Prompt: When it comes to China, it feels difficult to make predictions. This may be one reason why so many observers seem keen to revive familiar paradigms, like the New Cold War. Instead of trying to breathe life into old ideas, however, we should be developing new ones.  This requires a bit of creativity. When everyday life takes on the feeling of unreality, seeking out the frontiers of imagination takes on a practical importance. China is one of those frontiers of imagination, and its technological innovations can sometimes feel like real-life speculative fiction.  Fortunately, Chinese writers are taking technological change head on, exploring the urgent problems of inequality, environmental degradation, and social discontent. Contributors to this issue represent some of the leading figures in Chinese science fiction, and their speculations blur the lines between future and fantasy—even as some of them would protest that what they are describing is not essentially Chinese, but universal. Look at South America. Look at South Africa. Not only will you find Chinese power in these places, you will find patterns driven by the dynamics of global capitalism. China may represent an extreme, but the differences are often differences of degree.  Sometimes, the most startling experiences for an American on the Chinese internet occur when you notice the familiarity of certain elements in an estranged form. Take Peppa Pig: you might see this adorable figure from a popular children’s cartoon recast as a badass smoking a cigarette. Or you might stumble on Pepe, icon of the American alt-right—known in Chinese as beishang wa, 悲伤蛙, or “sadness frog”—restored to his original slacker millennial identity, without the overtones of white supremacy that he has acquired in the US over the past few years.  Politicians and pundits in the United States will doubtlessly continue to craft grand narratives about the Chinese internet. Some will be accurate. Others will be full of projection—nightmares filled with monsters that Americans fear they may be creating at home, or the panic attacks of a superpower failing to invest in education and research. We hope this issue is not just an occasion to clarify or dispel myths and to elucidate complex realities, but also to underscore that the questions raised by Chinese tech hit uncomfortably close to home.

Response: In the late 1990s, the Chinese government undertook two initiatives that would tie the country more closely to the rest of the world. It opened internet access to significant numbers of Chinese people, and it forged a path for China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO).  China was coming out of a long period of relative isolation. The country still bore the marks of the destructive Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. A period of opening in the 1980s was capped by widespread demands for political reform and deadly repression at Tiananmen Square—violence that cooled ties between the Chinese Communist Party and foreign governments.  But in the 1990s, Chinese leaders grew determined to deepen their country’s integration with the world. They saw the value in greater access to global markets and technologies like the internet, even at the cost of sacrificing a degree of authority. If the People’s Republic was to survive and flourish, they believed, it could no longer stand apart.


Prompt: US thinkers generally welcomed these moves, expecting them to erode the power of the Chinese Communist Party. In March 2000, after the United States reached a deal with China that would lead to WTO accession, President Bill Clinton said Chinese leaders “realize that if they open China's markets to global competition, they risk unleashing forces beyond their control… But they also know that, without competition from the outside, China will not be able to attract the investment necessary to build a modern, successful economy.” American officials believed that greater integration with global markets had the potential to push China toward political liberalization.

Response: They believed that the internet would have a similar effect. In the same March 2000 speech, Clinton famously quipped that trying to crack down on the internet was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” “We know how much the internet has changed America, and we are already an open society,” Clinton observed. “Imagine how much it could change China.”   China, of course, was not an open society, and its government would go on to develop powerful, carefully calibrated methods to control the way the internet operated there. Over the past twenty years, Chinese officials have been remarkably successful in reaping the economic benefits of both the internet and global markets—with significant costs to workers and the environment—while managing the threats to domestic stability and continued Communist Party rule.  More recently, however, the Chinese government has moved to assert even greater control. Since Xi Jinping’s ascendency to the Communist Party leadership in 2012, it has become clear that Chinese leaders perceive some forms of international economic entanglement as risks to the political system, and that they see closer state supervision of the internet as essential to preserving their power.  Despite American idealism about the liberating power of free trade, free markets, and the internet’s open architecture, neither joining the WTO nor getting online created a free society in China. It’s easy to understand why. China’s government, market, and society were not passive recipients of influence from external rules and principles. Instead, they actively adapted the structures of international connectivity to serve their own purposes. Life in China is indelibly transformed by the links forged in the late 1990s, but not in the ways that Americans observers expected.


Prompt: When looking back on China’s life with the internet, five distinct eras emerge: The Late 1990s: Booting Up In the late 1990s, the Chinese internet grows fast. Starting from a small user base centered around major universities and research institutions, it rapidly becomes popular among a population that skews urban, well-off, well-educated, and young.  Mid-1995 – There are 40,000 internet users in China, up from only 3,000 earlier that year.

Response: 1997 – NetEase is founded. One of China’s foundational internet companies, it provides games, news, communications, and a good old-fashioned internet portal. Feb 1999 – Tencent QQ is released. A simple, lightweight chat app adopted widely by individuals and businesses. Users are identified by simple numbers that are still widely used in advertisements.


Prompt: April 1999 – Alibaba is founded. A business-to-business e-commerce company that develops into a consumer and financial goliath. The Early 2000s: Awaiting Scale In the early 2000s, Chinese tech companies, especially Alibaba, lay the foundations for the pervasive urban e-commerce environment that would emerge fifteen years later. They’re waiting for one thing: scale. State control is relatively light and lags innovation, although online monitoring and censorship are already underway.

Response: January 2000 – Baidu is founded. China’s top search engine, and now a company with great AI ambitions. March 2000 – Bill Clinton thinks trying to crack down on the internet is like “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” But the internet in China develops within the context of a political regime finding mechanisms to ensure continued control—not a government sleepwalking into a digitally driven revolution.


Prompt: December 2000 – There are 22.5 million internet users in China. May 2003 – Alibaba launches Taobao, bringing everyday online shopping to consumers and connecting small shops to a broader market. Alibaba, with its intense focus on China’s specific needs, out-competes eBay, which eventually leaves the Chinese market.

Response: 2003 – Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. The spread of SARS news online, combined with the government’s efforts to cover up the severity of the outbreak, demonstrated the ability of internet and mobile phone networks to break the propaganda authorities’ hold on a major story. 2004 – Alipay launches, facilitating online payments. By holding payment in escrow until a buyer is satisfied with the product, Alipay gives buyers confidence in online platforms.


Prompt: 2004 – Journalist Shi Tao is arrested for leaking state secrets after Yahoo gives data to Chinese authorities that link him to an email account. The Late 2000s: Cat and Mouse Era In the late 2000s, China’s online censorship apparatus becomes more sophisticated. Censors suppress search results, block entire websites or specific pages within them, or give users a “connection reset” error when a restricted keyword appears in a URL.  At the same time, patriotic fervor around the Olympics and related controversies in 2008, as well as a thriving culture of euphemisms and ironic references, signal the explosion of China’s digital public sphere. It appears that, just maybe, the scale and dynamism of the internet could prove too hard for the government to control.

Response: 2005 — Yahoo China turns over control of its services to Alibaba after middling market performance and high political costs abroad after the Shi Tao case in 2004. December 2005 —  There are 111 million internet users in China. 2008 —  Major international platforms, especially YouTube, are blocked for a few hours or days at a time, and then unblocked. The government shuts down access when it deems necessary—but not permanently.


Prompt: 8/8/08 —  The 2008 Olympics in Beijing opens at 8:08 p.m. on August 8, 2008, in a country where the number eight is considered lucky. When protests against Chinese practices in Tibet and elsewhere greet the Olympic Torch Relay around the world, nationalism surges online around slogans like “Red Heart China,” signaling both love of country and communist red.

Response: 2009 – Users are blocked from using profanity or discussing politically sensitive topics online, so they use clever homophones to circumvent censorship. One popular homophone is “grass-mud-horse” (草泥马 cǎonímǎ), which sounds like  “fuck your mother“ (肏你妈 càonǐmā).   The coinage is popularized in a viral video that uses alpacas to illustrate the invented grass-mud-horse, and pictures of alpacas become a symbolic f-you to government censors.


Prompt: July 2009 – Internet access is shut down in Xinjiang for months following violence in the region. August 2009 – Sina Weibo launches. Weibo means “microblog,” and the site offers a Twitter-like service for sharing short posts with followers.  The Early 2010s: Nailing Jell-O to the Wall Opening with the exuberance of Sina Weibo’s heyday and ending with the consolidation of internet authorities in the Cyberspace Administration of China, the early 2010s marks a transition from the free-wheeling aughts to the present era of tight control. As Sina Weibo rises in prominence, enabling millions of people to reach enormous audiences quickly, business titans and individual bloggers alike criticize the government. This dynamic chills precipitously after Chinese authorities crack down on the so-called “Big Vs”—verified accounts with large followings.  Meanwhile, Chinese officials are increasingly aware of the security risks posed by the internet after the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011 and Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of US spying practices. Through technical means, as well as by creating an atmosphere of fear among the most influential online voices, the Chinese government nails Jell-O to the wall.  January 2010 – Google shuts down its mainland China search engine, which had controversially implemented Chinese government censorship orders. Google’s market share was never large, but its products had a devoted following.

Response: December 2010 – There are 547 million internet users in China. January 2011 – Tencent WeChat launches. WeChat is a robust chat platform offering text, voice, and video, from the same company behind the ubiquitous QQ chat app. 2010–2011 – Arab Spring. A series of so-called “Twitter revolutions” unleash instability in several authoritarian states. For Chinese authorities, these events underline the risk of unfettered online communication.  November 2012 – Xi Jinping becomes General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.


Prompt: March 2013 – Xi Jinping becomes President of China. June 2013 – Edward Snowden leaks files on US spying, revealing US intelligence capabilities to Chinese officials and people around the world. 2013 – Crackdown on the Big Vs. The golden age of Sina Weibo ends as authorities target several prominent users with strong-arm tactics.  2014 – The Cyberspace Administration of China is founded, reflecting the administrative challenge of coordinating internet regulation among authorities focused on high-tech development, public security, and propaganda.    Late 2010s: China’s Own Innovations By the late 2010s, more than half of the population is using the internet, predominantly through mobile phones. But this means that the other half still aren’t online—a divide that is increasingly relevant as mobile apps become essential tools for personal finance, commerce, and transportation.

Response: There is no significant loosening of government controls over speech and political mobilization since 2013. At the same time, services driven by mobile technologies and machine learning algorithms are proliferating. Tech companies handle so many types of transactions that their systems have reordered the streetscape, where workers move goods bought and sold online and people hop on and off of shared bikes. Despite China’s particularities and Communist Party censorship and controls, some Chinese internet innovations go big abroad—including those dockless shared bikes now seen around the world, pioneered by Chinese companies like Mobike and Ofo.


Prompt: December 2015 – There are 688 million internet users in China. January 2017 – WeChat introduces mini-programs, which run inside the app and allow users to interact with other services. By the next year, mini-programs will number more than 1 million. June 2017 – China’s Cybersecurity Law goes into effect, laying the groundwork for one of the world’s most comprehensive internet regulatory regimes.

Response: July 2017 – The New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan is released, drawing international attention for its ambitions to make China a world-leading AI developer by 2030.  December 2017 – Official statistics report that 527 million Chinese use mobile payments, and the top services—AliPay and WeChat Pay—report rapid user and volume growth.


Prompt: January 2018 – Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba, is fined and publicly apologizes for an app that pre-checks the opt-in box for its Sesame Credit service, which provides credit scores. Greater public awareness of the risks around personal data begins to take hold. March 2018 – The main interagency regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, gains greater political clout when its bureaucratic parent organization is upgraded.

Response: April 2018 – As the US government escalates its economic confrontation with China, Xi Jinping emphasizes the need for “indigenous innovation” in “core technologies” such as semiconductors, especially in the face of US threats to block the flow of crucial components to Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE.


Prompt: Early 2019 — The U.S. government, concerned about China-based companies such as Huawei and ZTE growing their presence in global IT infrastructure, charges Huawei with sanctions and intellectual property violations while urging friendly governments to block the company's products from next-generation 5G wireless networks.

Response: Early 2020s and Beyond: What’s Next? Back in the 1990s, both Chinese officials concerned about retaining control and American observers hoping for liberalization believed that the internet would change China. Now that the fourth and fifth eras of China’s internet development have cultivated a largely separate online ecosystem, the question becomes whether China will change the rest of the world.


Prompt: Efforts by Chinese companies to sell their technology overseas mean that products designed for China’s authoritarian context could form the backbone of connectivity in a wide range of societies. Assuming that China’s politics will travel with its machines, however, is a lot like assuming that US democracy would travel with the internet. Beware of confident predictions.

Response: The coming years will present a profusion of automated and autonomous technologies, the deep integration of networks into physical space, and profound challenges surrounding privacy and accountability. How China’s state and society meet this moment will shape not only China’s future, but the rest of the world’s.


Prompt: This summer I spent a month in Beijing. I’d last lived in China in 2016, and I was relieved to find my favorite noodle shops in their usual niches. But this time round, navigating the city felt inexplicably different. The cabs I tried to hail passed me by. On the subway, other riders jostled past me, swiping their phones at the turnstiles as I fumbled with my ticket. When I tried to sneak into the cafeteria in Renmin University for a cheap lunch, clutching my grubby backpack, I made it past the guards only to be stopped at the cash register—apart from student cards, the only form of payment accepted was Alipay.  It gradually dawned on me that that was why Beijing felt like a different city from the one I knew: in the two years since I’d left, the whole city had switched over to mobile payments on China-specific platforms to which I, a foreigner, had no access. These days in Beijing, the green and blue logos of mobile payment providers WeChat Pay and Alipay appear everywhere, from breakfast stalls to five-star hotels.  Just about every foreigner who’s visited China in the last ten years comments on the dizzying speed at which physical infrastructure is built. When I first moved to Shanghai in 2012, I worked in the city’s financial district, home to a skyscraper nicknamed the “bottle opener”: according to Wikipedia, it’s the world’s tallest building with a hole in it. But these days, China’s part in the race to build the world’s tallest building appears to be waning. China’s much-vaunted speed in infrastructure building has more recently been directed at the digital rather than the physical world.  This year alone, Chinese tech companies such as the social e-commerce company Pinduoduo and food delivery platform Meituan Dianping raised billions in IPOs on international markets. Chinese online spending during “Singles Day,” a one-day online sale event in November, far exceeded American spending over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.

Response: Until just a few years ago, before smartphone purchases were ubiquitous, cash was king in China. Online purchases were generally made using offline payments, in part because credit cards have never been widely used. To buy a plane ticket via the internet five years ago, you could pay by following a link to your bank account, but that was a cumbersome process supported by a relatively small number of banks. If you didn’t have an account with the right bank, a courier would bring you the physical ticket the same day so you could pay for it with a wad of cash.  These days, cash has been almost entirely replaced by mobile payments in transactions both online and offline. The only accessory nearly as important as a smartphone is a portable charger: at most cafes and restaurants in big cities, you can rent a charger for several cents to fire up a phone that’s low on juice. Startups that supply these chargers, such as Laidian and Xiaodian, are themselves worth tens of millions of dollars.


Prompt: The Everywhere Store The two biggest mobile payment providers, WeChat Pay and Alipay, belong to tech giants Tencent Holdings and Ant Financial. WeChat Pay is fully integrated into WeChat, the dominant Chinese app for messaging, social media, as well as just about everything—a Twitter, WhatsApp, Google Maps, Venmo, and Yelp rolled into one. Alipay started life as an escrow service for transactions on the e-commerce platform Alibaba in 2004 and began offering mobile payments in 2008, though uptake of the app has been fastest over the past five years.  WeChat Pay’s big break came in 2014: as a promotional feature for the Lunar New Year, China’s biggest holiday, users were prompted to send digital “red packets”—the cash gifts customary at the new year—to friends and family on WeChat. Would-be recipients had to sign up for WeChat Pay; tens of millions did. Before long, WeChat was a serious player in the mobile payments market. Between 2015 and 2016, mobile payments in China quadrupled; today, more than 80% of Chinese smartphone users have used their phone to make a payment.

Response: With ubiquitous mobile payments, anything from a cup of soy milk to a pricey imported blouse can be bought using your phone. American consumers are used to a minimum amount below which smaller shops may not accept a credit card: with mobile payments, no charge is too minor, as evidenced by the enterprising homeless people who hold up QR codes instead of begging bowls.  On WeChat, you can make plans to meet a friend for dinner, look up directions to the restaurant, and pay the bill, all on the same app. Passengers on high-speed trains can pre-order meals to be delivered to their seats at the next station, and a handful of KFC restaurants in major cities are trialing mobile payment by facial recognition. The combination of convenient mobile payments and cheap courier services means that nearly any of the vast array of things made in China can be bought directly from their producers by urban consumers.


Prompt: Over the past decade, China has systematically blackballed foreign apps. Didi Chuxing bought Uber’s China operations in 2016; Google, Facebook, and other US-based platforms have long been banned (though Google is reportedly planning a comeback). But with the growing ubiquity of mobile payments in daily life, China may also be excluding foreign users from its domestic platforms. Thus far, the major payment apps haven’t made significant efforts to reach potential users who are not holders of Chinese bank accounts, such as the tens of millions of foreign tourists who visit China each year, or the mostly rural domestic unbanked population.  For tourists, accessing the mobile system is prohibitively difficult: expats can generally do so by opening a domestic bank account with a valid proof of residence. Although both of the major payment apps say they have started integrating foreign credit cards, users report that the integration hardly ever works. China has long wooed foreign tourists, so at first glance this lacuna may seem puzzling: why make it more difficult for tourists to part with their money? The answer has little to do with technological limitations. Mobile technology is increasingly serving as the vehicle for a sophisticated national surveillance system that’s deeply intertwined with all kinds of necessary everyday transactions. If your phone knows where you got out of a cab and with whom you split the bill for lunch, then the Chinese government knows too.  Both WeChat and Alipay already require users to sign up using their legal names. An ambitious move to enable WeChat to function as a legally valid form of identification is underway. Chinese authorities are experimenting with all kinds of surveillance technology, from closed-circuit cameras trained on jaywalkers to facial-recognition glasses that allow the wearer to determine a person’s identity. But in the meantime, mobile-payment providers are already collecting a wealth of data that they are legally bound to share with the government. In comparison with using this data to tighten state control, accommodating foreign users is a relatively low priority. In fact, permitting users to pay with foreign credit cards would introduce an additional element into the equation, one that would be harder for Chinese authorities to monitor and manage.

Response: Homegrown Hegemony It wasn’t so long ago that China’s economic policies and reforms were framed in terms of opening the country up to the outside world. As recently as the 2008 Beijing Olympics, authorities were going out of their way to impress foreign visitors, opening new subway lines and offering free wireless internet access throughout the capital. But over the past few years, appealing to foreigners and accommodating their needs has become less important to Chinese authorities and domestic companies.  The shift in focus to homegrown digital innovation and mobile technology suggests a change in the government’s priorities. These days, China hardly cares to impress the outside world with its rapid pace of development and enlightened policies. Rather, it is building a new, parallel world, a digital infrastructure that will fully capture its growing domestic market while permitting an impressive degree of social control in Chinese cities.


Prompt: To that end, WeChat Pay and Alipay are prioritizing the reverse form of expansion: instead of catering to foreign tourists in China, they’ve calculated that it’s more lucrative to target Chinese tourists abroad. Both companies are competing to woo foreign airports with promises of more Chinese spending. At the Helsinki airport, one of the first European airports to offer Alipay, a spokesman states that Chinese tourists spend more than any other group of travelers. At the Mountain View, California outlet of 99 Ranch, a Taiwanese-American supermarket chain, the checkout counters are festooned with banners proclaiming that the store accepts Alipay. Teddy Chow, a marketing manager, says that discounts encouraging shoppers to use Alipay and WeChat Pay are paid for by the payment providers rather than by the supermarket itself.

Response: For Chinese users, the expansion of WeChat Pay and Alipay offers the convenience of paying abroad as if they were at home, and allows them to legally circumvent currency controls governing how much renminbi each individual can take out of the country. For Las Vegas taxicabs and London department stores, offering Chinese mobile payment options allows them to capture more tourist spending without the pesky inconveniences of foreign currency conversion. And for the authorities, WeChat Pay and Alipay will permit them to track Chinese users even when they’re in foreign countries.  Notably, even in their overseas forays, Chinese platforms show little interest in targeting foreign users; their aim is to capture Chinese spending elsewhere. Given that Chinese tech firms have far surpassed foreign analogues in the seamlessness of the experience they offer, the fact that they’re not interested in exporting this technology shows that the Chinese government’s first concern is to tighten its domestic grip on power.


Prompt: Throughout my time in China, the act of paying with coins and notes while everyone else around me brandished a smartphone reminded me that tourists inevitably inhabit a world parallel to that of the locals they brush past on the street. I’d lived in China for years: never before had each daily interaction so clearly reminded me that I was an outsider. Friends constantly told me how surprised they were that it’s possible to get around Beijing in 2018 without WeChat Pay or Alipay. I, for one, was surprised that so many of them told me they didn’t carry cash or credit cards when they left home—just their smartphones.  One evening on the subway, a gangly guy tried to badger me into joining his runners’ club by scanning a QR code on his phone. He was clean-shaven and soft-spoken, doggedly making use of every last moment while a screen above us counted down the minutes and seconds until the next train would arrive. He showed me the QR code on his screen, flanked by a profile picture of a scantily clad woman who was not in running gear. Even though I figured I probably couldn’t be scammed out of money that wasn’t on my phone, I said no.

Response: The key to understanding the relationship between politics and technology in China is a word you might be surprised to hear in the mouth of its president Xi Jinping in 2019: Leninism. For the Chinese Communist Party, Leninism is more than just a dusty inheritance from the Soviet Union. It’s a guide to governance, shaping how the Party is organized as well as how it controls Chinese society. The Australian journalist Richard McGregor, author of The Party, defined Chinese Leninism as “keep[ing] control of the commanding heights of politics through the party’s grip on the ‘three Ps’: personnel, propaganda, and the People’s Liberation Army.” But there’s another dimension to China’s contemporary Leninism: the way in which Lenin’s ideas shape the Party’s relationship to information technology and electronic surveillance.


Prompt: The history of Leninism is complex, contested, and violent. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders faced the outbreak of a savage civil war. To mobilize for the war effort, commissars needed unimpeded access to networks of electricity, communication, and transport to execute their central planning. Through the "commanding heights" of telecommunications and transport, the Bolsheviks would wield a lever of political control, a force for economic growth, and a tool for reshaping consciousness itself. Leninism became a way of governing, emphasizing the role of a vanguard party leading the revolution—the Bolsheviks, in the Russian case—and the use of dictatorship to pave the way for transforming society.

Response: Chinese intellectuals like the poet Xu Zhimo watched Lenin’s revolution with fascination. Xu visited Moscow in 1923, writing that in the Soviet Union, "they believe that Paradise exists, that it can be reached. But between our world and Paradise, there lies an ocean streaked with blood." Technology was a crucial tool in the pursuit of this “Paradise.”  In China, the promise of Leninism was equally redemptive: some saw Lenin's approach as the only means to rescue and redeem a country mired in warlordism and humiliated by predatory foreign powers. They borrowed the Soviet Union’s term for this blend of ideologies: “Marxism-Leninism,” or Makesi-Liening zhuyi. Mao Zedong, a cofounder of China's Communist Party in 1921, set an organizational template for Party control that survived decades of ideological oscillations, and endures into the digital age.  Network technologies were a top priority from the start. Often, Chinese communists did not seize the telecommunication or rail lines—in this agrarian empire, much less developed than Russia, they built them. After the revolution's victory in 1949, Mao's propagandists lay a nationwide system of wires for radio broadcasting. Some privileged peasants had a loudspeaker in their own homes. The ideas they heard through these speakers were soon known as Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.  From the start of Communist rule in China, the regime developed massive state surveillance. Mao's secret police, trained in Moscow, tapped phones, opened letters, recruited informers, and closely monitored the populace. The Party's grip on information and logistics technology facilitated its campaigns and efforts at social and economic engineering. But during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards “bombarded the headquarters” and overthrew Party leaders throughout the bureaucracy, including the broadcasting and media centers of Beijing. For a moment, the dictatorship's grip wavered. After a rebel Red Guard faction seized control at China National Radio, Mao personally issued a statement requesting that faction splits be resolved. Rebel factions claiming to support Mao set up secret radio stations with illegal transmitters, forcing central authorities in Beijing, sensing a loss of control, to issue orders banning their use.


Prompt: Mao died in 1976, but Chinese Leninism survived and continued to shape China’s approach to information technology and surveillance. (Deng Xiaoping’s market experimentation also echoed Lenin's economic loosening under the New Economic Policy.) As markets blossomed, the party-state receded from everyday decisions in citizens' lives. But China's Communist Party never ceded ultimate control over strategic networks or abandoned mass surveillance, and never negated its Leninist inheritance. Even as a fourth official ideology joined Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought—so-called “Deng Xiaoping Theory”—Leninism remained the defining form of Communist Party governance in China.  The Digital Commanding Heights With the emergence of the internet, the Party’s Leninist approach was updated, but not discarded. For this reason, the German political scientist Sebastian Heilmann has coined the phrase “digital Leninism” to describe the Xi Jinping–era approach to digital technologies. In 2014, Xi chaired a national meeting about "propaganda and thought work" at which he decreed, "We must firmly grasp in our hands the leadership, control, and speech power required for ideological work; at any given moment, we cannot stand idly by, lest we make irreparable historical errors." The Party, Xi continued, echoing Lenin, must "occupy the commanding heights of public opinion, and always exercise and dominate the power of speech."  Advanced technology has certainly given the Chinese party-state’s Leninism new outlets for its impulses. The Party’s supremacy over information technology—its access to smartphone data, its power over private tech firms—offers an immense trove of data that can be used for social control. Today, through chat searches and predictive algorithms that flag potentially rebellious discourse, China's police are picking potential protestors off trains hundreds of miles away from the city where they intend to rally.  Social media also presents new opportunities for propaganda. People's Daily has opened a channel on WeChat, China's ubiquitous chat and commerce app, which blends emojis into bromides against foreign imperialist encroachment on China's "internet sovereignty." China's vast scale, spotty privacy protections, and investment in technologies like facial recognition have created the world's largest natural laboratory for honing AI—a commanding height of the twenty-first century.

Response: This leaves us with a final irony: Leninism's adaptation to the digital age is better articulated in practice than in theory. Data, like oil, is a critical sector for political and economic power, and the Party is working to occupy its commanding heights. But Xi Jinping is drawn to theory as well; his speech on the 40th anniversary of Deng’s “reform and opening” in December 2018 devoted a lengthy section to Marxism, and he has recently become the author of a signature ideology of his own: “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era.” Yet new ideological banner phrases, and new technologies, have not altered the underlying Leninist logic of the Chinese Communist Party’s handling the relationship between politics and technology. Expect continuing updates to  Leninism 2.0.


Prompt: Every year at the end of August, the Nevada desert, with its dense, corrosive, dusty air, welcomes tens of thousands of pilgrims who call themselves “burners.” They come in house cars, peculiar floats, or private jets to this “Black Rock City,” which only exists for nine days. They build hundreds of art installations, attend sexy dance parties with roaring music all night long, and take part in more than one thousand activities—from yoga and meditation to S&M and orgies to artificial intelligence (AI) exhibitions. There is no commerce here. All you can get with money is ice and coffee. Everything else must be gotten for free or shared voluntarily. A hug or a song can be payment for bread and alcohol.

Response: This is the legendary Burning Man Festival, a utopian gathering centered around performance art. The theme for 2018 came from Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi collection I, Robot, published in 1950. The choice of the novel, which discusses the various moral issues between robot and man, seems to be responding to the current worldwide fervor for AI.


Prompt: Perhaps it was this theme that attracted a large group of tech entrepreneurs and investors from China. The media has reported that Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have all been seen in the playa of the Burning Man Festival, and these figures are revered by Chinese tech entrepreneurs as the heroes of the present era. Some participants from prior years even attributed the success of their projects to the inspirational power of Burning Man. Admittedly, this neat combination of worshipping totems while pursuing practical benefits is quintessentially Chinese.

Response: This year, I also came here with a group of friends from all over the world and became a “virgin burner.” I had already learned about the so-called Ten Principles of Burning Man—but experiencing firsthand this miraculous feeling of order emerging from chaos proved to be remarkably different from the Chinese social experience of myriad rules and stringent controls. I had to spend several days slowly assimilating before I could savor the joy of this so-called “techno-hippie orgy.”  I couldn’t help but feel curious about those Chinese entrepreneurs and investors who came in private jets from thousands of miles away. There was an entrepreneur training camp organized by the internet giant T———, and seventy startup owners were brought over by their investor, a leading Chinese venture capital company, M———. They hired a company to outsource their experience; this company set up expensive air-conditioned space-capsule tents and prepared large amounts of food, drinking water, and alcohol. One camp even had karaoke. But in the first four days, these luxuries, which were too high-end for traditional burners, sat untouched. Those Chinese guests only arrived, belatedly, on the fourth day. I heard that the most expensive slot for this camp cost $20,000, whereas a regular ticket for the Burning Man Festival cost only $425.


Prompt: Of course, this sort of privilege and consumerism, which runs against the ideals of Burning Man, can also be found among Silicon Valley elites, and have been harshly criticized. But the difference was this: the majority of these Chinese burners seemed to know little about the festival and had no intention of trying to understand and respect the Burning Man spirit. They either saw the festival as an exotic, lawless place, or as just another holiday getaway for business-related socializing. They brought certain habits with them from the outside world, and especially habits from China.

Response: So we witnessed the following scenes: most people lay in air-conditioned tents, drinking cold beverages and fiddling with their smartphones (though there was no signal); many used their senior executive titles when they introduced themselves; some took photos of other people’s nude bodies without consent; there was verbal or physical harassment of burners of the opposite sex, often occurring in the form of “inviting” them to the orgy dome; some were unwilling to share food and even called other burners fuwuyuan, or “waiter”; others refused to take part in collective work and set up individual entrepreneur training classes in the camps; and there were also people littering and spitting everywhere.  However, there was another group of Chinese burners, mostly millennials—artists, documentary directors, feminist activists, and Burning Man enthusiasts—who tried to communicate to the rest of the Chinese burners the principles of the Burning Man Festival: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy. But they didn’t have much success.


Prompt: Looking at these tech elites who represent the new era of a rising China, I felt as if I were seeing something much larger played out in miniature. And I was forcefully reminded of several recent events that have sparked heated debates in China.  Wolf Instincts On August 7, 2018, the founder and CEO of the Chinese search giant Baidu, Li Yanhong (also known as Robin Li), commented in a WeChat post about Google’s possible return to the Chinese market: “If Google decides to come back to China, we are highly confident that we will take them on again, and win again.” This comment triggered a vehement backlash online, with tens of thousands of people expressing discontent about the quality of Baidu's search results, especially about the deceptive ads that it promotes.  Two years ago, a college student named Wei Zexi died as a result of delayed treatment caused by the so-called “Putian Medical Group,” which posted misleading ads for an ineffective form of cancer immunotherapy that were then promoted in Baidu’s search results. In the two months after this incident, the stock value of Baidu plummeted by over 15 percent, but even today fake medical ads still appear in Baidu Search, waiting to swindle users once more.  On August 25, 2018, a twenty-five-year-old girl from Zhejiang was raped and killed by a car driver after she had used Didi Hitch (an app similar to Uber Pool or Lyft Line). Public opinion was especially incensed because this was the second instance of rape and murder on the Didi platform within the span of one hundred days. Didi is the biggest online car-hailing service provider in China, yet its product design, driver screening, and customer service all still had serious security vulnerabilities that had gone unresolved. Furthermore, a former executive was discovered to have said that Didi Hitch was designed to be a “sexy” social platform—“like a coffee shop, or a bar, a private car can become a half-open, half-private social space. It’s a very sexy application scenario”—which further fanned the outrage. Didi eventually decided to suspend and reorganize Didi Hitch in an effort to address the problem, but it could not stop users from uninstalling and boycotting the app anyway.

Response: The third piece of explosive news happened during the Burning Man Festival. Liu Qiangdong, also known as Richard Liu, the founder of the online retailing giant JD.com, which has a stock market value of $310 billion, was embroiled in a sexual assault scandal following a night of lavish eating and drinking at a Japanese restaurant in Minnesota. As a result, from August 31 to September 7, 2018, JD.com’s share price plummeted from $31.30 to $26.95 and the company’s market value evaporated by 43 billion RMB. Although the scandal was unrelated to the services of the company, it nonetheless gave rise to carnivalesque visions of the lifestyles of Chinese tech entrepreneurs as well as a significant critique of this nouveau riche class.  In the past twenty years, the Chinese tech industry has experienced explosive growth. Terms from the famous sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem like langxing (“wolf instinct,” as in The Wolf of Wall Street), yeman shengzhang (“savage growth,” as in, “That was savage, man!”) and jiangwei gongji (meaning a blow so powerful that it flattens your opponent from three dimensions to two dimensions) have become popular among Chinese tech entrepreneurs. They act as the first generation of pioneers journeying into the virtual New World. They imagine themselves as packs of wolves in the Mongolian plains who can only survive and emerge victorious through bloody combat, incessantly stalking new territory and prey.  Objectively speaking, China’s technology companies have indeed greatly promoted technological progress in China and even around the world. According to an unpublished report by the China Development Research Center, from 1995 to 2015 nearly 80 percent of Chinese R&D expenditure came from private tech companies rather than the government, a percentage significantly higher than in developed countries such as the US, the UK, and France, where it hovers around 50 to 60 percent. In most Chinese cities, cash is seldom used, since in everyday life most consumers use mobile payment apps through their smartphones. Even street peddlers selling roasted sweet potatoes hang a card with a QR code to scan for payment. Concepts like AI, virtual reality, blockchain, and genetic editing have become deeply rooted in the public consciousness through relentless coverage in the media. Chinese people love technology, trust technology, and rely on technology. While fully (or even excessively) enjoying the convenience brought by technology, they have consciously or unconsciously forgotten about its possible negative impacts, such as infringements upon personal privacy and being misled by inaccurate data.


Prompt: Thousands of years ago, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi said, “One should master the external world rather than be mastered by it.” His was a sober reflection upon the power relationship between man and material civilization. But just as the traditional idea of gewu, the study of the essence of things, did not blossom into modern science, so too did the relationship between man and technology only enter Chinese people’s field of vision in the last forty years, after the start of “reform and opening up.” Important tasks like public oversight and institutional design according to the rule of law are poorly developed, and often have been done only in hasty reaction to the exponential growth of the tech industry over the last twenty years. This lack of supervision has resulted in the vast majority of Chinese tech companies falling behind with regard to the ethics of science and technology.  But Chinese tech companies are starting to pay the price for their immaturity now that the entire market has become saturated, and hundreds of millions of users have both more experience with technology and the opportunity to reflect on it. At the same time, the government is beginning to actively intervene via supervision and legislation, which has made life increasingly difficult for these companies. For instance, the stringent controls over online gaming (including restrictions on the number of regulatory approvals granted to games and limiting the time minors spend playing games) imposed in 2018 have indirectly cost Tencent a stunning 1.2 trillion HKD in market value.

Response: Burning Better Nevertheless, tech startups are still the hottest field. In our camp at the Burning Man Festival, there were two tech entrepreneurs, from Beijing and Hangzhou respectively, who tried to find inspiration from Burning Man to help them start new journeys. One, Mr. Miao, spoke only broken English but spent the day reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. At night, he went to electronic music parties and clumsily swung his limbs around trying to dance. Every day he discovered something new. “There is a kissing booth, and everyone can kiss strangers!” The digital platform he created was about to expand overseas into the North American market, and he was trying to find some kind of cultural affinity. The other, Mr. Yang, was an engineer from the hottest Chinese short-video platform. He imagined the Burning Man Festival as a giant TED talk but was often disappointed: “Those guys aren’t discussing Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat—they just literally believe the Earth is one giant flat board!” Although Mr. Miao and Mr. Yang might have been let down by the Burning Man Festival, I trust that this experience opened them up to new ways of thinking. Mr. Miao gradually came to accept the idea that people can walk around naked or make out with strangers if they are willing. Mr. Yang made friends with one neighbor who was sharing marijuana cookies and had a long conversation with another, who happened to be an IT engineer. I also met some founders of leading Chinese tech companies who thought more deeply about these issues after experiencing the festival. The founder of the search engine and internet company Sougou, Wang Xiaochuan, said, “In this utopian community, we can experience cultures or principles that have been discarded or distorted in the civilized world. If you take certain things back with you, they’ll make your daily life more creative and more powerful.” During the final night, a huge nebulous wooden structure called Galaxia was burned in a spectacular fire at a place called the Temple. The tradition is that many burners put photos and objects representing deceased family members and friends together with words of remembrance into the Temple to be burned as commemoration.


Prompt: People gathered around the soaring flames. We sat quietly in the desert, below the vast, starry sky, and we seemed to have returned to a time thousands of years ago, when primitive humans yearned to connect and communicate with the gods and the dead. We were no longer lonely. Next to the flames someone shouted, “Thank you, Larry!” More people followed suit, shouting, and some people wiped tears from their eyes.  They were paying tribute to the founder of all this, Larry Harvey, who had just passed away that year. In 1998 he said in a speech, “This is the analog to cyberspace, but it’s different, because it’s not anonymous and it’s not vicarious like the internet can be. So it puts people in touch with one another . . . It turns out the world is changing fast and we’re teaching valuable survival skills out here, this is about radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” And this is precisely what I felt over those eight days.  Then the camps and the art installations were removed. The house cars left. The desert returned to its original state, and the Milky Way reappeared in the night sky. Before departing, groups of burners voluntarily searched the sand for any trash left behind by human activity. Even a tiny shard of glass had to be found and taken away. Leaving no trace.

Response: In the campsite where I was staying, which had become a sort of headquarters for all of the Chinese campers, a group of young people were having a heated discussion as they prepared to leave. They hoped to set up a screening mechanism next year, so that only true burners could be selected to attend. They also hoped to create art installations and campsites that would authentically represent Chinese culture so that all burners interested in China could partake and interact.


Prompt: Consent. This word appeared repeatedly in their conversations. It represented a respect for others, for their communities and their cultures. Maybe Chinese tech entrepreneurs would remember this word every now and then, after they went back home. Maybe they would bring such respect to their future products and services so that technology can better serve everyone. Or maybe I am too optimistic.

Response: Will I return next year? I ask myself.  I think I will return. The best way to change the future is to become a part of it. And I want to become a better Chinese burner. When I started writing this article, Feminist Voices had been deleted for six months and ten days. Yes, I have been keeping track of the time: ten days, fifteen days, thirty days, sixty days, three months, six months… The first week after it disappeared from the internet, my heart was filled with mourning; every day I lay in bed and cried. As time went by, I seemed to see a figure drifting away, but her soul was still near me. And her name will always linger in my mind.  Losing Feminist Voices was like losing a loved one, or even like having a part of myself die before my eyes. I must put this story into words, in the first person, because people should know that online censorship and persecution do not only erase information; they cause psychological and physical pain to real people. Another important reason to write this is to prevent the memory of Feminist Voices from being erased entirely. To preserve and spread the intellectual contributions that it has created—that is the real purpose of this essay.


Prompt: Starting Out In September 2009, I founded the magazine that would become Feminist Voices. At first, I called it Women's Voices—a less confrontational name. I was the only editor. I had resigned from my job as a journalist several years earlier and was working with women's NGOs. My goal was to help spread feminist activism and ideas. In the introduction to the first issue of Women's Voices, I explained that I wanted to “provide a critical gender perspective in the media and help popularize China’s feminist movement." At the time, Women's Voices was an e-magazine in the .doc file format, which was distributed by  email and also available for download from several websites. It came out once a week. Every issue contained was a roundup of social and cultural news as well as feminist actions. The form was very rudimentary. I had no money to hire a designer, and I didn’t think design was important. Many people suggested that I convert the .doc files into PDF documents to appear more "advanced." I refused, because most readers didn't have PDF reading software on their computers. I wanted Women's Voices to be able to reach the most readers possible in the cheapest and simplest way.

Response: I also wanted to get readers to participate in the project. At the time, I had about 1,000 subscribers, many of whom had expressed their enthusiasm for the feminist movement by reading this e-magazine. I urged them to suggest topics and opinions, published their letters and contributions, and devised simple ways to interview them and compile their insights. For instance, I used a group text to send messages on Chinese New Year's Eve to ask readers about their views on CCTV’s coverage of the upcoming Spring Festival, which many feminists thought was sexist. And I relied on readers to help disseminate the e-magazine: to forward it to their relatives, friends, classmates, and students.


Prompt: The mother of one of our readers told us that she was surprised by Women's Voices. She had never read anything like it before. Before our magazine, the conversation among feminists in China was quite academic and aimed only at a small audience. For the first time, Women's Voices made many people recognize that feminist ideas could address China's current social reality and give many people new, critical ideas. Women's Voices had no intention of producing a "classic" or eternal discourse. Rather, we wanted to work with our readers to better understand contemporary  issues and events. I hoped that our efforts would help illuminate the situation of feminists in China and strengthen our movement.

Response: It was not possible to build a women’s movement solely through electronic media, due to the simplicity and constraints of the medium. However, through Women's Voices, I got to know young people who were interested in feminism. Many of them were only children, daughters, women who had gotten higher education, and were living in big cities. They were not only reluctant to live a life of conformity; they were reluctant to tolerate gender inequality.  By 2010, social media had become widespread in China. That April, Women's Voices set up an account on the microblogging site Sina Weibo—the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Initially, we used it to publish our own original content. In April 2011, at a reader's suggestion, the Women's Voices microblog changed its name to Feminist Voices and became the first public platform on Chinese social media that had “feminist” in its name. From this time onward, our focus shifted to social media. Within the network structure of Weibo, we began to establish a feminist community online.


Prompt: At that time, the word "feminism" was still taboo in China. I used to search for accounts tagged with "feminism" on Weibo, but I couldn't find any that were really oriented around feminism besides ours. So when Women's Voices began publishing the Feminist Voices microblog, my friends worried we would scare people away. However, the opposite happened. Feminist Voices began to take off. It grew as Weibo grew. At the same time, we established our own, independent channels.

Response: Into the Streets On Valentine's Day 2012, under the direction of Feminist Voices, a group of young activists organized a public event at the Beijing City Center. The purpose was to call for the passage of anti-domestic violence laws—there were none on the books—and the theme was “injured bride.” Dressed in white wedding gowns with fake blood smeared on the front, women walked through downtown Beijing holding signs that read "Violence Is Not Love" and “Hitting Is Not Intimacy.” This was the first time that the new Chinese feminism appeared in public, bringing a significant strategic update of the feminist movement with youth as the subject. It was also the beginning of a new strategy at Feminist Voices: we started to coordinate online communication with offline organizations. Ten days later, feminists organized a public event called "Occupy the Men's Bathroom,” which demanded more female public toilets to make the ratio of male to female toilets equal. (A young college student began the movement when she and a group of other protesters held signs outside men's public restrooms in Beijing saying, "Men, please let women use the bathroom first,” and asking men to let women in line use the men's bathroom. The campaign spread across the country and was successful in Guangzhou, where the city government promised to build more female toilets.) The “Occupy the Men's Bathroom” action earned sensationalist coverage from the Chinese media and quickly became one of the top ten trending topics on Weibo. However, the keyword associated with the event was quickly banned from Weibo searches. The feminist topics emerging on social media immediately ran into trouble with censorship.


Prompt: More feminist actions continued in the following months. In June 2012, a public post by Shanghai Metro on their Weibo account encouraging female passengers to “dress appropriately to avoid harassment” sparked a major debate on sexual harassment. On June 24th, a group of anonymous protesters demonstrated in the Shanghai subway by holding signs that said, “It’s fine for me to be sexy, it’s not ok for you to touch” (我可以骚，你不能扰, Wo ke yi sao, Ni bu neng sao, a rhyming phrase). Photos of these protesters were sent to us via text message and then posted to Weibo on the Feminist Voices account. This post made great waves—it was shared more than 2000 times—and triggered a heated online debate.  In the ensuing controversy, sexual harassment became a public issue for the first time, marking the beginning of a new wave of activism by young Chinese feminists. In the course of this media frenzy, I realized that effective activism required us to communicate with the mainstream, launching public debates to shed light on feminist issues—and that only by launching these debates would a broader audience become aware of feminist ideas. In the beginning, Women's Voices had advocated “alternative” views. But we now realized that if we wanted Feminist Voices to enter the mainstream, we had to use mainstream means of empowering ordinary people.  From 2012 to 2015, China’s young feminist activists created many news events through radical actions. These had two direct effects. The first was to force several government departments to make policy concessions. In May 2013, for instance, the Ministry of Education announced that universities cannot set separate test score cutoffs for applicants of different genders, or establish gender ratios for admission, after a months-long advocacy campaign by feminists. The second effect was to spread feminist ideas more widely. The actions raised the public awareness of feminist issues and established a core community of activists committed to those issues.

Response: Feminist Voices became the mouthpiece for this group of young people on social media. Feminist Voices had always tried to play the role of leading and coordinating the online feminist community by posting daily discussions, but we now hoped to bring those discussions into mainstream society.  This was not an easy task, for many reasons. At the time, Weibo imitated Twitter and restricted the number of characters to 140. Within this extremely limited range, figuring out how to express ourselves thoughtfully was difficult for me and my colleagues. We had many arguments.  Another challenge we had to navigate was the emphasis that social media platforms place on getting more followers. From the beginning to the end, Feminist Voices was the most popular women’s rights platform on the Chinese internet. We were proud of this and we kept increasing our number of followers. On the other hand, popularity was not our only goal. I had told my young colleagues countless times that we shouldn’t be sensational or emotional, and that our tone should always remain resolutely cool and calm. In my opinion, sensationalism is a way of manipulating your audience. It’s a way to use your readers so that they do not think. In this way, it is anti-feminist.


Prompt: Ultimately, we weren’t a media outlet. Our real goal was not to encourage more people to read us, but to encourage more people to join actions aimed at changing Chinese society. Therefore, for us, communication was only one path to a larger goal: organization and mobilization. This is the biggest difference between alternative media and mass media. Alternative media are the engines of social movements.

Response: Closing In In 2014, Feminist Voice reached its peak. We had popular accounts across multiple platforms, including Weibo, WeChat, and Douban (a social networking site for young people). We developed a series of video programs and independent documentaries that we distributed on those platforms. We supported a feminist community center, which was open every day, and a theater group that put on feminist plays, while keeping in touch with young feminists, NGOs, and gender researchers across the country. We also gave dozens of public lectures each year at universities and communities in cities.


Prompt: At this time, however, China's social environment was becoming increasingly repressive. Liberal intellectuals no longer occupied positions as dissenters or thought leaders within mass media and social media. In 2013, after Xi Jinping took office, the government placed  new restrictions on speech. It adopted stricter censorship rules and used criminal persecutions to crack down on citizens' speech and actions. The state also intensified its control of social media by censoring organic content and creating their own social media propaganda.  In August 2013, the government staged the “Eating Bao” event in Beijing. President Xi showed up at an ordinary bao shop, pretending to be a man of the people. Many users  posted photos of Xi ordering and eating on Weibo, giving a new image to his leadership. However, this performance was a coordinated, top-down propaganda operation. The government ensured that the photos of Xi dominated the Chinese internet. Moreover, this event had far-reaching implications. The “Eating Bao” event was one of the first cases where the Chinese government directly intervened in social media for propaganda purposes, and it inaugurated a new era of stronger state regulation of online speech. Afterwards, the internet would no longer be a so-called "free zone," but would become an important site of authoritarian governance.  The space for activism was never large in China, but under Xi it has shrunk sharply. In 2014, the Chinese government arrested nearly 1,000 human rights defenders. China’s feminist movement was reaching a crossroads. On the one hand, a feminist community had taken  shape on social media by the second half of 2014. A broad debate on feminist themes no longer needed to rely on the instigation of core activists. Rather, it was happening spontaneously. On the other hand, the government was constantly harassing and threatening feminist organizers, including the editors of Feminist Voices. These two phenomena coexisted, bringing both excitement and anxiety. In early 2015, I said to a friend, "People outside the inner circle will cheer because of the progress of feminism. People inside will feel more and more anxious. The government has seen the subversiveness of the feminist movement, so some of the feminist activists have been been targeted."

Response: Online harassment—possibly directed by the government—became increasingly common. It came in multiple forms, and the platforms did little to prevent it. Early on, Chinese social media platforms had a "free-for-all" attitude. This could be seen in the phenomenon of the "human flesh search" on Weibo, where users publicly distribute the offline details and whereabouts of people who seemingly deserve public scorn. Similar to “doxxing,” this practice straddles the line between grassroots justice and pure harassment.  Features like creating a "blocked list" on Weibo was not possible until late 2009, and even then harassers could continuously create new, anonymous accounts that let them continue attacking you. Regulations to protect users of online platforms were nonexistent, with legal means often unavailable to pursue online harassers. It wasn't until after 2015 that new laws were put into place that increased a platform's accountability for user interactions (as well as opening the door to state surveillance). Overall, however, the platforms continue to prioritize engagement and traffic over the wellbeing of the users.  More importantly, online censorship became both more stringent and more subtle. It was as if people on Weibo were gathered in a town square, but everyone was trapped in an invisible cage. The self-censorship was exhausting. Where was the boundary of permissible speech? What was the cost of crossing it? No one knew, so each of us had to try to evaluate every instance for ourselves. Looking back on that period, I’m proud that I never let the fear of censorship prevent me from saying what I wanted to say on Weibo. It’s not that I didn’t consider the risks. But I didn’t feel that we should keep silent because we were afraid of having the account deleted by the censors. For example, we thought long and hard about publishing a piece written by the scholar Ai De Ming on the feminist activist Wang Li Hong. Even if censorship did end up happening, the deletion of our account was nothing compared to what happened to the feminist activists who were thrown into prison such as Wang, who was sentenced to nine months for organizing a demonstration to defend three Fujian bloggers convicted of defamation.


Prompt: From the Square to the Alley Ultimately, however, we did become a target of state repression. During the Spring Festival of 2015, Feminist Voices launched an initiative to protest gender discrimination at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. Feminist Voices started a WeChat group for the event, where people posted critiques. Some of the critiques went viral, as people from the group wrote articles that were circulated widely. However, we paid a price. In the aftermath, Feminist Voices suffered its first large-scale review by government censors. Many of our posts were deleted or blocked.  This happened around the time that the wave of feminist actions in China was coming to a climax. On March 5, 2015, I went to New York to attend a United Nations meeting and planned to stay for two weeks. The next day, five young feminist activists were arrested in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou because they planned to organize volunteers to hand out flyers against sexual harassment in the bus stations of ten cities on the same day. This became known as the "Feminist Five" case. For the first time in its history, the Chinese Communist Party publicly suppressed a feminist action. Feminist activity was criminalized in a country where the constitution guarantees "equality between men and women." After thirty-seven days, the five sisters were released, but young feminist activists were terrified. Since then, many offline feminist activities have been cancelled, and the state-controlled mass media has reported almost no public feminist activities.  As for Feminist Voices, we survived, despite thorough investigations by the state. Still, we were forced to downsize. We closed the community center, and almost completely stopped organizing public events. But we maintained our accounts on the two most important social media platforms, Weibo and WeChat, and we continued to release original content—although many of our posts were quickly deleted by state censors. Due to continuous monitoring and threats, Feminist Voices had to become much more low-key. Continuing to exist became a struggle.

Response: During this period, we found that our WeChat account showed better growth. WeChat is a mobile social application developed by Tencent. On WeChat, messages can be seen by your social circle, but not on the open internet. If Weibo is a town square, where everyone can see each other, then WeChat is more like an alley, where only a limited number of people can gather. That’s why WeChat is more suitable for connecting a close community.   Feminist Voices became more active on WeChat, and our readers carried on many vibrant  feminist discussions in the comment area. On Weibo, by contrast, our influence declined. One of the reasons was that there were many other women's rights accounts. These accounts paid more attention to women's daily life, and weren’t focused on activism.   Even as we tried to be more low-key, however, Feminist Voices remained a target of the state. In February 2017, following the US women's strike, the government banned our Weibo account for one month. (The exact reason for the ban remains unclear, but the government was presumably concerned that our coverage of the US women’s strike would help further inspire the Chinese feminist movement; at that time the government was also restricting any communications critical of President Trump, since they expected Trump to be beneficial to them.) The editorial department decided to use this month as a special period. Through WeChat, we published many articles on the history of feminist activism, along with hundreds of photos from supporters from mainland China, Hong Kong, and other countries. (The photos included women wearing pink pussyhats holding signs that said, "Sina Weibo does not care about equality,” and men in Rosie the Riveter poses with signs that said, "I need Feminist Voices!") At the end of the ban, the editorial department sent the following letter of thanks:  Feminism has gone from the periphery to the center of the public eye. As a movement, it is constantly facing new situations and challenges. We want to thank you, not only for your concern, your support and perseverance in the face of crisis and doubt cast on women’s voices, but also for your firm stand with feminism… We have always intended to persist; your choice to stand with us affirmed our mission. We know this was a choice based on your values, and not an easy choice to make.


Prompt: Afterlives During the following year, the pressure on feminist activists in China escalated. In May 2017, the head of the All-China Women’s Federation—the country’s official women’s rights organization with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party—made a public speech accusing feminists of spreading Western ideas. They alleged that “Western hostile forces... actively peddled Western feminism” and “female supremacy” under the banner of “poverty alleviation,” “charity,” “empowerment,”  and other labels.  The All-China Women’s Federation is basically a megaphone for government propaganda. Its conflation of feminism with “Western hostile forces” isn’t something that the organization’s leadership came up with on their own, but rather absorbed from the official state-controlled discourse. And this discourse, backed by violent suppression, was becoming increasingly anti-feminist. It was becoming okay to openly condemn feminists and even to circulate the most ridiculous rumors, such as the false claim that Saudi Arabia funded Feminist Voices. These attacks not only sapped our energy—energy we could have otherwise used to help women. They also created a malicious environment that made feminists and their supporters silent, afraid, and isolated.

Response: In January 2018, the #MeToo movement began to rise in China, and women‘s anger that had accumulated for a long time against sexual harassment finally broke out. Almost everything happened on the internet because it was difficult to move offline. At this time, Feminist Voices only provided support by sharing articles via Weibo and WeChat. But when the “relevant departments”—China’s domestic security agencies—tried to convict the organizers of the movement, they didn’t target the young activists and students at the forefront. They targeted Feminist Voices.


Prompt: In the middle of the night on March 8, 2018, Feminist Voices was shut down on Weibo because of the “posting of sensitive and illegal information.” After a few hours, the WeChat account was also banned, under the vague charge of “violating relevant laws and regulations.” On its last day, Feminist Voices had 250,000 followers on both platforms.  The next day, on March 9, 2018, the WeChat index—similar to Twitter’s trending topics—showed a significant increase in the popularity of the word "feminist," apparently related to the crackdown on Feminist Voices. Then, ten days later, a huge WeChat public account, whose daily theme was completely unrelated to feminism, issued a long article accusing Feminist Voices of being related to “criminal prostitution groups” and “outside reactionary forces.” This very sensational article quickly gained tens of millions of views online. However, when we tried to publish a rebuttal, it was removed after only 4,000 clicks. Any mentions of Feminist Voices’ legal work—such as our unsuccessful attempt to sue Weibo and WeChat in order to challenge the closure of our accounts—were banned, along with any articles or photos sent by our readers or supporters. WeChat shut down some supporters’ personal accounts, and Weibo even forbade users from using our logo as an internet avatar.

Response: After that, the popularity of search terms related to feminism on the Chinese internet plummeted. Obviously, people had gotten the message that feminism was “unpopular” and should be taboo. This represented yet another front in the war that the state had been waging against feminism since 2015. However, this time, the means was no longer criminal investigation but online repression. Its purpose was to obliterate the social contribution of feminists, cut off our social network, abolish feminist actions’ legitimacy, and drive us out of the public spaces where we have been working hard for the past few years.


Prompt: At that time, from New York, I wrote in an article:  Many people may not understand why feminism is a "sensitive" topic, and I have always felt the same way. Regardless of the personal views of its participants, China’s feminist movement does not oppose the government agenda, and it has always paid more attention to economic, social, and cultural rights than civil and political rights. The policies and reforms advocated by the feminist movement do not touch the core of political power. However, we do not make the rules. I have gradually come to understand that there are three other factors that had to be considered. The first is that feminism is ultimately critical and serves to ask, “Who is responsible?” Second, any force that shows social organization and mobilization will be taboo, no matter what its claims are. Third, when the public space collapses, feminism cannot escape that kind of disaster. When dissenting thoughts and opinions are removed, feminist thought is also removed. In the future, we can go underground, but we will become isolated. Feminists cannot publicly preach and advocate for our cause… At that time, I said, "We have no choice but to resist." But how were we supposed to resist? Even though I was free, in the United States, I felt like a person who was being held captive.

Response: In the most painful period, I was grateful for the companionship and dedication of my friends.  I had never met many of them. They were our readers, and they created pictures, articles, and comics for Feminist Voices. Their contributions that were now deleted by the online platforms, their accounts that were canceled and no longer existed—all that they had sacrificed became part of a precious friendship.


Prompt: I have come to realize that it is not the wisdom of leaders, but the contributions of the many “ordinary” feminists that keep the feminist movement alive. The rank and file contribute a large amount of unpaid work, and broadcast the work of Feminist Voices by relaying articles and working around censorship. It is through them that I had realized more deeply than ever that Feminist Voices was so important to everyone. They remembered how they used to find Women's Voices in the past when it consisted of .doc files, starting from the era of desktop computers, starting in high school, reading every day, saving the articles.  Some people said that our magazine was their best friend. Some people said that our magazine was alive. Some people said that the death of Feminist Voices felt like the death of a famous singer. Of course, I didn’t make that comparison myself. It was only until after Feminist Voices was gone that I realized that the purpose of creating feminist knowledge was to share and disseminate that knowledge.  When one part of our life dies, we take what we are left with and work hard to move on. This is the responsibility of social activists. I will always mourn Feminist Voices. It is such a beautiful name. It carries the enthusiasm, persistence, faith, and love of so many people, and I am proud and sad for it. I will also guard the intellectual riches created by Feminist Voices and strive to ensure that its history is not forgotten.   But I can't end on that note. The government may have blocked Feminist Voices, but they cannot block the feminist movement. About a month after the closing of Feminist Voices, the Chinese #MeToo movement set off a new wave of conversation and activism. By August 2018, an unprecedented, shocking tide of feminist activity had taken off —even if participants were not foregrounding the term "women’s rights." (In fact, some people online used emoji to avoid censorship. Instead of posting “#MeToo,” they used the emoji for a bowl of rice (mi) and a rabbit (tu), which together sound the same as “me too.”)

Response: In 2012, I thought that we were starting a campaign. In 2015, I feared that the campaign was about to fail—I was wrong. In 2018, I finally realized that our campaign was just beginning. The movement is vast and networked: it has no central  leadership. But this does not mean that it doesn’t need competent communicators, organizers, and trainers. As I write this article, we have begun to pursue the next stage of our campaign.


Prompt: In mid-2017, a Uyghur man in his twenties, whom I will call Alim, went to meet a friend for lunch at a mall in his home city, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China. At a security checkpoint at the entrance, Alim scanned the photo on his government-issued identification card, and presented himself before a security camera equipped with facial recognition software. An alarm sounded. The security guards let him pass, but within a few minutes he was approached by officers from the local “convenience police station,” one of the thousands of rapid-response police stations that have been built every 200 or 300 meters in the Turkic Muslim areas of the region. The officers took him into custody.

Response: Alim’s heart was racing. Several weeks earlier, he had returned to China from studying abroad. As soon as he landed back in the country, he was pulled off the plane by police officers responding to a nationwide warrant for his arrest. He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now under suspicion of being “unsafe.” The police then administered what they call a “health check,” which involves collecting several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice signature and face signature—a process which all adults in Xinjiang are expected to undergo. (According to the government, biometric data from 18.8 million of the region’s 21.8 million people have been collected through these checks.)  Then they transported him to one of the hundreds of detention centers that dot northwest China.  Over the past five years, these centers have become an important node in China’s technologically driven “People’s War on Terror.” Officially launched by the Xi Jinping administration in 2014, this war supposedly began as a response to Uyghur mass protests—themselves born out of desperation over decades of discrimination, police brutality, and the confiscation of Uyghur lands—and to attacks directed against security forces and civilians who belong to the Han ethnic majority. In the intervening period, the Chinese government has come to treat almost all expressions of Uyghur Islamic faith as signs of potential religious extremism and ethnic separatism under vaguely defined anti-terrorism laws; the detention centers are the first stop for those suspected of such crimes. Since 2017 alone, more than 1 million Turkic Muslims have moved through these centers.  At the center to which he had been sent, Alim was deprived of sleep and food, and subjected to hours of interrogation and verbal abuse. “I was so weakened through this process that at one point during my interrogation I began to laugh hysterically,” he said when we spoke. Other detainees report being placed in stress positions, tortured with electric shocks, and submitted to long periods of isolation. When he wasn’t being interrogated, Alim was kept in a fourteen-square-meter cell with twenty other Uyghur men, though cells in some detention centers house more than sixty people. Former detainees have said they had to sleep in shifts because there was not enough space for everyone to stretch out at once. “They never turn out the lights,” Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur woman who spent several months in detention, told me.


Prompt: The religious and political transgressions of these detainees were frequently discovered through social media apps on their smartphones, which Uyghurs are required to produce at thousands of checkpoints around Xinjiang. Although there was often no real evidence of a crime according to any legal standard, the digital footprint of unauthorized Islamic practice, or even an association to someone who had committed one of these vague violations, was enough to land Uyghurs in a detention center. Maybe their contact number had been in the list of WeChat followers in another detainee’s phone. Maybe they had posted, on their WeChat wall, an image of a Muslim in prayer. It could be that in years past they had sent or received audio recordings of Islamic teachings that the Public Security Bureau, which polices social life in China, deems “ideological viruses”: the sermons and lessons of so-called “wild” imams, who have not been authorized by the state. Maybe they had a relative who moved to Turkey or another Muslim-majority country and added them to their WeChat account using a foreign number. The mere fact of having a family member abroad, or of traveling outside China, as Alim had, often resulted in detention.  Not using social media could also court suspicion. So could attempting to destroy a SIM card, or not carrying a smartphone. Unsure how to avoid detention when the crackdown began, some Uyghurs buried old phones in the desert. Others hid little baggies of used SIM cards in the branches of trees, or put SD cards containing Islamic texts and teachings in dumplings and froze them, hoping they could eventually be recovered. Others gave up on preserving Islamic knowledge and burned data cards in secret. Simply throwing digital devices into the garbage was not an option; Uyghurs feared the devices would be recovered by the police and traced back to the user. Even proscribed content that was deleted before 2017 —when the Public Security Bureau operationalized software that uses artificial intelligence to scour millions of social media posts per day for religious imagery—can reportedly be unearthed.

Response: Most Uyghurs in the detention centers are on their way to serving long prison sentences, or to indefinite captivity in a growing network of massive internment camps which the Chinese state has described as “transformation through education” facilities. These camps, which function as medium-security prisons and, in some cases, forced-labor factories, center around training Uyghurs to disavow their Islamic identity and embrace the secular and economic principles of the Chinese state. They forbid the use of the Uyghur language and instead offer drilling in Mandarin, the language of China’s Han majority, which is now referred to as “the national language.” Only a handful of detainees who are not Chinese citizens have been fully released from this “re-education” system.   Alim was relatively lucky: he had been let out after only two weeks; he later learned that a relative had intervened in his case. But what he didn’t know until police arrested him at the mall was that he had been placed on a blacklist maintained by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, or 体化联合作战平台), a regional data system that uses AI to monitor the countless checkpoints in and around Xinjiang’s cities. Any attempt to enter public institutions such as hospitals, banks, parks or shopping centers, or to cross beyond the checkpoints of the dozen city blocks that were under the jurisdiction of his local police precinct, would trigger the IJOP to alert police. The system had profiled him and predicted that he was a potential terrorist.  Officers told Alim he should “just stay at home” if he wanted to avoid detention again. Although he was officially free, his biometrics and his digital history were being used to bind him in place. “I’m so angry and afraid at the same time,” he told me. He was now haunted by his data.  Unlimited Market Potential The surveillance and predictive profiling systems that targeted Alim and the many Uyghur Muslims he met in detention are the product of a neo-totalitarian security-industrial complex that has emerged in China over the past decade. Dozens of Chinese tech firms are building and marketing tools for a new “global war on terror,” fought in a domestic register and transposed to a technological key. In this updated version of the conflict, the war machine is more about facial recognition software and machine learning algorithms than about drones and Navy SEAL teams; the weapons are made in China rather than the United States; and the supposed terrorists are not “barbaric” foreigners but domestic minority populations who appear to threaten the dominance of authoritarian leaders and impede state-directed capitalist expansion.


Prompt: In the modern history of systems of control deployed against subjugated populations, ranging from North American internment camps to the passbooks of apartheid-era South Africa, new technologies have been crucial. In China, that technological armament is now so vast that it has become difficult for observers to fully inventory. The web of surveillance in Xinjiang reaches from cameras on the wall, to the chips inside mobile devices, to Uyghurs’ very physiognomy. Face scanners and biometric checkpoints track their movements. Nanny apps record every bit that passes through their smartphones.  Other programs automate the identification of Uyghur voice signatures, transcribe, and translate Uyghur spoken language, and scan digital communications, looking for suspect patterns of social relations, and flagging religious speech or a lack of fervor in using Mandarin. Deep-learning systems search in real time through video feeds capturing millions of faces, building an archive which can help identify suspicious behavior in order to predict who will become an “unsafe” actor. The predictions generated automatically by these “computer vision” technologies are triggered by dozens of actions, from dressing in an Islamic fashion to failing to attend or fully participate in nationalistic flag raising ceremonies. All of these systems are brought together in the IJOP, which is constantly learning from the behaviors of the Uyghurs it watches.

Response: The predictive algorithms that purport to keep Xinjiang safe by identifying terrorist threats feed on the biometric and behavioral data extracted from the bodies of Uyghurs. The power—and potential profitability—of these systems as tools of security and control derives from unfettered access to Uyghurs’ digital lives and physical movements. The justification of the war on terror thus offers companies a space in which to build, experiment with, and refine these systems. In her recent study on the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff notes that consumers are constantly off-gassing valuable data that can be captured by capital and turned into profitable predictions about our preferences and future behaviors. In the Uyghur region, this logic has been taken to an extreme: from the perspective of China’s security-industrial establishment, the principal purpose of Uyghur life is to generate data.


Prompt: After being rendered compliant by this repressive surveillance, Uyghurs are fed into China’s manufacturing industries as labor. Officially, the People’s War on Terror has been framed as a “poverty alleviation” struggle. This requires retraining marginalized Muslim communities to make them politically docile yet economically productive. China enforces this social order with prisons and camps built to accommodate over ten percent of the country’s Turkic Muslim population. The training that happens in the camps leads directly to on-site factories, for textiles and other industries, where detainees are forced to work indefinitely. The government frames these low-wage jobs as “internships.”  Controlling the Uyghurs has also become a test case for marketing Chinese technological prowess to authoritarian nations around the world. A hundred government agencies and companies, from two dozen countries including the United States, France, Israel, and the Philippines, now participate in the annual China-Eurasia Security Expo in Ürümchi, the capital of the Uyghur region. Because Ürümchi is a strategic entrepôt to the Muslim world, the expo has become the most influential security tech convention across East Asia.  The ethos at the expo, and in the Chinese techno-security industry as a whole, is that Muslim populations need to be managed and made productive. This, from the perspective of Chinese industry, is one of China’s major contributions to the future of global security. As a spokesperson for Leon Technology, one of the major players in the new security industry, put it at the expo in 2017, 60 percent of the world’s Muslim-majority nations are part of China’s premier international development initiative, “One Belt, One Road,” so there is “unlimited market potential” for the type of population-control technology they are developing in Xinjiang.  Over the past five years, the People’s War on Terror has allowed Chinese tech startups such as Leon, Meiya Pico, Hikvision, Face++, Sensetime, and Dahua to achieve unprecedented levels of growth. In just the last two years, the state has invested an estimated $7.2 billion on techno-security in Xinjiang.  Some of the technologies they pioneered in Xinjiang have already found customers in authoritarian states as far away as sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, CloudWalk, a Guangzhou-based tech startup that has received more than $301 million in state funding, finalized a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Mnangagwa administration in Zimbabwe to build a national “mass facial recognition program” in order to address “social security issues.” (CloudWalk has not revealed how much the agreement is worth.) Freedom of movement through airports, railways, and bus stations throughout Zimbabwe will now be managed through a facial database integrated with other kinds of biometric data. In effect, the Uyghur homeland has become an incubator for China’s “terror capitalism.”

Response: A Way of Life The Uyghur internet has not always been a space of exploitation and entrapment. When I arrived in Ürümchi in 2011 to conduct my first year of ethnographic fieldwork, the region had just been wired with 3G networks. When I returned for a second year, in 2014, it seemed as though nearly all adults in the city had a smartphone; downloads of Uyghur-language apps suggested approximately 45 percent of the Uyghur population of 12 million was using one. Many Uyghurs had begun to use WeChat to share recorded messages and video with friends and family in rural villages. They also used their phones to buy and sell products, read about what was happening in the world, and network with Uyghurs throughout the country and around the globe. Young Uyghur filmmakers could now share short films and music videos instantly with hundreds of thousands of followers. Overnight, Uyghur English teachers such as Kasim Abdurehim and pop stars such as Ablajan—cultural figures that the government subsequently labeled “unsafe”—developed followings that numbered in the millions.  Most unsettling, from the perspective of the state, unsanctioned Uyghur religious teachers based in China and Turkey developed a deep influence. Since the 1950s, when the newly founded People’s Republic of China began sending millions of Han settlers to the region, Islamic faith, Turkic identity, and the Uyghur language have been sources of resistance to Han cultural norms and Chinese secularism. Sunni Islam and Turkic identity formed the basis for the independent East Turkistan republics that predated the decades of settler colonization. Together with deep-seated attachments to the built environment of Uyghur civilization—courtyard houses, mosque communities, and Sufi shrines—they helped most Uyghurs feel distinct from their colonizers even in the teeth of Maoist campaigns to force them to assimilate.


Prompt: The government has always pushed to efface these differences. Beginning with Mao’s Religious Reform Movement of 1958, the state limited Uyghurs’ access to mosques, Islamic funerary practices, religious knowledge, and other Muslim communities. There were virtually no Islamic schools outside of state control, no imams who were not approved by the state. Children under the age of eighteen were forbidden to enter mosques. As social media spread through the Uyghur homeland over the course of the last decade, it opened up a virtual space to explore what it meant to be Muslim. It reinforced a sense that the first sources of Uyghur identity were their faith and language, their claim to a native way of life, and their membership in a Turkic Muslim community stretching from Ürümchi to Istanbul.  Because of the internet, millions of Uyghurs felt called to think in new ways about the piety of their Islamic practice, while simultaneously learning about self-help strategies and entrepreneurship. They began to imagine escaping an oppressive state which curtailed many of their basic freedoms by such means as restricting access to passports, systematic job discrimination, and permitting the seizure of Uyghur land. They also began to appreciate alternative modernities to the one the Chinese state was forcing upon them. Rather than being seen as perpetually lacking Han appearance and culture, they could find in their renewed Turkic and Islamic values a cosmopolitan and contemporary identity. They could embrace the halal standards of the Muslim world, wear the latest styles from Istanbul, and keep Chinese society at arms-length. Food, movies, music and clothing, imported from Turkey and Dubai, became markers of distinction. Women began to veil themselves. Men began to pray five times a day. They stopped drinking and smoking. Some began to view music, dancing and state television as influences to be avoided.

Response: The Han officials I met during my fieldwork referred to this rise in technologically disseminated religious piety as the “Talibanization” of the Uyghur population. Along with Han settlers, they felt increasingly unsafe traveling to the region’s Uyghur-majority areas, and uneasy in the presence of pious Turkic Muslims. The officials cited incidents that carried the hallmarks of religiously motivated violence—a knife attack carried out by a group of Uyghurs at a train station in Kunming; trucks driven by Uyghurs through crowds in Beijing and Ürümchi—as a sign that the entire Uyghur population was falling under the sway of terrorist ideologies.  But, as dangerous as the rise of Uyghur social media seemed to Han officials, it also presented them with a new means of control—one they had been working for several years to refine. On July 5, 2009, Uyghur high school and college students had used Facebook and Uyghur-language blogs to organize a protest demanding justice for Uyghur workers who were killed by their Han colleagues at a toy factory in eastern China. Thousands of Uyghurs took to the streets of Ürümchi, waving Chinese flags and demanding that the government respond to the deaths of their comrades. When they were violently confronted by armed police, many of the Uyghurs responded by turning over buses and beating Han bystanders. In the end, over 190 people were reported killed, most of them Han. Over the weeks that followed, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Uyghurs were disappeared by the police. The internet was shut off in the region for over nine months, and Facebook and Twitter were blocked across the country.  Soon after the internet came back online in 2010—with the notable absence of Facebook, Twitter, and other non-Chinese social media applications—state security, higher education, and private industry began to collaborate on breaking Uyghur internet autonomy. Much of the Uyghur-language internet was transformed from a virtual free society into a zone where government technology could learn to predict criminal behavior. Broadly defined anti-terrorism laws, introduced in 2014, turned nearly all crimes committed by Uyghurs, from stealing a Han neighbor’s sheep to protesting land seizures, into forms of terrorism. Religious piety, which the new laws referred to as “extremism,” was conflated with religious violence. The Xinjiang security industry mushroomed from a handful of private firms to approximately 1,400 companies employing tens of thousands of workers, ranging from low-level Uyghur security guards to Han camera and telecommunications technicians to coders and designers. The Xi administration declared a state of emergency in the region, the People’s War on Terror began, and Islamophobia was institutionalized.