patriotism depends on our sentiments, these are the grassroots patriots!" But at that time, Tom became completely disillusioned with the version of the patriot he had considered himself to be, as a "true supporter.” As the space for public opinion on social media has narrowed in recent years, Tom’s group decided to disband due to security concerns. Tom and a few friends migrated over to other "rebel groups.” At first, Tom was very active in the new group, but he gradually discovered that the "rebel group" was breaking down as a stratosphere [Translator note: “stratosphere” in this context refers to the psychological concept that everyone in a certain group believes they are all thinking independently but ultimately are reinforcing each other’s existing beliefs, essentially becoming an echo chamber effect]. "Every time there was an intense argument in the group, it became a burden weighing down my emotions, especially the topics of domestic feminism, labor rights issues, discussions of the [political] left and the right, of Hong Kong, and of the U.S. election. They all just erupted in the group together, and I often couldn't bear to watch members attacking one another, and then blocking the other person." Tom finally decided to leave the group, but not because of the arguments. "Ultimately I got so angry that I withdrew from the group. After a pretty intense argument with a Trump supporter in the group, everyone started to reflect, saying that maybe they should prioritize maintaining the surface harmony of the group, asking ‘are we too being too mean to Trump supporters?’ Even to the point of making excuses and accepting that when someone says ‘1+1=3,’ we shouldn’t be angry because anger just reveals that our belief that 1+1=2 isn’t that strong. Compared to Trump supporters, I can't stand even more this kind of placating attitude." Tom’s belief is that he would rather see group members persist in confrontational thinking rather than watching everyone choose to pretend to be "reasonable,” arrogantly using a “haha” just to keep the peace. He believes that if tension between the two parties is removed, and you can’t even get angry over important issues, "then any serious discussion is unnecessary, and it’s advised that this group should either be transformed into a collection of high-end intellectuals and academic criticism, or simply disbanded." For Tom, the "rebel" stratosphere is extinguished. The "rebels" are in reality just squeezed into a corner by the “little pink army.” Liberals, conservatives, the LGBT community, feminists, Christians... with all kinds of "alternative" values shrinking into this small corner, they are competing for precious, thin air again. He believes that the false stratosphere is full of various words and disguises, and true communication is unsustainable. "Either give up this type of treatment completely, or have the administrator strictly enforce the group rules, where 'kicking people out’ and 'forbidden words' shouldn’t be a problem, otherwise I feel that this group is really ? (to be finished)," Tom said to the group owner after he left. Should the management of rebel groups practice democracy or be more laissez-faire? The rupturing of the stratosphere was a traumatic experience for Tom. But Mimi, another member of a rebel group, believes that breaking the stratosphere is necessary, even if trauma is inevitable. Unlike Tom, Mimi firmly believes that it is important that the owner does not use their power to kick people out. She believes that the more important thing is that the "rebel" who is still arguing in China should be able to "persist in not leaving the field" and never easily say "I'm not playing anymore." Mimi had only one simple idea at the beginning of building a "rebel group" on WeChat: sharing information. The world was plagued by the pandemic in 2020, and the explosion of information on Chinese Internet is overwhelming. Mimi, who lives abroad, feels that she can access high-quality information from different sources and is obliged to share it with her friends, so that everyone has a place to express the deep emotions ignited by the pandemic. Group members added more members, quickly growing to 500 people. Then the group was blocked just as quickly, and the repeated cycle of "blocking" and "reincarnation" has left Mimi feeling numb. What really affected Mimi was when she once had to disband the group herself. "My rebel group was torn apart by the American riots triggered by the George Floyd case," Mimi wrote on social media. With a group of hundreds of people, occasional accidental fire of verbal weapons is inevitable, but the dispute lasted for three days and three nights, and tens of thousands of messages turned into personal attacks and abuse. Mimi, as the group owner, was being "blocked" at the time and had no way to provide oversight, and simply disbanded the group and started afresh. Every time Darou kicks someone out from the "The Crowd Stinks,” he carefully writes down the cause and decision process, encouraging everyone to participate in the decision, and finally leaves a detailed case statement for each rotating group leader’s reference. Mimi bluntly stated, "I think WeChat groups are not suitable for democracy,” and her attitude towards WeChat groups is even more "laissez-faire." Mimi believes that the WeChat group structure itself leads to communication that is mostly fragmented expression, which can easily develop into verbal disputes. It is understandable that everyone has to vent their emotions: "If you want to argue, just express your argument in a few words. The world won’t stop because of the changes in perspective by small people like us." Try not to kick people out or censor opinions. Whenever the discussion reaches a dead end, Mimi will not intervene in the dispute. Instead she tends to re-examine the context of the issue, and summarizes each member’s views when the dispute comes to an end, and then opens the discussion space again. “Of course, it’s okay to have some negative emotions in the debate, but I just hope that our group will develop a self-purification mechanism after a while... I hope everyone can expand their comfort zone after arguing and have a higher level of public discussion and tolerance." Mimi said. Why can't we separate ourselves from WeChat? "WeChat is our artificial limb" While living and studying abroad, there were more than a dozen netizens who helped raise money for her while she was blocked... Mimi's extraordinary skills in the “rebel kingdom” are one of a kind. Xiao Ang told me that her friend had also added her into a small "rebel group," but then the friend was afraid of getting into trouble and was too afraid to initiate discussions in it, and even the group was gradually abandoned. Openness, freedom, equality, collaboration, sharing, anonymity... 20 years ago, the Internet was expected by the academic community to put democracy into practice, empower ordinary people, and even loosen the hold of various totalitarian institutions. However, with the joint efforts of technology moguls and public authorities, the open, public discussion space is even tighter than when the Internet was in its infancy. Foreign social media products cannot be spread in China. WeChat grows monstrously large with very few domestic competitors. In late 2010, Tencent had just begun to prepare their new WeChat project. In January 2013, Tencent announced that WeChat became the world's most downloaded and used communication application, with more than 300 million users. WeChat’s development was unbridled, growing in leaps and bounds. Voice calls, browsers, Moments, Mini Programs...each small step bound it more tightly to the daily lives of Chinese people. At the same time, beginning in October 2017, China implemented online real-name authentication to ensure that every virtual identity could quickly be traced to the person behind the avatar. The singing, dancing, and sensuality of the Chinese online world is built under the gaze of public authority. Losing social media accounts can only be regarded as the slightest punishment. At the beginning of February 2020, a wave of account bans made "WeChat account bans" top Sina Weibo’s super topics’ "Social Topics List". Although it was quickly deleted, this super topic consolidated many people's frustrations, disbeliefs, reprimands, and ventings. The netizen "Shunping Hou_" claimed to be "a party activist in the school, who loves the Communist Party and the country in general.” He was banned because he forwarded mainstream media news and the government's pandemic prevention information to his family, making his life and studies even more difficult during the pandemic. Netizen "LyBy999" said that as a law professor and a member of the Chinese Communist Party, he "has always stood for the perspective of the country and the people.” After being banned, he was "very anxious and worried, constantly reviewing and examining his own behavior... but after I checked my comments and content on WeChat, I couldn’t find any illegal content.” He added, “I hope Mr. Ma Huateng [the CEO of Tencent] will come forward and provide an explanation... The company (Tencent) should strive to develop from the perspective of the country and the people, and genuinely safeguard the majority of netizens’ interests.” WeChat’s big data keyword censorship is quite effective, but it can mistakenly kill many "innocents". From online commentators to university professors, facing robotic customer service that’s always docile and superficial, the Internet has fulfilled its promise to serve everyone equally. "WeChat is already compatible with our bodies; WeChat has become our prosthetic limb." Amao felt that his analogy was not an exaggeration. "But for those of us who are dissidents, using WeChat is like suffering from some kind of chronic disease. You don’t know when you will fall ill." Guang Mo also bluntly stated: "Tencent's technology is very accurate, you are not safe at any time. If a person's account disappears, then this information is enough for 80 to 90 percent of Chinese citizens, and they will steer clear from these topics and avoid having deep friendships with people who like them or support them." Of course, Darou is well aware of the danger. After several blockings, he decided to migrate the locals on "The Crowd Stinks" to Telegram. However, getting around the ”Great Firewall” has tough barriers. In addition, Telegram only provides simple dialogue and voice functions, which also decreases the user capabilities of group members who are accustomed to WeChat’s functions. The Telegram group is deserted, and the WeChat group is still going strong. Darou is annoyed by being under censorship all the time but feels that WeChat has a kind of gravity that is difficult to escape. People on the inside want to go out, but Mimi, who is concerned about China, believes that no one can leave WeChat because everyone’s connections are on that platform: “It makes sense to be there. I don’t want that kind of freedom (provided by foreign social media).” Some people are pessimistic, some are troubled, and some are unconcerned. Only Juan Juan thinks that the problem is simple. "You asked me to go to another place to talk, making it a clandestine thing, as if I did something wrong." Juan Juan said in a serious tone, "Everything I say on WeChat is honorable, I am not afraid of you, because I believe what I say is honorable."
