#LoveTwitter, a Special Place Like No Other for Mainland Chinese Netizens

China Change, March 24, 2016.

In no particular order and with a couple of exceptions, we sample Chinese netizens’ thoughts on March 21, 2016, Twitter’s 10th anniversary. We don’t know who else will be touched by this, but we certainly are. – The Editors

乌鸦哥哥 ‏@wuyagege : Twitter is like a small cafe that never closes. People come and go, connecting with each other in ways both lasting and fleeting. You can exchange a few words if you feel the urge, otherwise everyone goes about their own business. After these many years, I have so many friends from all over, both old and new. Some have faded away, others are still around. Still others have been made to vanish. I somehow manage to continue on. I cherish the fact that a place like this exists, where you can pull up a bar stool and manage to find a way to enjoy some freedom and relax a while.

浅洚 / Valerie ‏@knifepoint : In August 2009 I was wearing the Twitter Tee designed by GeekCook @digitalboy. That summer I sent Xu Zhiyong (@zhiyongxu) a postcard and weeped over Tan Zuoren’s essay. Through using dabr to get on Twitter, I started to learn how to get around the Great Firewall. That was the summer I stopped being a little commie and turned into a rebel . . . the first day of the rest of my life.

Michael ‏@zombie023 : I love Twitter the Great, and don’t know what I’d do if it comes to an end.

Akira Yan ‏@akirayan : Through Twitter, I get so much more information than any of my classmates inside the Great Firewall. To this day, some of them remain convinced that I have a team of people who are funded by a foreign government and who helps me to research, since I can always debunk their lies in a matter of minutes.

刘晓原律师 ‏@liu_xiaoyuan : Today’s the 10th anniversary of Twitter’s founding. When Twitter founder Jack Dorsey visited China in 2012, he could only tweet by sending text messages back to the US:

@jack: Hello, Shanghai. Unfortunately, I can’t read Twitter in China.

@aiww: Hello, Jack.

@jack: Hello, Lord Ai.

@aiww: Let’s work hard to get Twitter into China.

书叔 ‏@gavinleehead : I love Twitter because I can curse whomever I want and say whatever I like here. Here there are no sensitive words, no messages that can’t be displayed “according to the relevant laws,” and no risk of having your account shut down at any moment. I have a group of followers who share messages that can’t be shared inside the Great Firewall and I can share that information with others without having to worry. I can curse those 50-cent idiots . . . And on the most important occasions, I don’t need to worry about keyword filtering.

不卖内裤的大叔 ‏@NalaGinrut : Actually, everyone knows that it’s not Twitter I love, but female tweeps.

张贾龙 ‏@zhangjialong : I joined Twitter in November 2009. That’s when I got my first taste of freedom. In May 2010, state security police in Guizhou invited me to tea over some sensitive things I’d said online. In April 2011, police in Beijing summoned me for questioning for 24 hours and searched my place over a tweet. Four days after I got home, they gave me a 10-day administrative detention for “disrupting social order by using overseas website Twitter to post false information that was reposted 37 times.”

兔爷 ‏@rbttt : I’m not going to get melodramatic: Twitter is great.

Jian Alan Huang ‏@hnjhj: To me, Twitter is both newspaper and television, classroom and bookstore, teahouse and bar, shopping mall and theater. It’s both a society and a way of life. Twitter has come to replace a number of things in my life. Every day, I’m forced to sift through oceans of information, consider different viewpoints, and endlessly refine my own thinking. I’m probably one of only a few people who reads every single tweet, and I’ve never blocked a single person. And, I’ve had the good fortune to meet 119 tweeps in real life.

马了个 ‏@majunlive : I never see anyone say anything bad about Twitter in my timeline. It’s all deep expressions of gratitude or emotion, as if a website had been endowed with a soul. You may be only a “machine,” but you have far more dignity than [Mark] Zuckerberg.

陈闯创 ‏@1957spirit : On Twitter’s 10th anniversary, the first thing that comes to mind for me isn’t that “Big V” Jia Jia @jajia, but people like Zhang Haitao (@xjvisa), Ying Ligang (@ylg9712), and Wang Yi (@Wangyi09) who’ve gone to prison or been sent to re-education through labor for things they posted on Twitter. And then there are even more unknown Chinese Twitter users who’ve simply vanished.

Victor ‏@chuhan : I’ve been on Twitter almost seven of the past 10 years. Early on, I’d use dabr and embr, then to save bandwidth costs I stopped loading avatar images. Later, I used Gravity on my Nokia E63. To this day I fondly recall how convenient it was to scroll through and post to Twitter on that phone. More recently, I used Tweetbot and T4C on iOS. In the end, I started using the official app.

zengshensi ‏@zengshensi : One day in 2009, I was on Twitter while crossing an intersection in a small town in Zhongshan (Guangdong province). A tweep with a cute monkey pirate avatar asked me where Ms. He Qinglian (@heqinglian) had gone. Later on this tweep became my wife, and we have a daughter who is now three and a half years old.

Shengyi Wang ‏@txyyss : Twitter is practically the only way an old homebody like me has to make new friends. I hope it will stay around forever.

东先生 ‏@MyDF : The Chinese Twitter scene is where a bunch of Chinese who’ve self-exiled themselves gather to enjoy the free Internet and break down the information imbalance created by the Great Firewall. Twitter’s Chinese circle deserves a round of applause for undercutting the authority of the state media.

牟山夫 ‏@even5435 : In the 7-8 years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve witnessed all of the big online events. I feel fortunate to have been able to stick around. Thanks to Google and Twitter for being the Zion in my own spiritual Matrix. Thanks to the selfless ones who developed tools for scaling the wall. Thanks to those friends whom I don’t know in real life but share common goals. I hope we can all soldier on until the dawn breaks.

哲尔夫 ‏@Zeove : When I first came to Twitter, I was terrified by you guys. So much anti-CCP talk everywhere you turned. It doesn’t bother me as much these days, since I know that all told those guys don’t even outnumber a square-full of dancing grannies.

吴发课 ‏@wufake : Of the 10 years of Twitter, 2009-2011 was the golden era of Chinese Twitter. Since then, changes in the sociopolitical environment, the rise of social media inside China, and the diversification of the Chinese Internet have led to the gradual decline of Chinese Twitter. But I remain convinced that Twitter has had an irreplaceable value to the revolutionary nature of the Chinese language. Freedom of expression will always be the most fundamental part of universal values.

wailon ‏@doctor8888 : My two deepest impressions of the Chinese Twitter scene (if you don’t count the Jasmine Revolution, which everyone’s familiar with) are two online actions. The first was when Ai Weiwei borrowed money [to pay his tax fine] and the second was the mobilization of tweeps to support Wang Lihong (@wlh8964) by gathering outside the courthouse on the day of her trial. Actually, Twitter’s most important role is to provide a space for what can be considered free discussion. Thanks to debate online, the plans for a number of actions became much more realistic. This sort of “republic” is essential for collective action, without a doubt.

明天我就不追了 ‏@oohlalalevre : I began playing with Twitter during my freshman year at university. Since then, I’ve gone through a few different accounts, deleting one and setting up a new one and so on. It’s simply impossible for me to leave. Isn’t that what love is about? As soon as you part you start thinking about being near each other again. I think Twitter must me my true love.

初夜 ‏@eachgo : Mm-hm, promise me you’ll stay here with me until Twitter goes bust.

冉云飞 ‏@ranyunfei : Twitter celebrated its 10th anniversary yesterday. I’ve been on Twitter for seven years. Generally, I haven’t stuck around consistently on too many websites, but I’ve stayed on Twitter more or less the whole time. I don’t want to get too emotional, but when I write my memoirs one day and look back at my life and my various spiritual journeys, Twitter will be an irreplaceable part of the story. Compared to those sites that delete posts every time you turn around, so brutal that at any moment they can erase you without a trace, a record of one’s Twitter timeline resembles a chronicle of a person’s life.

SUN ‏@sunzhiyi : In 2009, Fanfou* voluntarily shut its service down on the sensitive anniversary of June Fourth. After the incident in Xinjiang, it went completely dark. So, the refugees all came to Twitter. Many years later, and still no one’s kicked us out yet.

DR.K ‏@kielboat : In a thesis back in 2010, I categorized active Twitter users as an opposition group. Even though a lot of them seemed as if they were only pretending and engaging in “opposition lite,” they still took part and became part of a common opposition culture on Twitter. For the first time, opposition no longer follows the earlier model of the wretched and hysterical dissidents making impassioned outcries about how hopeless everything is. Instead, Twitter is more of an opposition lifestyle and a great platform for communication.

老貓 ‏@octw : A single tweet travels thousands of miles, carrying my thoughts to five continents.

StarKnight ‏@StarKnight : I’ve been on Twitter for nine of its 10 years. Fleeting thoughts in this brief life have become a long and voluminous river of information. As long as one drop of water can meet up with other drops of water, the river will never run dry.

莫之许 ‏@mozhixu : I once said that when the number of [Chinese] Twitter users surpassed one million, the dictatorship would be finished. Now that we’re in a time when even patriotic little commies are getting past the Great Firewall, I guess I ought to specify that they need to be liberal Twitter users. Unfortunately, it’s six years later and not only aren’t there a million users but the number of liberal [Chinese] Twitter users has been in decline and they’re less active than before. Some of the public intellectuals who were once on Twitter have even abandoned it altogether. But this is okay. Even if Twitter can’t be an engine [of change] under neo-totalitarian repression, at least it can be our own little backyard!

基德酱 ‏@akid_ : All I can say is that I don’t even bother to wash my hair when I go out to eat with friends who don’t have a Twitter ID.

ZHealoT ‏@zhealot : I test my access to Twitter when I test tools for getting around the Great Firewall. Every time I saw that little blue bird, it reminded me of how it used to feel, when I was a kid, at the moment the lights came back on after we’d had a power outage.

*Fanfou, 饭否, was China’s first social media platform, an imitation of Twitter that predated Sina Weibo. It was shut down on July 7, 2009, resulting in a large exodus of China’s earliest social media users to Twitter.

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Related:

A Month or so in the House of Twitter, by Yaxue Cao, January 23, 2012.

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