When Silence Becomes a Duty

Luna Tian

1. Prologue

In July 2022, at 2 a.m., Zhang Wen (a pseudonym) lay in bed scrolling through his phone. A news piece about protests by rural bank depositors unsettled him. After some hesitation, he opened the login page of the WeChat public platform.

He didn’t add much commentary—just pasted screenshots of the news and titled the post: Withdrawals Blocked at Rural Banks; Depositor Journalist Gets “Red Code”. After posting, he turned off the light and went to sleep.

A phone call woke him. A friend was asking where he was—“The police are looking for you.” Flustered, he asked, “Did they say why?” “No,” the friend replied. “They’re not saying anything.”

Zhang opened his call logs and realized the police had tried to contact him multiple times during his Do Not Disturb hours. Then he heard the knocking at his door—persistent, insistent. He’d been sleeping too soundly to notice before.

When he opened it, two officers in short-sleeved uniforms stood outside, smiling. “There’s a new regulation from higher-ups,” one said. “They’re asking everyone to be mindful of online speech. Can we talk?”

Zhang gave a bitter smile and stepped aside. Of course he knew—this was an informal police “tea chat,” the kind that required no written summons.

They took note of all his accounts and posts, recorded his statements, and had him stamp countless fingerprints. His name was now added to a list he would never get to see.

Zhang was not an isolated case. In recent years, China has dramatically increased its “stability maintenance” spending related to online speech censorship. The mechanisms are evolving, and so is the technology.

A few years ago, content moderation on social media platforms relied mainly on human reviewers. Every flagged post was manually reviewed to determine whether it should be deleted—a slow, labor-intensive process.

Today, things have changed. AI algorithms are now the first line of defense, using natural language processing and machine learning to detect “sensitive content.” Whether it’s a veiled critique or a symbolically charged image, the system flags it within seconds for further review.

Public data shows that in 2023 alone, Weibo processed over 10 million posts daily, with deletion or suppression rates as high as 7%. On the short video platform Douyin, the “violation content handling rate” reached a historic high.

Zhang’s post was caught immediately by an algorithm, flagged as “potentially inappropriate dissemination.” From notification to shadowbanning, not a single human intervened. The speed made any defense impossible.

Behind the scenes, confidential keyword blacklists play a key role in censorship. These lists evolve constantly in response to current events.

Earlier sensitive terms focused on historical events like “June 4th” or “Falun Gong.” By 2022, new terms like “blank paper,” “lockdown,” and “chained woman” were frequently deleted. By 2023–2024, even seemingly innocuous phrases like “delivery driver” and “unemployed upon graduation” were flagged due to their implied social critiques.

In response, netizens have developed a unique form of linguistic resistance—using homophones, emojis, code words, and deconstructed characters to evade detection. “Blank paper” becomes a white square emoji. “Stability maintenance” turns into “WIFI.” “COVID policy” is replaced by “mask.” Names are swapped for strings of Xs. This coded language has become a quiet war of wit against an unseen adversary.

2. Shifting Censorship Themes: 2021–2025

The Peak of Pandemic Discourse (2022)
In 2022, lockdown measures across China tightened continuously, and “Zero-COVID” became the central national policy. As major cities like Shanghai experienced severe supply shortages and overwhelmed hospitals during lockdowns, public frustration exploded online.

Out of this frustration rose the “White Paper Movement.” Following the Urumqi fire, students at Nanjing Communication University held up blank sheets of paper in protest. In just a few days, hashtags like #WhitePaperRevolution and #Overlockdown spread rapidly across the internet. In response, authorities launched sweeping censorship campaigns. Posts were deleted at high speed, accounts banned en masse, and nearly all content related to the protests was purged.

Economic Anxiety and the Wave of Unemployment (2023–2025)

After the lockdowns ended in 2023, China’s economy struggled to recover. Youth unemployment soared to record highs. Online, the trend of “Kong Yiji Literature” emerged—young people using self-deprecating humor to express their despair: well-educated but jobless, idealistic but trapped in harsh realities.

Meanwhile, the real estate market collapsed and local government debt spiraled out of control. Public distrust in government financial operations surged. Posts discussing “rural bank runs” or “local fiscal bankruptcy” were frequently deleted. Platforms began auto-blocking keywords like “can’t withdraw savings,” turning them into unsearchable taboos.

Feminist Issues and Their Growing Sensitivity
In early 2022, a news story about a woman found chained in a village in Fengxian, Jiangsu Province, sparked nationwide outrage. Discussions about human trafficking and grassroots governance failure flooded the internet. But soon, related content was downranked or outright suppressed, and public discourse was forcibly cooled down.

From then on, topics involving women’s rights, the #MeToo movement, and sexual assault cases were placed under tight content monitoring. Many feminist accounts were banned, forcing netizens to adopt increasingly coded ways to share and discuss such issues.

This escalating sensitivity, triggered by real events, has steadily shrunk the public space for debate.

3. Choices of the Netizens

After repeated deletions and warnings, many ordinary users began to voluntarily hold back their speech. Zhang Wen was no exception.

He used to share social news in his WeChat Moments and participate in lively discussions in Douban groups. Now, his Moments are filled only with food photos, travel check-ins, or links to uncontroversial charity campaigns.

On public forums, the silent consensus became: “scroll, don’t post.” Increasingly, people chose to suppress their discontent and remain silent to avoid potential trouble. Self-censorship was no longer something imposed—it had become second nature.

4. Retrenchment of Media and Intellectuals

It wasn’t only ordinary netizens—journalists and scholars also faced unprecedented pressure.

Once-vibrant public accounts known for in-depth reporting, such as New Citizens, Guyu Lab, and Tencent Dajia, were either permanently shut down or voluntarily ceased publication. From university professors to independent journalists, more and more chose to retreat into academic research or shift focus to harmless, apolitical topics.

One media professional, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the atmosphere this way:
“Before writing an article, I don’t first think about how to sharpen my argument—I ask myself whether publishing this will make me disappear.”
In such an environment, the space for free expression evaporates like mist, leaving behind only a gray everyday life where caution, silence, and self-censorship intertwine.

5. Censorship in China and Elsewhere: Points of Comparison

Comparing China with Iran and Russia
Globally, China’s censorship regime is often compared to those of countries like Iran and Russia. All exercise some level of internet control, but China’s system is uniquely layered.
In Iran, the government frequently blocks entire platforms—Instagram and Telegram, for example—forcing users to rely on VPNs. Russia, on the other hand, leans heavily on legal instruments, labeling media outlets as “foreign agents” and using state power to suppress dissent.

China takes a dual approach: technological and administrative. Technically, it uses the Great Firewall (GFW) to block access to foreign websites. Administratively, it mandates that all internet companies establish internal “content safety departments,” making them the primary enforcers of censorship. These departments monitor content, apply big data analytics, and work in tandem with the social credit system.

This creates a system of censorship that is both efficient and invisible—one that doesn’t just block information, but subtly reshapes reality.

Resistance and Code: The Ingenuity of Netizens
Even under such intense pressure, people have not entirely given up on expression. They’ve learned to survive in the cracks—resisting censorship through wordplay, metaphor, and creativity.

The White Paper Movement is a case in point. When words were forbidden, young people raised blank sheets of paper—silent protests more powerful than any slogan.

To dodge increasingly strict internet controls, netizens developed a coded language. These “anti-censorship codes” use puns, euphemisms, and symbolic references to voice opinions on sensitive issues. Common examples include:

“River crab” (河蟹): a homophone for “harmony,” mocking censorship policies.
“Wall” / GFW: shorthand for the Great Firewall.
“Climbing over the wall” or “ladder”: refers to using VPNs.
“Pence” or “Harris”: coded stand-ins for the figures in the Peng Shuai–Zhang Gaoli incident.
“Run” (润): a pun on the English word, meaning to emigrate or escape.
“Cocooned internet”: describing China’s closed digital ecosystem.
There are also situational metaphors:
“Mask” for COVID policy or lockdowns.
“Having tea” for being summoned by police over one’s speech.
“535” for the Tiananmen Massacre.
“404” for deleted articles or disappeared individuals—“This article has been 404’d.”

Through subtle, often humorous codes, people continue to express unresolved concerns and a yearning for change.

Though such resistance may seem faint, it proves one thing: no matter how tightly information is controlled, the desire for free expression never truly dies.

6. Epilogue: A Question That Still Hangs in the Air

It was a sunny afternoon when Zhang Wen sat in a café, idly scrolling through his phone. On the screen, a rumor about a new wave of youth unemployment in a certain city was going viral. But Zhang hesitated—he didn’t click “like,” didn’t share it. He simply scrolled past, like a passerby walking silently past a protest no one could hear.
He knew that even if he said nothing, did nothing, his account was still silently flagged somewhere in a massive data system. And he also knew that more and more people were choosing, just like him, to respond to this era of censorship with silence.
In this land of silence, silence is no longer neutral. It has taken on new meaning—sometimes as self-protection, sometimes as a reflex born of fear.

But a question still floats above us, unanswered:
If one day, the absence of praise is seen as dissent, and even silence becomes dangerous, how will people still find ways to speak?

In a country where information is filtered layer by layer and emotions are delicately trimmed, the once-vivid, raw, and outspoken voices may temporarily vanish. But they are not gone.

They linger in every heart, lying in wait—for the next time, the next opportunity, when they will rise again as a flood too vast to ignore.