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6 hours after I posted a Tibet flag under friends of tibet's tweet (https://t.co/hzpW17lXjD), government officers in my hometown found my family and urged me to delete it. 2 days later, we reached an agreement to delete my two weibo posts instead. pic.twitter.com/Gep3erEKCc — Shawn Zhang 章闻韶 (@shawnwzhang) January 15, 2018

In one particularly bizarre turn of events, a panic erupted over a handful of hollow decorative boxes made to look like copies of the banned book “Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs,” by Canadian human rights campaigners David Matas and David Kilgour. The fake books were found in a hotel lobby in Chongli, a ski resort northwest of Beijing.

But back to Zhang’s Twitter post — the Tibetan flag, with the words “Free Tibet” above it. Within hours, public security police were putting the heat on Zhang’s schoolteacher parents back home in Wuyi, in the coastal province of Zhejiang, just south of Shanghai. The cops wanted Zhang’s parents to tell their son to shut the hell up.

“It’s like they are holding my parents hostage there, so that I can’t say things,” Zhang told me. “It is not just Chinese, but many non-Chinese are under this censorship. People in Canada and the United States have to censor their own statements if they want to get business inside China, so they don’t say anything. They surrender to censorship.”

It is like they are holding my parents hostage there, so that I cannot say things Shawn Zhang

The Friends of Tibet Twitter post that Zhang decorated with an image of the Tibetan flag was a satirical congratulations to the Marriott International hotel chain “for listing #Tibet as a country along with #HongKong and #Taiwan.” The post was referring to an uproar set off by a rewards program customer survey the Marriott chain had circulated that referred to Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan as countries. Marriott complied with an order to shut down its website for a week as penance, and further agreed to kowtow with a grovelling apology, disavowing any sympathy for “separatist groups that subvert the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China.”