When China’s prodigious tech influencer, Naomi Wu, found herself silenced, it wasn’t just the machinery of a surveillance state at play. Instead, it was a confluence of state repression and the sometimes capricious attention of a Western audience that, as she asserts, often views Chinese activists more as ideological tokens than as genuine human beings.
Maybe? It’s only been a month, and Naomi Wu has been fairly clear in the past that she doesn’t want too much scrutiny of her personal life. It’s possible that her allies in Western media (and she definitely has some) have adopted a wait-and-see attitude about it. If the government is putting heat on her (or her partner), the last thing she wants is an international kerfuffle over it.
I was hoping this was the case for at least the whole first half of the article… even anxious what I was reading would be a provocation for the authorities to do worse. But what she says towards the end is just heartbreaking.
She’s obviously pretty frustrated, it’s just not clear to me that she’s been permanently silenced, that’s all I’m saying. She said specifically that she doesn’t want to be ammunition in an ideological war between east and west, so perhaps she anticipates a relaxation of the restrictions after a cooling off period.
EDIT: Honestly, I may be misreading her. We only get a few sentences from Naomi Wu herself, but she seems at the same time dismissive of Western attention (“we’re just signs for people like you in the West to wave at each other in their ideological war”), and seems to think her notoriety in the West was keeping authorities at bay (“Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me”).
Anyway, I hope the authorities back down, it’s not clear what agenda they are serving by restricting her video & social media access.