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.
Maybe? It’s only been a month, and Naomi Wu has been fairly clear in the past that she doesn’t want too much scrutiny of her personal life. It’s possible that her allies in Western media (and she definitely has some) have adopted a wait-and-see attitude about it. If the government is putting heat on her (or her partner), the last thing she wants is an international kerfuffle over it.
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 :-(
That’s a possibility, but throughout the article she sounds like she is attributing herself an unreasonable importance. I am not saying that in a derogatory manner, just pointing out that the kind of public she generally appeals to is a very small minority, definitely not the mainstream, and definitely not a bunch I would expect to hold a lot of geopolitical power.
What was she actually expecting a fraction of a fraction of the 3D Printing/OpenSource firmware hacking community to do for her when she was detained by the police?
The world doesn’t bat an eye when national celebrities like Jack Ma or Fan BingBing disappear for weeks, because this is all a show of power by the CCP, doubled with the implication that such things will keep happening to those who refuse to toe the party line. She admitted knowing for many years that her content and social presence were “outside of the norms”, but if she was indeed solely counting on her viewership to keep her out of trouble, this is beyond candid…
To me, this is very sad, because I want her to keep doing whatever she likes, but I wish I could say I was surprised.