China’s Independent Media

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Nana (a pseudonym), a Chinese woman with an office job in Europe, was a happy twentysomething, content to lead a quiet life. She liked to travel and do her friends’ makeup. She had no interest in becoming an online influencer. Her Instagram page was set to private mode, and she shared selfies only with people she knew. Her account on Weibo, a Chinese X-like platform, had 30 followers.  

The pro-war stance of her Chinese friends led Nana to sympathize with Ukraine, a country she had once visited, and aggressive pro-Russia propaganda on Chinese social media annoyed her. She began translating videos and articles about the situation in Ukraine to share on Weibo—a decision that changed her life. 

Two years later, her followers had grown to over 200,000. By then, she had rallied supporters to fund the supply of drones for Ukrainian forces: Pro-Ukraine bloggers in China dubbed that plan “Roast Goose” (the words “goose” and “Russia” sound similar in Chinese). Using donations from fans and other Chinese people who sought her out, she delivered more than 400 drones to the Ukrainian military over three years. In May 2024, during the visit of President Vladimir Putin of Russia to China, her account was taken down.  

In times of crisis, some people are willing to pay a higher price to seek out accurate information and fight censorship. And censorship also often fails then. Russia’s full-on attack of Ukraine in early 2022 was one such moment for liberal Chinese citizens like Nana. After the war broke out, mainstream Chinese social media, especially short-video platforms, overwhelmingly pushed Russia’s militant nationalism. Many Chinese interpreted this as signaling a potential shift in national priorities: away from the traditional focus on what the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party call “peace and development” toward the pursuit of unification with Taiwan by force. But pro-Ukraine and pro-West liberal bloggers such as Nana also emerged then. 

Perhaps this happened because the CCP’s stance on Russia’s actions was somewhat ambiguous. The government seemed to want to support Russia against the West without fully supporting the war itself. And so China’s censors hesitated before fully cracking down. Or maybe Chinese bloggers on Russia-Ukraine affairs were tolerated because they had a limited following or because they were not part of recognized liberal intellectual circles. Several bloggers I interviewed told me that they and their peers were predominantly middle-class individuals from across Chinese society: civil servants, editors, scholars, doctors in small clinics, corporate employees. Nana noted that her donors ranged in age from college students to retirees and that many had a decent grasp of English. 

A blogger known as The General, who also has been writing about the war in Ukraine, told me that his audience is mostly male, middle-aged, and middle class, and comes from China’s most economically vibrant and outward-looking regions. The General said he believed it was safe for him to express his personal opinions because he had not been known previously as a journalist, intellectual, or activist. He created a new account after the Russian invasion to share news about the conflict and international trends, primarily sourced from Western media. He also sold war memorabilia, like keychains made from the remnants of artillery shells, put together with the help of artisans in Ukraine. These are not inexpensive items, and proceeds from the sales have funded Ukrainian troops. The donors’ names, or slogans they choose, are written with a permanent marker on the munition to be dropped on the Russian enemy.  

Most often, accounts like Nana’s and the General’s wind up being temporarily banned, usually for one to six months. But the authorities might intervene more forcefully. Some bloggers are barred from leaving China; others are interrogated by the police. Nana, to ensure her drone deliveries, has spent all of her holidays in Ukraine—anyway, she can no longer safely return to China. Her parents have been harassed and insist that she not try to come back. Her donors who underwent questioning told Nana that the police said she belonged to “foreign anti-China forces.”  

Despite all this, social-media engagement by grassroots Chinese citizens supporting Ukraine’s resistance continues quietly. One reason is that even as the Chinese government does its best to “tell China’s story well”—such is the official slogan—around the globe, there are people in China who remain unconvinced. Recent academic research shows that the extreme shifts in elite politics and ideology under President Xi Jinping have not really succeeded in changing hearts and minds in China. Most remarkably, wealthier and better-educated Chinese continue to hold liberal, pro-market, and non-nationalist views, as during the pre-Xi era. 

The previous four decades of closer connections with the outside world fostered diverse cultural trends and social groups in Chinese society, which developed an appetite for independent media in terms of both production and consumption. The demand remains. But with harsher censorship and repression, the information landscape on the mainland has fundamentally changed from what it was just a decade or so ago. Today’s independent voices are de-professionalized and dispersed, and they exist within new communities of trust.  

In 2022, Chinese nationalist bloggers reported to the authorities the website China Fact Check for verifying disinformation related to the Russia-Ukraine war. That prompted a nationwide security investigation targeting the site’s volunteers, mostly university students, and ultimately forced it to cease updating. But even as individuals like Nana—citizen reporters, social-media influencers, or old-school journalists, including those in exile—are being banned, harassed, and censored, they are resisting by continuing to assert their right to information within newly constrained spaces and translating that into acts of civic courage. 

Independent media in China has essentially become an illegal activity under the country’s current legal framework and propaganda policies—in this sense, its very existence constitutes a form of activism. The usual distinctions between media and activism that exist in free, pluralistic societies don’t apply to China. 

Reporters Without Borders ranked China 174th out of 179 countries in its press-freedom index in 2011 and 172nd out of 180 in 2024. The change might seem like a marginal uptick in a still-abysmal rating, which it is, but none of that captures what matters most. The CCP’s power over Chinese society is so different from government controls in other countries, whether authoritarian or democratic, that cross-national comparisons are insufficient to explain changes in China’s journalistic practices. And there is an important qualitative difference between the journalistic environment of the Xi era and that of the era before, even if the same overarching political and legal framework prevails. The party-state is now far less transparent or responsive to the public’s interests, and far more violent in its repression of coverage it dislikes. Every year at least since 2014, China has imprisoned more journalists than any country in the world. Today, both its institutional news industry and its own special tradition of critical journalism are nearly extinct.  

The golden era of the Chinese news industry was between 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, and 2008, when even as the Beijing Olympics boosted the country’s pride, biting coverage of the Wenchuan earthquake demonstrated to the government the challenges that a disobedient media could pose. The audience for cultural consumption seemed ever-expanding then, as did the advertising market. Regional governments competed—over GDP performance, governance innovation, discursive power—and that fostered a relatively open atmosphere in local affairs, which in turn allowed market-oriented newspapers and television channels to flourish. China’s integration into the global market, the growth of a middle-class readership, and the rapid expansion of the real estate sector’s advertising market endowed market-oriented media with immense wealth and prestige. During this period, the relatively fragmented, hierarchical, and outdated system of news administration found it difficult to effectively control the media. News organizations were scattered across economically developed urban clusters throughout China. The internet played a supporting role in disseminating information. Censorship was relatively passive and occurred mainly after the fact, in the form of administrative penalties.  

This is not to say that there were no problems before the Xi era, but he has fought creeping pluralism by wielding instruments of dictatorship tinged with a revivalist communist flavor. The 2011 policy known as “Five Things Not To Do” had terminated judicial and political reforms. But then in 2013, the “Seven Things Not To Say” clearly redefined the boundaries of press freedom, civil society, and judicial independence. Subjects that had previously been discussable in the media now became ideological taboos.  

The arrests of human rights lawyers and labor or feminist activists just before and after 2015 marked the end of the rights-defense movement. And they signaled the end of the gradualist reform envisioned by liberal elites who had hoped to collaborate with what some called “healthy forces within the system.” Censorship of the internet escalated. The criminalization of speech became routine, with measures such as the anti-rumor-mongering policy—which might be characterized as “share it 500 times and it’s a crime”—or the 2018 Law on the Protection of Martyrs and Heroes. With the rise of online communication as the dominant channel, the concentration of internet companies in Beijing, the country’s political center, effectively terminated the pluralistic media ecology that had emerged from the previous dynamics of decentralization and competition among localities. China has long swung between periods of opening up and closing in, and the latest period—of closing in—is still underway.  

During the SARS outbreak in 2003, it was a journalist from a party publication in southern China who corrected the Beijing-based central media’s erroneous account on the origin of the disease. Xinhua reported that the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention had identified chlamydia as the pathogen responsible for the pneumonia outbreak in Guangdong Province from the winter of 2002 to the spring of 2003. But Duan Gongwei, a reporter for Southern Daily, relayed objections to this raised by frontline medical workers and experts in Guangdong, which helped overturn mistaken diagnoses and treatment plans coming from the capital as well as accurately identify a coronavirus. Owing to the relatively open atmosphere in the press at the time, the account ultimately won an official journalism award.  

During the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, the same newspaper group’s most celebrated award-winning work was a series of portrait photographs glorifying the spirit of sacrifice among medical personnel—and they were displayed on electronic screens throughout Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, from landmark buildings and public squares to bridges and shopping malls. Turning disasters for which the government should be held accountable into stories that glorify the sacrifice and commendable deeds of individuals is an increasingly common form of image-based propaganda today. It also serves as a small example of how the role assigned to media institutions and the narrative frameworks that journalists are now willing to accept essentially go in the opposite direction of what standards were two decades ago. 

Prior to 2013 the most influential media advocating judicial and political reform were market-oriented publications affiliated with newspaper groups with party connections. Key to their success was their ability to take advantage of the relatively open space for free expression created by local governments competing with one another for growth. This allowed them to serve their audiences while reaping enormous economic benefits. It also helped create professional human resources for alternative citizen-media. 

In 2013, the propaganda authorities unilaterally altered the title and content of the nationally renowned annual New Year’s editorial by the Southern Weekly, turning its call for constitutionalism into a promotional pitch of the “Chinese Dream.” That set off a chain reaction that included protests by editors, solidarity from the wider journalistic community, and public demonstrations. The episode was emblematic of the party-state’s determination to subordinate journalism to the needs of propaganda. Online and offline protests calling for freedom of the press ultimately led to a more thorough purge. In the wake of this, the prime period of investigative reporting came to an end. Various media shut down investigative units one after another. And market-oriented publications that had previously been focused on supervision and accountability gradually lost those functions.  

Once these outlets were tamed into resuming a propaganda role, media supported by private capital and internet giants—all unrelated to the CCP—began to assume greater independence and exert greater social influence. Many of these new media’s leaders had been trained during the 2003–13 era and were committed professional journalists. They began addressing subjects that were taboo for the state media under the guise of publishing more literary or nonfiction writing, or stories about personal fates and choices.  

But because these platforms were not formally authorized to edit news they could easily be quieted and that risk undermined investors’ confidence. During the early stages of COVID-19, for example, Tencent Dajia, a platform that brought together the best columnists from around the country, was shut down for publishing a series of commentaries related to the pandemic, including some that criticized prevention policies. Other social media accounts that had run numerous in-depth reports were permanently banned or punished. Some belonged to successful online healthcare companies and healthcare communication firms, and they had reported the stories of patients and the deceased, disclosed factual information about the outbreak, and presented the professional opinions of doctors and scholars. The internet purge came from the central authorities. When the state sought to erase the memory of the pandemic—or even simply to avoid mentioning issues such as poverty and unemployment—privately run media outlets disappeared.  

Government efforts to manage public opinion have imposed heavy costs on those who were the subjects of reporting. I have learned that some NGOs quoted during the pandemic, discussing its impact on vulnerable groups, were called to account by the police or the relevant authorities. Many NGOs were warned that agreeing to interviews or conducting investigations could violate the Data Security Law and the Counter-Espionage Law. As a result, advocacy organizations that should be committed to transparency and openness now hesitate to speak out on behalf of the groups they represent, leaving them with even fewer channels to voice concerns. 

After the pandemic, two former CCTV journalists and a New York Times columnist who was refused entry into China launched their own programs on YouTube and as podcasts. They understood that doing so would mean never being able to return to China. The possibilities available within Chinese state media a decade ago—to discuss air pollution or other sensitive issues—now exist only beyond the Great Firewall, the vast system of controls the Chinese government uses to filter or block access inside the mainland to online content from outside.  

China’s firewall system continually grows stronger, significantly raising the cost of using VPNs. Added to this is strict monitoring and enforcement by the Cyberspace Administration of China against what it calls “foreign information influx,” as well as police surveillance of users or any information attempting to “jump the wall.” As a result, until recently fewer and fewer people in China were using VPN technology to access information outside the Great Firewall. The information ecosystems inside and outside the Great Firewall are increasingly disconnected, limiting the reach on the mainland of information from diaspora media.  

Inside the firewall, a closed ecosystem has developed. Social-media content, from publication to dissemination to feedback, is strictly censored—on WeChat (a so-called super-app for messaging and payments), Zhihu (an online Q&A platform), and Xiaohongshu (a social media and e-commerce app) alike. These cannot be searched via engines and only users can access all their features, which complicates both archiving and content sharing.  

The year 2022—with the Ukraine war, the COVID lockdowns in Shanghai, the White Paper Protests (a wave of demonstrations sparked by anger over China’s strict zero-COVID policies)—was a year of awakening political consciousness for many Chinese people. They realized that peaceful days might be coming to an end and that economic and social progress might well give way to more social control. Some intellectuals, activists, and journalists left China, looking for places where they could publish their works and speak their minds; they started to set up new hubs of Chinese diaspora culture in Tokyo, Chiang Mai, Berlin, New York, and Washington, D.C. More and more discrete media projects using simplified Chinese (the form read and written by people from the mainland) have since been appearing on overseas content-hosting platforms.  

The fact that some of the state media’s core spokespeople have gone into exile indicates both the deterioration of the relatively permissive censorship of earlier years and the growing alienation even within the cultural elite: journalists and intellectuals no longer endorse the regime’s objectives, nor do they seek accommodation within its system. So much for that social contract. Intellectuals used to accept the regime as legitimate while acknowledging its flaws, and even as they embraced it in principle, they retained enough independence to criticize this or that of its policies or actions. In the early years of the Xi era, co-optation and repression tried to tame dissent in overseas media; today, formerly loyal critics of the system are moving abroad—joining forces, attracting fresh audiences. Having come out of the flourishing era of Chinese journalism, they remain the best-trained generation of journalists to date.  

On the mainland, as institutional media have been neutered and private outlets steadily shut down, what remains of critical Chinese journalism now takes the form of small, decentralized groups. They are de-institutionalized (and to some degree de-professionalized), highly vertical—meaning they focus on specific issues or communities—and unevenly scattered across the social-media landscape.  

Reports and commentary about police violence and procedural injustice are published by so-called “law media” accounts run by lawyers and journalists working together. The editorial departments of newspapers no longer provide as effective a framework for understanding current events as do the personal and institutional accounts of former journalists and commentators. During major news events—the COVID-19 pandemic, the abuse case known as the Chained Woman Incident, the #MeToo movement—nonfiction-reporting platforms have met the public’s information needs by telling people’s stories and reporting on news censored by mainstream media.  

Meanwhile, some grassroots news awards, news commentary, and training platforms run by veteran journalists continue to provide peer guidance and recognition for journalists engaged in investigative reporting. Fact-checking and international news translations offer domestic audiences credible information free from the distortions of nationalist narratives. 

But all of these efforts are temporary, random, unstable. No single one of these outlets is likely to have a wide readership or the ability to mobilize the public—which is precisely why they are able to survive amid the stringent censorship enforced within the Great Firewall. Once any of them inspires people to engage in heated discussions on public issues or participate in offline activities, even if those remain circumscribed to cultural activities, it will be harassed, and face censorship and the threat of being closed. Having a stable brand is a luxury. 

These media serve their audiences quietly; if they reach the general public beyond their usual followers it’s because of one story that goes viral. For example, the account Yuexiu Mountain Side, run by a group of retired members of the provincial political consultative body, policy advisers to the provincial government, and former media commentators in Guangzhou, typically engages in local municipal oversight. But in 2022, during the final lockdown phase of the pandemic, it helped numerous citizens in need connect with municipal authorities, fulfilling a role previously played by local mainstream newspapers. Unsurprisingly, by early summer of the following year, it had to shut down. There are many such examples: cultural podcasts interviewing scholars about the pandemic, film-review podcasts discussing movie censorship—all were widely shared by listeners at first and then were shuttered. 

Some independent media serve as platforms for news reporting and commentary, as well as for literature, art, and academia. Their audiences may range from local communities across China to distant regions throughout the world, or they may consist of community members who can meet in physical spaces such as bookstores and event venues. They might collaborate on civic activities—like feminists advocating for rural women with mental disabilities who have been trafficked (such as the “chained woman” mentioned above)—gender-diverse groups, labor rights supporters, or other subcultural communities. They may be online publications, alternative print materials, or even exhibitions.  

As the democratization of politics, human rights, and press-freedom issues have been removed from discussion in China’s mainstream public space, a new set of groups focused on literature and art, readings and entertainment, or what may seem like other more marginal issues has created a new, decentralized public sphere. The mobilization capabilities of these more niche communities were demonstrated to some degree during the White Paper Protests, with subcultural groups, along with feminist and transgender ones, serving as key agents of connection and mobilization. 

The manager of one urban art community group told me that after Russia invaded Ukraine they started collaborating with Ukrainian artists to hold exhibitions related to the war. Although this came at a heavy price in terms of personal safety, their reasoning was: “No matter what the system of this country is, this is the kind of life we want to live.” The life they desire harks back to the utopian anarchism of the early 20th century: they do not want China’s mainstream political system to be all-determining, and they seek alternative spaces for free creation and interpersonal communication. 

Such outlets do not share the exact same politics, but their views dovetail on many points—into what John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus”—for example: about evaluating the exercise of state power and the effectiveness of social governance, spreading the concept of limited government, promoting the spirit of the rule of law, appealing for procedural justice, and advocating judicial reform. The liberalism of this fragile ecosystem might not seem as robust as the liberalism preached by the 1980s generation of Chinese intellectuals, but those were mainly men with little understanding of feminism: reform first, they believed; women would just have to wait for broader systemic change. And this is to say nothing of their understanding of the niche issues that are important to many Chinese young people today, such as gender-based violence, workplace hierarchies, and LGBT topics. Perhaps the seeds of a more inclusive liberalism are now being sown. 

China sits at the bottom of global rankings in terms of internet freedom. The Great Firewall is not merely a technical barrier; it also serves to discipline and punish. Through the use of new legal tools and violent suppression, it has succeeded to an unprecedented extent in dividing public opinion in the Chinese-speaking world, including between the producers and the consumers of content.  

Independent media operators are essentially asked to choose sides. To reach the largest possible audience, they must operate within the firewall—or produce content that is as apolitical as possible under increasingly intense censorship and harassment, and submit to ever-stricter review mechanisms. But choosing an uncensored platform outside the Great Firewall means giving up reaching the majority of domestic audiences, who do not use VPNs. It also risks a nationwide ban in China.  

The overreliance of Chinese audiences on social-media platforms has had a detrimental effect on the dissemination of independent media. Censorship by these platforms means that the content that some mirror sites technically processed overseas is illegal on Weibo and WeChat, for example—and also basically impossible to share. Even when content from platforms outside the Great Firewall is successfully posted inside China, it often faces severe punishment. WeChat is a complex system that combines government services, commercial and financial services, office functions and entertainment. Chinese people who rely on it rarely use traditional internet services such as email, RSS feeds, or email subscriptions—all channels that are friendlier to independent media or high-quality, in-depth content. 

But that is precisely why some writers have felt the need to use VPN tools to bypass the firewall and publish their work. And why millions of people in China also use VPNs as they actively seek reliable information. Consequently, certain overseas infrastructure has become increasingly important. For example, Duan/Initium Media currently is the only overseas Chinese-language news organization accepting in-depth submissions (Wainao/Why Not played a similar role until it went dark in March 2025). Despite the risk of repression, including outside China, many young journalists seek to publish their work there. The Chinese-writing community website Matters, which is built on distributed networks and cryptocurrency technology, as well as the writing fellowship “Frontline,” which it supports, are channels for young writers to connect with the world outside the Great Firewall. 

The website China Digital Times archives internet documents that have been censored. I often meet writers whose articles have been deleted on domestic platforms and who express relief at the knowledge that their texts have been archived on CDT. Of course, such platforms are also the targets of transnational repression. The Chinese police have repeatedly harassed the staff and featured authors of CDT, as well as those of China Unofficial Archives, a website dedicated to collecting, preserving, and disseminating archives of China’s unofficial history that were censored or suppressed.  

After the former CCTV journalist Chai Jing voiced opposition to any military conflict with Taiwan in a conversation with an elderly veteran of the Chinese Civil War on her YouTube channel in May, her bestselling book was banned in China. People who work for the independent platform Mang Mang of the White Paper Generation or the team of former CCTV journalist Wang Zhi’an or even volunteers from a Chinese–North American feminist stand-up comedy group have faced police harassment, as have the performers’ family members in China. 

In the past, uncensored information from abroad, for example from VOA or the BBC, seemed highly politicized, partly because of its focus on human rights and dissent, and to many ordinary audiences in China it either smacked of Western propaganda or felt largely irrelevant. But now, with so many more Chinese writers and thinkers outside the Great Firewall trying to circumvent it, reports from abroad seem more credible and seem to speak more immediately to the concerns of Chinese on the mainland.  

During the White Paper Protests, the blogger Li Ying’s account on X, which was called “Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher,” became a hub for breaking news events related to China; it attracted more than one million followers. Police interrogated users who followed the account across China. Then Li Ying launched the 611Study.ICU and NiuMa.ICU projects in February 2025, which focused, respectively, on the excessive study hours of primary and secondary school students and on the excessive working hours of laborers.ⁱ By early May, both projects had received over 9,000 complaints or reports—including contributions from students at more than 4,000 schools, employees from nearly 5,000 organizations, and civil servants. Perhaps the Great Firewall is not as powerful or impenetrable as it appears.  

Connections across it pose a mortal danger to the party-state. When internet users become aware that there is content outside that is relevant to them, they may be motivated to use circumvention tools. Safer anti-surveillance technologies, together with more vigorous content production, could facilitate this process. Moreover, beyond the firewall, there are tens of millions in the Chinese diaspora exposed to an uncensored information environment—precisely the population that, according to the Chinese regime, external propaganda has long been trying to influence. 

About 16% of the world’s population speaks Chinese and China is a major player on the international stage, and yet only 1.2% of all content online is in Chinese. From news reporting to academic research, from the hottest mobile apps and blockbuster films to cross-border popular games, all Chinese cultural products undergo massive censorship and are embedded in the party-state’s discourse in various ways. This influences not only political life in China but also global public discourse.  

Compared to the government’s efforts to “tell China’s story well,” the Chinese people’s voices and their efforts to seek freedom of speech have not received sufficient attention or support. This neglect may stem from the fact that the outside world has never had to confront an authoritarian system as intricate as China’s, and thus it finds it difficult to grasp the potential—and the importance—of China’s independent voices today. But one place to start might be to observe and understand Chinese people like Nana, together with her audience and donors. People everywhere seek reliable information to make sense of their surroundings, recognize and gather with their own kind, and, on that foundation, push for the changes they yearn for. Even amid a brutal war with no clear end in sight, they continue to cling to hope and fight for it. 

Li Jun is a Chinese scholar with a background in both journalism and research, currently working on the Chinese-language, independent media initiative inVOC. 

This text was translated from the Chinese by David Ownby, a professor of Chinese history and the curator of the website Reading the China Dream.