China’s Censorship Reaches Globally Through WeChat

TikTok dances have captured the attention of countless U.S. teenagers—and TikTok has captured the regulatory attention of the U.S. government. But the deeper threat to U.S. freedom is from another Chinese-owned app—one with a much broader reach into the wallets and conversations of both Chinese and Chinese Americans. WeChat is China’s “app for everything,” but as some Chinese Americans have found out, “everything” does not include free cultural or political discourse.

Imagine a fusion of WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and PayPal. This is WeChat—an immensely popular app in China and Chinese-speaking communities around the world because of its wide range of functions, including texting, calling, video conferencing, playing video games, shopping, paying bills, sending money to friends, creating information feeds for friends, and reading news. Released by Tencent in 2011, it is the largest standalone app in the world, with over 1 billion monthly active users.

WeChat’s widespread use among Chinese-speaking Americans makes it an important source of news for the United States-based Chinese diaspora, including international students, first-generation Chinese Americans, and others. This has driven an explosion in WeChat-based media targeting the audience. And once adopted, WeChat is far more all-encompassing for its users than TikTok or any comparable U.S. app. In a sense, it is not just an app but an add-on operating system for smartphone communications in Chinese.

WeChat’s popularity makes it a key part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surveillance and censorship apparatus. User activity is tracked, analyzed, censored, and handed over to the Chinese government in line with Party mandates, making it a prominent part of the party-state’s mass surveillance network in China. Algorithms are adjusted to promote the Party’s narratives and demote or censor information that runs against it. Those who post information that challenges these narratives face a range of possible consequences, including banishment from the app, as happened to several users who shared images of last year’s pro-democracy demonstrations, and imprisonment, which can happen for sharing as little as one wrong post.

But even using WeChat outside of China—beyond the immediate reach of the authorities—is a fraught experience.

For example, the most common way for WeChat to censor users in the United States is to block access to the account from China or for anyone using a Chinese phone number for their account, meaning that even though a censored person can log in and access the app’s various functions, very few people can see that person’s texts or moments. A more severe form of censorship is to completely block access, meaning that the user cannot even log into their account; while this occurs more frequently in China, it does happen in the United States. Alternatively, WeChat can completely block specific content released by a user without the user’s knowledge; users would only know by monitoring the responses (or lack of them, in this case).

For those who come directly under the eye of WeChat’s controls, the damage is even more direct. Lydia (Yang) Liu, a Chinese immigrant with a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, started a public WeChat account, MoshangUSA, in the spring of 2018. Liu’s aim was to tell “the truth of real American life to Chinese immigrants in the [United States] and worldwide,” as she told me, and she worked countless hours over three years to build her WeChat account. MoshangUSA became one of the largest outlets on social media focused on social, cultural, and political issues among first-generation Chinese immigrants in the United States. It garnered over 250,000 followers and millions of monthly views.

But promoting a positive understanding of life in the United States—and its democracy and freedoms—challenges the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative about the country. This narrative, which is propagated over and over again in China through television, movies, social and print media, print media, and even posters on the subway and construction sites, emphasizes the Party’s almost messianic role in restoring China’s glory after a long period of humiliation (and the concomitant demise of the Western powers that caused it).

Even though Liu intentionally self-censored many topics, MoshangUSA was suspended from WeChat first for two weeks, and then for six months. Posts that undermined the Party’s narrative—by, for example, not taking a pro-China stance on the U.S.-China trade war or Covid-19, or by exploring the positive aspects of immigrants’ experience in the United States—were taken down. Dozens of articles were disqualified before publication, and over 40 were removed after publication. Comments were similarly censored. Meanwhile, Liu was repeatedly harassed, and even doxed by some combination of state-backed and independently-acting nationalist users.

MoshangUSA is hardly the only Chinese American account to be targeted. The CCP, through both direct action and pressure on companies, manages content according to Party narratives in various ways: suspending or shutting down particular accounts, censoring some posts and elevating others (often indirectly, via algorithm), flooding moderate groups with extremist users, creating favorable content (propaganda), and leveraging its rules system to limit who can establish public accounts.

First, independent WeChat accounts that cover news have had experiences similar to MoshangUSA. These accounts include Newslab, which was founded by a University of Pennsylvania graduate student with a background in journalism; Yalerica Road, founded by a Chinese American professor; and Chinese Americans, established by a group of Chinese American progressives. Each account garnered an estimated 50,000 to 300,000 followers before being shut down by WeChat in the past two years. Chinese Americans was shut down after it ran an article in the week following the 2020 U.S. presidential election celebrating that “America was back, and democracy won.” When Yalerica Road was shut down, the founder released a message stating: “It was a very dark night to me …. [It] woke us up one more time that we need to allow critical voices for a brighter tomorrow.”

In addition, journalists and commentators connected to outlets critical of the CCP regularly have their posts deleted, accounts shut down, or are expelled from chat groups, according to a Freedom House survey.

And while WeChat censors or demotes content that is positive toward the United States, negative posts about U.S. life go viral daily, ensuring that United States-based Chinese speakers who use WeChat to get their news regularly see content promoting critical narratives—such as that the United States treats Chinese as second-class citizens, that white people always discriminate against Chinese people, and that the country is a gun-violent society. The CCP’s goal is to suppress Chinese and Chinese American passion for U.S. politics and make users believe that the U.S. political system is no better than China’s authoritarianism.

Indeed, the Party proactively supports favorable outlets that support its narratives, ensuring their posts are readily promoted and that they can grow without interruption. For example, the account Cicero2020 grew rapidly after its inception in November 2020 because WeChat repeatedly recommended it to MoshangUSA readers while never doing the reverse; eventually about one-third of users migrated over. While Cicero2020 claims to be independent, the account manager is a former journalist of a state-owned media outlet who lives in China.

The Party also encourages the development of extremist voices that can both discredit the United States and its democracy and exacerbate divisions among users. For example, right-of-center groups are flooded with far-right voices that question the integrity of U.S. elections, spread QAnon misinformation, and support Putin’s war in Ukraine. GoWest, whose owner is based in Seattle, Washington, and claims to be Chinese American, regularly circulates content on both WeChat and Telegram suggesting that the U.S. “deep state” is worse than the CCP, that the U.S. Democratic Party is really the American Communist Party, and that the media in the United States is so biased it’s even worse than China’s state media. The intensity of posting and circulating of content suggests GoWest has several editors and many volunteers supporting its efforts.

The CCP’s fourth method of control on WeChat is “flooding the zone” with content creation. A group of state-backed internet commenters nicknamed “wumao” (loosely translated as “fifty cents” after the amount they were supposedly originally paid per post) operate like a propaganda apparatus, creating articles or comments on social media in China and abroad that promote the party-state’s narratives while undermining anything that might challenge them. The Wumao Army numbers anywhere from 500,000 to two million employees within China, with more overseas. Many of the wumao commenters working on U.S. WeChat are based in the United States and have already acquired U.S. passports or green cards. The FBI and other U.S. government agencies lack the understanding of CCP activities and resources to constrain them.

The consequences for targeted WeChat account managers and content posters can be dire. The CCP requires that any public accounts making more than four posts a month be registered in China. Registration means either setting up a presence in China (a highly regulated process) or is dependent on the support of someone in China (leaving that person vulnerable to jailing or pressure tactics). Media companies that refuse to register in China, such as the Epoch Times or other anti-Party outlets, are unable to establish a WeChat account and therefore have no presence on the app.

Even if they live in the United States, those affected are reluctant to publicize harassment or censorship for fear of consequences for their family members. For example, Chen Xiaoping, a journalist for the Chinese-language Mirror Media Group based in Long Island, New York, interviewed the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. Shortly afterward, Chen’s wife, who was living in China, disappeared. After he published an open letter on Twitter asking for her release, she appeared in a video on an anonymous YouTube account denouncing his work.

As a result of all the actions against her and MoshangUSA, Liu is off social media today. “This kind of insane pan-platform sabotage has really killed my social media career,” she said. “I cannot fight a machine as an individual.” Meanwhile, GoWest and other outlets such as Tensor Torch (绿网) that promote CCP-backed content have expanded their presence to Telegram and other platforms—everywhere Chinese speakers may seek out news and congregate—to continually crowd out independent voices.

WeChat enables the Chinese party-state to do much more than just manage information that millions of Americans access day in and day out. It provides a mechanism to infiltrate the Chinese American community and stifle its social and political development. As such, it is part of a broader campaign to control Chinese American organizations, civic engagement, and political participation. As Alex Joske and his co-authors concluded in a 2020 Australian Strategic Policy Institute report: “WeChat has accelerated the growth of CCP-aligned media. Its account registration restrictions and unclear censorship process have discouraged political content, contributing to a lack of political awareness among Chinese communities and leaving them vulnerable to manipulation.”

These methods of control give the CCP the capacity to influence U.S. politics in ways that are not easily visible to U.S. government officials and others who monitor foreign meddling. For instance, the Party uses the app to stifle the reach of Chinese American political candidates who take a strong anti-Party stance—such as Allen Shen, a Chinese-born U.S. Army veteran who ran as a Republican for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Shen said he was unable to post on WeChat because of his political positions. Lily Tang Williams, formerly a law professor in China, ran in a GOP primary for Congress in New Hampshire; she said she avoided anything that might be deemed political while on WeChat, out of concern for her relatives in China.

The activities and methods outlined above explain why the Trump administration tried to ban WeChat from U.S. app stores in 2020 on national security grounds. The ban was blocked by a federal judge. While the Biden administration has ordered a security review of foreign-owned apps, it is likely much more concerned with TikTok because it is omnipresent among U.S. youth today, and concerns about data privacy are generally more politically salient than concerns about foreign agents publishing content in a foreign language. What occurs on WeChat is hidden in a language few people in Washington or the U.S. media understand. What happens in Chinese stays in Chinese.

But given that WeChat is likely to both grow in importance to users and in influence over Chinese language media in general, the Biden administration should elevate its assessment of the threat it poses—not only to personal data but to political discourse and civic engagement among U.S. citizens. All social media apps in the United States should be required to adhere to U.S. standards of free speech and privacy, with major platforms assessed for compliance.

If Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) cannot ensure that public WeChat accounts targeting U.S. audiences are easily registered in the United States, communications outside China are no longer monitored, posts and accounts are not censored, algorithms are not systematically promoting anti-U.S. content, and wumao commenters are not advantaged, WeChat should be banned in the United States. While this would surely inconvenience users who depend on it to communicate with family and friends in China, there are alternatives—Signal and Telegram use is surging in China and there are other options. And it is a small price to pay for enjoying the freedoms the United States offers—freedoms that are limited by WeChat. In addition, foreign ownership of major public accounts—the equivalent of major media on the app—should require public reporting. Such efforts should be paired with outreach to other democracies to ensure Beijing’s long arm no longer reaches into the information public square of the free world.