Doing Time In WeChat Jail

“You gotta lower your ideals of freedom if you wanna suck on the warm teat of China”

I’m back in WeChat jail again as I write this. That means my account has been locked and suspended for a temporary period due to the alleged breaking of WeChat’s terms of service.

The charge: “suspected of spreading malicious rumors”

WeChat Jail is an odd place to be. WeChat has become an indispensable part of life in China since about 2014–2015. The majority of your telecommunication connections are through WeChat when you live in China. I rarely grab the phone numbers for people I know as I have their contact in WeChat, and that’s taken for granted. Asking for someone’s number just isn’t something you do all that often anymore here.

Now if most of the day-to-day business communication you do is on WeChat, then you have a real problem when in my predicament. Fortunately I’m able to work around this via email and WhatsApp, but there was a time when I was much more dependent on this app for work. This was about a year ago, the first time I got put in WeChat jail.

Transactions are another one. Lots of purchases are made via WeChat. I actually paid cash for lunch today, which is a rarity. Unlike communication, WeChat isn’t the sole dominant force in the mobile payment sphere. If I was also in Alipay jail, then I’d really be in trouble. Having just 2 contenders in the Chinese mobile payment space is somewhat refreshing, as I was still able to order tacos and pay via Alipay on Ele.me tonight.

As you can see, I’m not really in too much trouble. I’m able to get on with my life. I’m inconvenienced, and hopefully I’ll get my account back up and running when my 24-hour bid is up. Hopefully.

It’s been a pretty eventful week for China on the global stage. That’s what got me into this mess. South Park makes a very pertinent episode poking fun at US corporations bending over to China. Then the NBA does just that. Then Blizzard Entertainment. Really uncanny timing.

This act of bending over for China isn’t anything new. Ever since Hollywood starting getting a taste of the RMB, things Hollywood put out started catering more to the Chinese audience. And the Chinese audience is subject to the Chinese government’s censors.

These guys will censor anything too. I swear they cut things out of movies sometimes simply to justify their existence. But one great way to not get censored is to simply cater to the Chinese censors from the beginning and run things through them from the pre-production stage. That’s what this South Park episode was all about.

Then Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, Tweets out “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong,” and all hell breaks loose for the NBA. The Houston Rockets, once the favorite team of China, becomes canceled in China.

Daryl pussies out and deletes his Tweet, then follows up by Tweeting out a pathetic thread of capitulation. And what did that get him? Absolutely nothing but anger from his own fellow citizens. The Rockets are still canceled. The NBA pre-season matches in China are canceled.

Once the NBA wised up to the sentiments of their own countrymen, aka standard American freedom 101, NBA commissioner Adam Silver puts out a gentle “hey China, we’re going to stick to our values here.” Too little too late though, they’ve already lost in China and lost in America.

Meanwhile, CCTV announced it will no longer air the two pre-season games that will take place in China (but no longer taking place in China?). Hey, don’t worry though — CCTV still supports freedom of speech. Here’s what they had to say about it: “We’re strongly dissatisfied and oppose Adam Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right to freedom of expression, We believe that any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability are not within the scope of freedom of speech.”

Then Blizzard… holy smokes. What a bunch of stooges. They suspend Chung Ng Wai, a professional Hearthstone player in Hong Kong, for one year after he voiced support for the Hong Kong protests during a live broadcast at a Hearthstone Grandmasters eSports tournament. And not just that — they also forced him to forfeit $10,000 in prize money.

South Park was really touching on something in this “Band in China” episode. The most iconic quote from it: “You gotta lower your ideals of freedom if you wanna suck on the warm teat of China.”

Sure enough, South Park was banned in China, followed by Tencent Sports declaring the cancelation of NBA game streaming. They’re only the NBA’s exclusive digital partner in China. But I guess Blizzard played their cards right on this one and still gets those sweet sweet pink Mao faces.

It’s all so sad, it’s funny. And it made for great memes. And memes are for sharing. That’s what I was doing on WeChat. It’s not like I was rubbing these in the face of the locals either. I was sharing in groups full of other foreigners with similar sentiments.

It might have been some stooge in a group that flagged a post they saw me make, but I think it was something more sinister. WeChat has had pretty sophisticated content recognition software for some time.

Back in the summer of 2016 when the Beijing Uniqlo sex tape went viral, I noticed something odd. I tried sharing it in some groups, but the people in there never saw it from their side. It was shadow-banned. I went ahead and distorted the video with some filters and re-sizing and sure enough, it went through.

My theory is that WeChat is tracking media files via content recognition software back to original senders after getting passed around group to group. I’ve screen-shotted plenty of things from Twitter that I’ve sent out in groups then found them being shared to different groups I’m in days later from other users who had presumably seen them in groups I’m not in. I know stuff I share on WeChat gets all over.

So I’m guessing I shared something straight from Twitter and into a WeChat group, it gets sent around in other groups, gets flagged, then gets traced back to me. Then my account is “suspected of spreading malicious rumors” and suspended. Chances are, it was this one:

In conclusion:

- If you want to suck on the warm teat of China, you gotta lower your ideals of freedom. Actually, just throw any idea of freedom out the window. And get ready to be China’s little lackey. Bend over real good.

- If you want to suck on the warm teat of WeChat, don’t do what I do.

- If you want to live a life with some sort of semblance in China after going to WeChat jail, make sure you get phone numbers from the people you know and have multiple means of spending and making digital transactions. Don’t become overly dependent on WeChat for work either. Be like a Boy Scout and be prepared.