Topic-based bans do remain an integral part of censorship, barring mention of historically taboo events like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and content published by banned media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, and BBC. However, after the rise of bloggers and social media influencers in the  late ’00s, the public opinion environment was also precisely targeted by campaigns meant to curtail influencer impact and the capacity of nongovernment thought leaders to build community. 

In theory, social media users with large followings were private citizens. However, the mid-2010s handed them a choice: They could serve and support the politics of Chinese authorities, or they could face discipline by law enforcement and the dismantling of their communities. In 2013, amidst a flurry of blogger crackdowns, novelist Hao Qun summarized the trend aptly: “They want to sever those relationships and make the relationship on Weibo atomized, just like relations in Chinese society, where everyone is just a solitary atom.”

By the time Peng appeared in a November 2021 video call with IOC chair Thomas Bach, the Weibo and WeChat environments had virtually purged discussions with offending keywords or references to an earlier, clumsier cover-up email sent to the Women’s Tennis Association.

In Zhou’s case, censors assessing organizational risk were likely concerned by the number of supporters, as well as their ability to mobilize actions in the physical world, including sending supplies to those holding vigils outside the courthouse where her case was evaluated. The collective characteristics of their support, too, was cause for concern.

 

Silencing organizers and victims of sexual assault is one of many tactics used to weaken the capacity to assemble cases and public opinion campaigns. The playbook of making communities taboo and isolating politically inconvenient views spans a wide breadth of groups, from feminists to Marxist labor organizers to citizen journalists who covered the handling of the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

Though Zhou has not received prison time or been arrested for her case, the monitoring of her activity itself is meant to put pressure on her to tone down or silence her calls for justice, and stop her story from spreading. The closure of her account likely sets an example for her supporters as to what is verboten in terms of discussion or commentary. In speaking about the aftermath, Zhou was determined in her appeal but visibly shaken by the takedowns of her posts. Though she said she would try to pursue the legal procedures to the end, she was stunned by the sudden and abrupt silencing of her accounts. “It felt like everything that I did was a crime,” she recounted in an interview with The Guardian. “This is a torturous feeling.”

Like Zhou, feminist activist Lü Pin was not left unscathed by the sudden shutdown of Feminist Voices, the organization she cofounded. The group’s closure demonstrates that Chinese censors may keep working in perpetuity while the communications tools of activists and people with stories against the grain, like Peng, have their online existence hang by a thread. “Because what the government does is to isolate us from one another,” the activist explains, “therefore, we must connect with each other, and moreover, we must create and spread the alternative knowledge of resistance. This is what feminism is good at, after all.”

Chinese censorship and platform maintenance is multifaceted and easy to replicate in part or whole. The subsequent impact of censorship can manifest in longer-term ways beyond the stifling of a specific topic at a certain point in time.

Peng Shuai’s censorship over Chinese social media continues, with topics based on her name and story still banned on Weibo and WeChat publishing platforms. Though the IOC feels confident that she is safe, the systemic changes of the acts of censorship continue to reverberate online, for her and for other individuals with #MeToo stories bursting at the seams.

As it turns out, remembering the politically inconvenient is a risky thing. To help others to remember is even more dangerous.