China's Communist Party had taken back the internet; the bloggers should stop writing about politics, the party and anything else that went against the official narrative advanced by propaganda authorities.

Just like anywhere else in the world, China's popular bloggers ply their craft via social media and are an eclectic mix of lawyers, academics, celebrities, investors, public intellectuals, food critics and journalists.

Yet they occupy a unique position in China as the only alternate voice to the party, and they speak to the world's biggest internet population of 650 million people. And while they have never been accepted by the party, these so called "opinion leaders" were once tolerated, in what many saw as a necessary loosening of control in the age of social media and mobile internet.

That was until mid-2013 when the party resumed its previous role as the sole arbiter of what information the public should be told.

"They [the bloggers at the hotel meeting] were promised protection and other benefits if they co-operated," says the source.

During the seminar, the authorities even put up a slide, showing what they believed to be a successful re-education of one blogger. The person in question, who had once written about politics and the rule of law, had now turned his keyboard to more appropriate subjects, according to the moderator, such as hotel reviews, fashion and first-world type lifestyle problems.

The assembled bloggers – often referred to as netizens in China – were also left in no doubt where these orders had originated.

The front cover of the blue booklet distributed to each of them showed the seminar was co-hosted by the Central Leading Group for Internet Security and Informatisation – a party organ as Orwellian as its name suggests. President Xi Jinping is its chairman.


On Wednesday, Xi moved to further strengthen his hand when China adopted a new national security law, which gives the party even greater control.

Amnesty International said the law's definition of national security was "virtually limitless", covering everything from politics to finance, culture and the internet.

"The law clearly has more do to with protecting the Communist Party's control of the country than with national security," the international human rights body said in a statement.

Harsh punishment

Eight months earlier, in the foyer of an international hotel in Beijing, the party adopted a more direct approach towards a popular political blogger. This time it was more stick than carrot.

Just after lunch on an autumn day, two plain-clothed police officers approached a slender young man from opposite directions, unfazed that the lobby was busy with foreigners and local business people.

Showing good field craft, the officer approaching from behind called out the blogger's name. As he turned, the other slipped on the handcuffs.

"They took me away like an eagle does its prey," says the blogger with Chinese precision.


At a nearby police station, in addition to the handcuffs, shackles were placed on his ankles. They would remain in place for 24 hours while he was interrogated.

Blackmail was the blogger's stated crime, although no documents were produced to substantiate these allegations.

"They told me just confess to something and you can go home. If I didn't co-operate, they said, 'you will be in jail for years'."

In a show of defiance, the narrow-shouldered young man did not yield and – surprisingly – was released after other bloggers raised questions about his whereabouts.

But the damage had been done.

Although never charged with any crime, the blogger was forced to leave his high-paying job – he was earning upwards of 1 million yuan ($200,000) a year – and authorities went through all his financial records looking for anything that could be used against him. The dirt they sought was never found but the harassment continued.

In the months after his detention, the man's father has been threatened and the blogger has been beaten up twice by hired thugs, once outside a public building watched over by security guards.

"Despite there being CCTV cameras everywhere, the police said they could not find any footage," he says now.


The harassment has worked.

After some initial resistance, the blogger who describes himself as a "mild reformist" retreated from the field of battle. He is no longer exposing corruption and hypocrisy within the party.

Wearing Nike trainers and a well-fitted blue blazer over a white T-shirt, the very image of a successful young Chinese man of the new, 21st-century era, he says simply: "I have been re-educated.

"My only hope now is for immigration to make a fresh start, but this makes me very sad as why should I be forced to leave my country."

Corruption exposure goes viral

The party's two-year campaign to retake the internet can be traced back to an uprising of popular anger over a series of photos posted at 6.12 pm in the summer of 2012. The pictures quickly went viral.

They showed a 56-year-old Chinese government official looking suitably earnest on a series of "inspection tours" around Shaanxi Province. The pictures were standard Communist Party propaganda, showing the cadre, Yang Dacai, hard at work serving his people.

There was, however, one glaring disparity.


In each of the five photos, a red circle had been drawn around Yang's left wrist, highlighting his collection of Swiss watches, which ran to a Rolex, two Omegas, a Rado and a Vacheron Constantin. The timepieces were conservatively valued at a combined $100,000, a sum no bureaucrat could afford on an official salary of $3000 a month.

And so the outrage began.

The post was shared on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, 13,737 times within days, received more than 5000 comments and, with hindsight, marked the start of a fleeting period where the Communist Party lost control of the narrative. Suddenly, China's internet activists or netizens, were setting the agenda by posting pictures of officials they believed to be corrupt.

There was the official in Guangdong with 21 houses and his colleagues in Wenzhou standing stiffly outside a government building with their Hermes belt buckles just visible.

In total, 104 allegations of corruption against government officials were posted on Weibo in the second half of 2012, according to a study by the Communications University of China.

This frenzy of outing corrupt officials online continued throughout 2013 with a further 229 postings.

More than a vehicle for just dobbing in corrupt officials, however, Weibo had became the public forum where property disputes, environmental atrocities, food scandals and general grievances could be aired. Some even believed the party viewed Weibo as preferable to street protests and saw it as a pressure valve for the country's millions of frustrated citizens.

They were badly wrong.


Online activists silenced

It might not have been China's Arab Spring or a colour revolution, but the rise of internet activism was seen as a significant enough threat to the party for it to take swift and decisive action beginning in September 2013.

"There has been an aggressive and concerted campaign to take back the internet," says Jeremy Goldkorn, a director of Danwei, a firm which researches markets and media in China. Nearly two years on, the word netizen (wangmin) has all but disappeared from the Chinese lexicon and Weibo, which is less than six years old, has become road kill on the information superhighway.

"Weibo has lost its position as the primary social force in China," Goldkorn says. "During its peak [in 2012], it was like Facebook and CNN combined."

With the decline of Weibo, China's public intellectuals, loudmouths and general troublemakers have also lost their voice. There is no room for them in President Xi's new China. This suggests the party has won again.

One of the world's most enduring totalitarian regimes, which Rupert Murdoch predicted would fall with the introduction of satellite television, didn't just outlive this threat but has also tamed the internet in the age of social media. It has done this mostly through fear.

In a law which was not discussed publicly or debated, the party, via the Supreme People's Court, decreed in September 2013 that bloggers could be jailed for three years if they posted a "defamatory" message which was shared more than 500 times.

The spreading of such "online rumours", as they were tagged by the state media, supposedly had the potential to "disrupt social order" and trigger "mass incidents", as protests are known in China.


"People have been hurt and the society's reaction has been strong, demanding with one voice serious punishment by law for criminal activities like using the internet to spread rumours and defame people," said the court's spokesman, Sun Jungong. He added, "No country would consider the slander of other people as freedom of speech."

Made a scapegoat

Hiding behind defamation law to stifle public comment mirrors the approach taken by Singapore, where the ruling People's Action Party has long used pliable courts to weaken opponents. Some believe that, in his more liberal moments, Xi aspires to adopt a Singapore-style model in China.

But just to make sure there was no doubt the party was prepared to use force if necessary to seize back control of internet, it isolated one perceived enemy from the pack and made a big show of his demise.

Two weeks before the new social media law was announced, Charles Xue, a celebrated Chinese-American blogger with more than 12 million followers on Weibo, was detained in Beijing for "soliciting prostitutes". Ironically, his plight was announced on Weibo by the Beijing police and came just days after he was linked by the state media to a "rumour monger" who was arrested for "stirring up trouble".

In an interview from prison with state broadcaster CCTV, a shackled Xue admitted his social media popularity had "greatly satisfied my vanity".

"I have irresponsibly posted negative information without verification," he said.

Xue would spend eight months in jail before being released due to ill-health. He remains on Weibo, but confines himself to posting on business and other neutral topics.


"After Charles Xue got arrested, people have been less willing to say interesting things [on Weibo]," says Goldkorn.

The data backs this up. According to the Communications University of China, the number of corruption-related postings on Weibo fell 77 per cent in 2014 to just 51.

More telling was the drop-off in postings from the country's most influential bloggers, the so called "Big Vs" or VIP bloggers such as Xue.

The same study found the number of postings by these people halved in 2014.

As for Weibo itself, the China Internet Information Centre reported, its number of active users more than halved in 2013 to about 25 million and its New York-listed shares are down 35 per cent since the day Xue was arrested.

"Most of my friends, I would say 80 per cent, have given up on Weibo," says Sun Duofei, a journalist turned luxury goods retailer who was a surprising participant in the corruption-outing frenzy of 2012. "I am one of the very few people who refresh my Weibo account."

Sun's perseverance with Weibo may be somewhat sentimental, as she was the blogger responsible for putting a price tag on the Swiss watches owned by the now jailed Shaanxi official Yang Dacai – he was eventually outed for owning 11 Swiss watches and is serving a 14-year term for corruption.

He originally came to the attention of bloggers after being photographed smiling while inspecting a bus crash that killed 36 people.


The 36-year-old Sun says she gave little thought to attaching those now famous price tags to Yang's watch collection. Indeed, it took her just 45 minutes in the car on her way home from work to research and post the item.

She had seen Yang's watches on her friend's Weibo account and, being in the luxury business, could easily work out how much they were worth.

"At that time it was a frenzy," she says. "That was the peak time for the anti-corruption role played by the bloggers."

And while Sun maintains she would do it again "out of a sense of justice", she has no doubt that Weibo has been muted.

This platform, which foreign journalists in China would refresh repeatedly throughout the day just two years ago, to ensure they stayed across the latest news, has become a dreary mix of food reviews and gossip. Sun says, "It's now dominated by entertainment and celebrity bloggers, rather than the economic and political commentators previously."

The party's platform

But the party, which runs one of the world's slickest propaganda machines, was smart enough not to kill off social media entirely. Instead, it has encouraged the development of a more appropriate platform.

That is WeChat, the four-and-a-half-year-old service that boasts 500 million active users and a parent company with a sharemarket value of $US190 billion ($248 billion), making it the world's eighth-largest technology stock.


"WeChat has delivered a deadly blow to Weibo," Sun says.

And while WeChat's functionality is undoubtedly better and it is more suited to mobile devices, it is also a far more contained platform.

"WeChat is for your circle of friends and acquaintances," Sun says. "Weibo is more for social influence."

Goldkorn takes this point a step further. "It's much more difficult for something to go viral on WeChat as it is far less public," he says.

This is because acquiring friends or followers on WeChat is more difficult than Weibo, as you either need to know a user's phone number, be in their vicinity or meet them in person whereby you can scan their QR code. Then they must accept your invitation to become a contact.

There is also no search function to seek out celebrities or opinion leaders and no way to determine how many followers or friends a user has.

Like Weibo, WeChat is also heavily censored in China and upon occasions has been censored overseas – a controversy the company hopes to avoid in the future by having separate servers for those inside and outside China. But the task of those trying to censor Weibo was always far greater given the volume of messages that could be quickly re-posted with small tweaks to sensitive words.

Put simply, Weibo was a new form of mass media akin to broadcasting in the town square; WeChat is more like whispering quietly in your lounge room.


"It is less likely to lead to viral or anti-party postings and I certainly think the government is happy with that," Goldkorn says.

The biggest beneficiary from this switch from Weibo to WeChat has been Pony Ma, the founder of Shenzhen technology company Tencent which devised the more party-friendly social media platform.

In January, Forbes magazine named him China fourth-richest man, with an estimated fortune of $US19 billion.

Open defiance

This climate of fear among opinion leaders in China is a big change from when Han Han – once China's most ubiquitous internet celebrity – was ridiculing officialdom and challenging the party almost daily.

The now 33-year-old turned to blogging in 2006 after publishing a teen angst novel, Triple Door, which sold more than 2 million copies and was followed by four more wildly successful books touching on similar themes.

At the time of Han's switch from author to blogger, President Hu Jintao was at the end of his first term in office and the party was just starting to understand the dangers posed by the internet.

As The New Yorker's former China correspondent Evan Osnos wrote in his prize-winning book, Age of Ambition: "He [Han] was instantly famous – a seductive spokesman for a new brand of youthful defiance."


By late 2008, Han, who has shaggy hair and the looks of a Korean pop-star, was China's most popular personal blogger, with more than 250 million people having visited his website.

He wrote about everything from inequity to pollution, forced evictions and internet censorship. In addition, he possessed a pen sharper than anyone who had come before him in China.

"Just because you see a crowd of people standing on a street corner eating shit doesn't make you want to elbow your way in for a bite," Han wrote in reference to the party flooding the web with pro-government advertising.

And while China's web censors were constantly taking down his copy, he pulled few punches and even mocked the electronic filters used by the party as a first line of defence. Instead of putting Tibet, Taiwan or Tiananmen (the three Ts which are not to be mentioned) or other taboo topics into his posts, Han would simply write "sensitive word" and allow readers to work it out for themselves.

During his decade-long reign as a public figure, he operated in the grey area between outspoken government critic, celebrity, car racer and brand ambassador. In December 2010, Johnnie Walker signed him for a digital campaign.

Climate of fear

But something changed in mid-2012.

In the lead-up to the party's once in a decade leadership transition, Han gradually wound down his blogging and his writing showed a new level of caution.


"I need to keep thinking about my words while I'm writing this article to make sure I don't cross the red line," he wrote in a May 2012 posting on Weibo.

These days, the man who once said "if you speak Chinese you know who I am" has all but given up tackling the big issues of the day. In a recent post on Weibo, Han told his 42 million followers that his Alaskan sled dog had arrived in Shanghai.

"Do you have anything to say" he captioned a picture showing himself with the dog.

There are no long-form articles of the kind that made him so famous.

Instead he sticks to four key themes: movies, motor racing, dogs and his daughter.

But perhaps the most telling sign of the pressure on Han to avoid commenting on sensitive current affairs came in recent days. As protesters took to the streets of his home town of Jinshan, outside Shanghai, to voice their opposition to a proposed chemical plant, he remained silent.

The demonstrations, which saw as many as 10,000 people on the streets chanting "give us back our Jinshan", received no coverage in the state media and, unlike previous years during such events, the country's bloggers also largely avoided the issue.

For Han, it's now about sticking to "suitable topics".


Over the past three months, AFR Weekend has had a long-running correspondence with his media handlers in an effort to arrange an interview.

At first they said Han was busy completing a film project and he was not taking media interviews.

A later request was also politely declined by his staff, who said Han no longer gave face-to-face interviews. They suggested written questions would be more appropriate.

When these focused on the lack of space for bloggers in China today, the rise of WeChat over Weibo and the arrest of Charles Xue, Han declined to answer.

"Sorry it's still not convenient," wrote one handler. "Thanks a lot for your support. Looking forward to future co-operation on a suitable topic."

One former netizen who remains in contact with Han said he would never take a media interview in the current climate.

"In China, if you don't talk about political events, you can have a very easy life," he says. "The party has claimed victory because all the opinion leaders have given up."

Social media crackdown


That's not entirely true, but those still maintaining the rage are doing it on a far smaller stage, usually to a known group of contacts on WeChat.

A prominent professor at Peking University, China's most prestigious tertiary institution, told in a recent post of the restrictions now faced by academics. On WeChat he complained that almost all public lectures at the university required approval from the propaganda department.

"There is less and less room for serious scholarly discussion," he wrote. "Speeches of praise and glory are everywhere."

He then asked how could China build first-class universities with the current "crackdown on academic discussion and people with independent thoughts".

He asked, "In just a few years where did it go wrong?"

To answer such a question brings us back to Chinese President Xi Jinping and his desire to restore the primacy of the party above all else in the country.

He is the new strongman, China's most dominant leader since Mao Zedong, who has unwound the few liberties taken by bloggers and public intellectuals over the past decade.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of media studies at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, said Xi needed to show he could reassert control over social media to silence factional rivals within the party.

"It was part of a power struggle," he says.

"The result is the worst time for media and internet freedom since the start of the new century."