Using the persona of an Iranian protester to circulate content, a writer manages to hoodwink China’s internet censors for weeks. Netizens notice how familiar the depiction of state control sounds.

By Wenxin Fan | Published by The Wall Street Journal

Excerpt

The text of a letter purportedly sent from a Tehran prison began to circulate on the Chinese internet last year around Lunar New Year. Its author, writing under the name “Mahsa,” described how Iranian secret police snatched her during a crackdown on anti-headscarf protests and interrogated her about her feminist beliefs.

Over the following days, the letter reached thousands of Chinese readers, many of whom marveled at its familiar descriptions of state control. “Is this a strange land?” wrote one user on the popular social-media platform Weibo. “Or is this homeland?”

The answer arrived weeks later when a new version appeared on overseas websites. It had footnotes and an epilogue revealing that “Mahsa” was a Chinese writer who had adopted the persona of an Iranian protester to tell the story of her own detention and interrogation. That writer turned out to be Wu Qin, a former editor at a state-run media outlet.

Based in Beijing, Wu often attended private gatherings of artists, activists and other intellectuals, many of whom were targeted by authorities after the bridge protest. That November, police from Beijing traveled to the southern city of Guangzhou, where Wu was staying with friends, and detained her along with three others, Wu said in an interview.

The police interrogated them overnight, then issued Wu 15 days of administrative detention for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vague offense the government often uses to round up activists. Pandemic travel restrictions prevented the police from transporting her back to Beijing, so they decided to let her off with a warning. They downloaded data from her devices before letting her go, she said.

Wu said she worried that authorities would find something in the data to justify arresting her again. Friends urged her to consider fleeing the country and to write a testimony in case she was taken into custody again.

She had paid close attention to the protests in Iran against headscarves. To give herself some distance from her experiences, she came up with the idea of writing about them as if they had taken place there instead. Cloaking her story in foreign clothing had the secondary benefit of helping it slip past censors, she said.

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