When China’s prodigious tech influencer, Naomi Wu, found herself silenced, it wasn’t just the machinery of a surveillance state at play. Instead, it was a confluence of state repression and the sometimes capricious attention of a Western audience that, as she asserts, often views Chinese activists more as ideological tokens than as genuine human beings.
I was hoping this was the case for at least the whole first half of the article… even anxious what I was reading would be a provocation for the authorities to do worse. But what she says towards the end is just heartbreaking.
She’s obviously pretty frustrated, it’s just not clear to me that she’s been permanently silenced, that’s all I’m saying. She said specifically that she doesn’t want to be ammunition in an ideological war between east and west, so perhaps she anticipates a relaxation of the restrictions after a cooling off period.
EDIT: Honestly, I may be misreading her. We only get a few sentences from Naomi Wu herself, but she seems at the same time dismissive of Western attention (“we’re just signs for people like you in the West to wave at each other in their ideological war”), and seems to think her notoriety in the West was keeping authorities at bay (“Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me”).
Anyway, I hope the authorities back down, it’s not clear what agenda they are serving by restricting her video & social media access.
I hope not :-)
Someone pointed me at this series of Medium articles she wrote on an incident with Vice running an article outing her after explicitly agreeing not to. So that’s where the general air of animosity towards western journalists probably comes from.
I was also told that The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj took clips from another interview she gave and put them together out of context in support of a story on China’s censorship. I haven’t watched either interview yet, but that story apparently got the attention of the government and resulted in her being detained by the police. The “first strike” implied in this article.
I really hope she’s able to make more videos. I was a kind of dismissive when she would pop up in my YouTube feed… I figured she was just a paid presenter, had to be, right? But you pick up on her dry humor and depth pretty quickly.
I have to say I would be very upset if she came to harm and would not forget :-(