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ELAH FEDER: I’m Elah.

ANNIE MINOFF: And I’m Annie. And you’re listening to Undiscovered, a podcast about the backstories of science. This story starts with a crash.

JOSH CHIN: This really horrific traffic collision on a highway in Shaanxi province, which is in northwestern China.

ANNIE MINOFF: That’s Josh Chin. He’s a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Beijing. And the crash he’s talking about happened in August of 2012.

JOSH CHIN: A double-decker sleeper bus slammed into a tanker carrying a flammable material, I think it was methane.

ELAH FEDER: Thirty-six people died. In the state news photo, you can see the blackened husk of the bus, sitting on the side of the road. There are some cops in reflective vests. And then, at very back of the picture, you notice this guy.

JOSH CHIN: This sort of portly, official-looking guy sort of standing next to the charred wreckage, sort of smiling. Very unperturbed by the scene.

ELAH FEDER: Users on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, they noticed the smiling man in the picture. And they were livid.

ANNIE MINOFF: So here are some sample posts from social media. They’re courtesy of our translator Isabelle. And you can hear, people are just venting their frustration at this man.

ISABELLE: Okay so this one says, “With a massive belly from overeating, smiling and laughing at the scene of death. Simply inhuman.” And... “Since he loves smiling so much, I hope these unfortunate dead souls can just take him away with them. Let him smile to his content down there in hell.”

ANNIE MINOFF: So Weibo users, they tried to figure out who this guy was. And they went on the internet, did a bunch of image searches, basically trying to turn up more pictures of him. And they hit pay dirt. The smiler was Yang Dacai. Communist party official and head of the Shanxi province work safety administration.

ELAH FEDER: Right so pretty much the last guy you want smiling at the scene of an accident.

ANNIE MINOFF: Right. And those Weibo users, they turned up something else too. Picture after picture of Yang Dacai out on site visits, or giving interviews, at the office, wearing different luxury wristwatches.

ELAH FEDER: Yeah that’s not good.

JOSH CHIN: Watches on the order of thousands of dollars and probably much more than you know your average provincial official can afford.

ANNIE MINOFF: Or afford without taking bribes. So today on the show, we are going to bring you the story of that smiling official, Yang Dacai, and the Weibo user who took him down. And we’re gonna try to explain how any this happens in the first place. In a country that heavily censors the internet, where online speech is not free, can you accuse a party official of corruption and get away with it?

ELAH FEDER: Like what is ok to post, and what is NOT ok to post on Chinese social media?

ANNIE MINOFF: The answer comes to us from some social scientists who were not even trying to answer this question. But they did. By accident. With big data.

********

ANNIE MINOFF: So in August of 2012, the smiling official Yang Dacai he is feeling the heat. There are those pictures of him all over Weibo. He’s grinning in front of that burned out bus.

ELAH FEDER: People are turning up more pictures, showing him wearing these fancy-looking watches.

ANNIE MINOFF: But it’s not a complete meltdown for the smiling official until another watch lover enters the scene.This watch lover’s name, is Boss Hua.

ELAH FEDER: That’s his Weibo handle, not his real name, by the way.

ANNIE MINOFF: So Boss Hua’s an entrepreneur. He’s in his late thirties, kind of slim, wears these really elegant rimless glasses. And he’s into luxury. Like, lifestyle magazine kind of stuff?

ELAH FEDER: Right so pictures on Boss Hua’s instagram look like something out of Conde Nast Traveller. It’s all sepia-toned pictures of elaborate espresso drinks….

ANNIE MINOFF: Or lobster dinners...

ELAH FEDER: Or luxury hotel suites.

ANNIE MINOFF: He’s actually a luxury hotel reviewer on the side. But back in 2012, Boss Hua was internet famous for doing something very, very specific on Sina Weibo. He’d find pictures of corrupt Chinese officials online, and identify their wristwatches.

<<Skype ring... Ring…>>

ANNIE MINOFF: I reached him a few months ago on Skype.

ANNIE MINOFF: Hi! Is this Boss Hua?

BOSS HUA: Hello, <<Chinese language>>

ANNIE MINOFF: You’ll hear our translator Isabelle on the call too.

ISABELLE: <<Chinese language>>

ANNIE MINOFF: Boss Hua told us, this whole watch-identifying thing, it started as a lark.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): Well at the time, I’d just sold my second start up, so I had a lot of free time on my hands. And I really like watches. It was really by random chance that I saw these pictures of officials wearing watches on Weibo. And since I had the time, I tried to identify them.

ANNIE MINOFF: So when Boss Hua says that he quote “really likes” watches? That is an understatement. He is the kind of watch nerd who really cares if your Rolex is stainless steel or rolesor. Which is a word that I had to look up. It’s some fancy like Rolex-speak for a combination of stainless steel and gold.

ELAH FEDER: Which is to say that when Boss Hua sets out to identify a watch, it’s with the kind of nerdy rigor you’d expect from career investigative journalists. He is relentless.

ANNIE MINOFF: So, say Boss Hua sees a picture of some grinning official in front of a burned out bus for example. His first step, he heads over to Baidu. This is basically Chinese Google. And he does a search. The idea is he’s gonna find other pictures of this same guy, wearing the same watch, at around the same time.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): And since I’m a programmer, I even wrote a little program to help me grab pictures from the internet.

ELAH FEDER: Boss Hua organizes these pictures into a giant database.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE: So at the end he had about 10 thousand pictures.

ANNIE MINOFF: Oh my god.

ANNIE MINOFF: And at the end of all this sleuthing, he posts his verdict to Weibo. Includes his photo evidence, the watch brand, model, and market price.

ELAH FEDER: And in Weibo’s court of public opinion, Boss Hua is the expert watch witness. So when Weibo users turn up pictures of Yang Dacai, that smiling official from the bus crash, and he’s wearing all these luxury watches, they know who to call.

ANNIE MINOFF: Did you already have a research file on Yang Dacai?

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): Yes, because he’s in my database.

ANNIE MINOFF: Now, at this moment, the smiling official makes a very crucial miscalculation. He tries to defend himself. He goes onto Weibo, and he says, basically, “Ok. Yeah. I’ve got some watches. But only five!”

ELAH FEDER: Boss Hua says game on.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE: Oh my god. He said, “If you don’t remember, I’ll help you refresh your memories, and every half an hour, I’ll post a picture of your watch, and let’s see how many you have.”

ANNIE MINOFF: Woooow. Okay.

ANNIE MINOFF: In the end, the news media reports that internet users surfaced eleven different watches, worn by Yang Dacai. Not five. Eleven! Among them, were reportedly a Montblanc…

ELAH FEDER: Worth 5 thousand dollars…

ANNIE MINOFF: An Omega...

ELAH FEDER: Worth 10 thousand dollars…

ANNIE MINOFF: And a Vacheron Constantin

ELAH FEDER: Worth at least twenty-five thousand dollars!

ANNIE MINOFF: Three weeks later, smiling official Yang Dacai is fired, and disappears into the opaque disciplinary machinery of the communist party.

ELAH FEDER: And Boss Hua? He becomes a folk hero.

ANNIE MINOFF: Ok. So before we get to our scientists, here is what strikes me about this story. We know that the Chinese government censors the internet.

ELAH FEDER: With some regularity.

ANNIE MINOFF: Right. In fact, way back in 2000, then-President Bill Clinton, he gives this speech, where he says...

BILL CLINTON: Now there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet. Good luck. <<Audience laughs>> That’s sorta like trying to nail jello to the wall. <<Audience laughs>>

ELAH FEDER: Except by 2012, China’s gotten really good at nailing jello. You’ve probably heard of the “Great Firewall.” It keeps internet users off of Google, off of Facebook, and Twitter....

ANNIE MINOFF: And they’ve got another weapon which is people. In China, there are more than a hundred thousand people whose only job is to take stuff off of the internet that the Chinese government doesn’t want there.

ELAH FEDER: So in China, most censored posts come down within twenty-four hours. Which means within twenty-four hours an actual human has looked at your post and decided if it can stay on the internet.

ANNIE MINOFF: But so here’s my question about Boss Hua then. Because he’s on Weibo. He’s posting about the smiling official’s watches, very strongly implying that there’s no legal way this guy could own these. How does Boss Hua get away with it?

ELAH FEDER: Right like why doesn’t one of these hundred thousand human censors take those posts down.

ANNIE MINOFF: Right. And if the government’s not censoring posts that are calling out a specific party official for corruption? What are they censoring? The people who would actually figure this out are at this point, 7 thousand miles away. They’re Cambridge, Massachusetts. They’re those three Harvard social scientists I mentioned.

ELAH FEDER: We’re gonna meet two of them. Professor Gary King, and one of Gary’s grad students at the time, Jennifer Pan. She’s now an assistant professor at Stanford.

ANNIE MINOFF: For Gary and Jen, the story actually starts a few years before this watch business. It starts in 2009. And by the way, Gary and Jen do not think they’re studying Chinese censorship.

GARY KING: Yes, we were interested in automated text analysis.

ANNIE MINOFF: It’s a pretty wonky data science thing. But basically, Gary’s figuring out ways to help computers analyze really gigantic databases of text. Actually gigantic databases of Chinese text.

ELAH FEDER: Right so step one, Jen says they need to build a giant database of Chinese text.

JENNIFER PAN: And we thought ok let’s look at social media because there’s a lot of text there.

ANNIE MINOFF: Gary, Jen, and Gary’s other graduate student Margaret Roberts, they partner with a company that’s already downloading Chinese social media posts en masse. They get access to literally millions of posts. And they’re about to write up this wonky data science paper when they notice a problem.

ELAH FEDER: When they go back to these social media sites, some of the posts they’ve collected just aren’t there anymore. The links are broken.

JENNIFER PAN: And initially we thought this meant that there was something wrong with our data, there was something wrong with the data we’d been collecting.

GARY KING: And then we got one that said this post has been taken down, it’s been deleted, or it’s being investigated. Investigated! And then if that wasn’t clear enough, over in the bottom right-hand corner there was a little picture of a little cartoon police officer that we—

ANNIE MINOFF: What?

GARY KING: A little picture of a police officer, that’s right. Eventually we learned that there’s cartoon internet police. And they’re Jingjing and Chacha—

ANNIE MINOFF: They have names?

GARY KING: They have names yes, you can google them. And you’ll find these funny little pictures.

ANNIE MINOFF: I totally googled them. Jingjing and Chacha wear little blue police uniforms. And they’re usually shown standing on top of computer mice or keyboards in this kind of crouching posture that makes it like they’re surfing?

ELAH FEDER: Like they’re surfing the web?

ANNIE MINOFF: I guess?

GARY KING: They put them everywhere just to remind you that you’re being watched.

JENNIFER PAN: That’s when we knew we knew that we were encountering censorship.

ELAH FEDER: The problem wasn’t a few broken links. Posts were missing because they’d been censored.

ANNIE MINOFF: So had you ever studied censorship before?

GARY KING: Ah, none of us had ever studied censorship. I’d never studied China—

ANNIE MINOFF: Do you speak Chinese?

GARY KING: I don’t speak Chinese, no.

ANNIE MINOFF: So here’s Gary. He’s looking at this thing he doesn’t quite understand. In a language he doesn’t even read. But it doesn’t matter. He knows they have to follow this lead.

GARY KING: And so we, we immediately changed what we were doing.

ANNIE MINOFF: So censorship on Chinese social media, you can kind of think of it like this big black box. Everyday, people are feeding stuff into this box. They post to Weibo, for example.

ELAH FEDER: Most of those posts come back out the other side, but not all. Some get stuck in that black box. And what internet users and scholars and policy people have wanted to know for a long time is this: What gets stuck in the black box? What does the Chinese government actually censor?

ANNIE MINOFF: And it’s not like we don’t know anything about this. Every once in awhile, a Chinese government memo will get leaked. People have actually interviewed censors.

ELAH FEDER: And obviously you’ve got 700 million Chinese internet users noticing when their posts disappear.

ANNIE MINOFF: The problem is this is all anecdotal. So enter Gary and Jen. They’re vacuuming up millions of Chinese social media posts. And when they notice that they’re disappearing, they realize something big. As fast as China’s 100 thousand human censors are reading posts, taking them off of the internet, Gary and Jen are downloading those same posts faster.

ELAH FEDER: When a post appears on the internet and then disappears into the black box of censorship? They can see that. And with this data they can answer the big question. Definitively.

ANNIE MINOFF: What are those hundred thousand censors taking off of the internet?

ELAH FEDER: Except it didn’t work like that.

GARY KING: People that talk about big data, they sometimes talk about the end of theory. You don’t have to theorize anymore, you just look at the data and it tells you the answer. Well we were being buried by enormous quantities of data. And it wasn’t speaking to us! It was just—

ANNIE MINOFF: It was not projecting its loud big data voice and saying “Gary! This is what China doesn’t want on the internet!”

GARY KING: <<Gary laughs>> Exactly, that’s right! They were just— it was just burying us!

ANNIE MINOFF: Turns out, having a lot of data, that’s not enough. You’ve got to ask the data the right question. And Gary and Jen? They’d started with the obvious question.

GARY KING: What would they censor?

ANNIE MINOFF: The obvious answer? Criticism. Anything that criticizes the government, or its politics, or its leaders.

GARY KING: And so we set up our telescopes, essentially, to look for that, and when we looked for that, we didn’t see that! Ee didn’t see anything like that!

ELAH FEDER: What they saw was actually pretty weird. Pro-government stuff and anti-government stuff, it got censored at about the same rate.

ANNIE MINOFF: Which is bizarre.

GARY KING: Let me just be clear about this. You can say the leaders of this town are all stealing money. They’re putting it in overseas bank accounts, and here’s the bank accounts, and here’s how much money. And by the way they all have mistresses and here are their names. That will not be censored.

ANNIE MINOFF: Wow.

GARY KING: So, we were quite confused for awhile.

ELAH FEDER: So this doesn’t seem to make any sense. But it does fit with the story of Boss Hua. He’s there, he’s calling out this smiling official, saying “Hey this guy’s got watches he shouldn’t have.” If criticizing party officials is ok, then it makes sense that that can stay up.

ANNIE MINOFF: But you can imagine now Jen and Gary are really stuck. Because they’ve asked the data a question: “Is censorship about taking criticism off of the internet?” Data says, “Nope.” And now they need to ask another question. They need a new hypothesis.

GARY KING: And we tried a bunch of them. And we finally came upon one that made everything clarify beautifully.

ANNIE MINOFF: They observe a trend. Something to explain why some posts get stuck in the black box, and some don’t.

ELAH FEDER: And now, it’s clear what they have to do. They have to put this beautiful, clarifying hypothesis to the test. They have to feed posts into the black box.

ANNIE MINOFF: Publish hundreds of fake social media posts to the Chinese internet, and see which disappear. Coming up, Gary and Jen discover the words that will get you censored on the Chinese internet.

ANNIE MINOFF: Those are the magic words right there.

GARY KING: Those are the magic words.

ELAH FEDER: And a twist in the tale of the dueling watch lovers: Smiling official Yang Dacai versus Weibo vigilante Boss Hua.

********

ANNIE MINOFF: So at this point in our story, our Harvard social scientists, Gary and Jen, they’ve stumbled onto this black box.

ELAH FEDER: The black box of Chinese social media censorship.

ANNIE MINOFF: And they’ve got a hypothesis about what exactly is disappearing into this black box. Gary says this hypothesis

GARY KING:...made everything clarify beautifully.

ANNIE MINOFF: So to test it, Gary, Jen, and their colleague Margaret Roberts, they design an experiment. And it works like this. They will create two-hundred fake accounts on a hundred social media sites all over China. And then, when something controversial happens...

ELAH FEDER: Like, say some party official gets caught smiling at the site of a gruesome traffic accident…

ANNIE MINOFF: Something like that. They are gonna post about this controversy all over Chinese social media. On messageboards, on Weibo, and then they’ll see what those hundred thousand censors take down.

ELAH FEDER: And this is a lot of work as you’d imagine. Writing social media posts, creating fake accounts… Guess who’s gonna do it?

ANNIE MINOFF: Undergrads!

MINETTE YU: So my name is Minette Yu. I was a research assistant for the big research project on Chinese government censorship.

ELAH FEDER: Minette was one of about ten researchers that Gary and Jen recruited to write posts. She grew up in China, but moved to LA in the 9th grade.

MINETTE YU: I did browse Chinese social media here and there, use it occasionally to connect with friends from childhood...

ELAH FEDER: Mostly though, Minette says, she was a lurker. She was checking out what other people posted, but not actually posting herself.

ANNIE MINOFF: But that changes in the Spring of 2013 in a big way. Because Gary and Jen have Minette creating…

MINETTE YU: ...Fake profiles on forums, websites, blogs, etc.

ANNIE MINOFF: And when a controversy starts trending? Minette is on it, composing posts about it under all of these different aliases.

ELAH FEDER: Sometimes, she’s writing about a specific person, like artist-activist Ai Weiwei.

ANNIE MINOFF: Other times, she’s writing about policy. Like the time the government decides to fine drivers for running yellow lights. Which one Weibo user points out, basically invalidates the concept of a yellow light.

MINETTE YU: It was kind of like massaging other people’s messages into my own writing. And then just you know, make it more exaggerated or, play up some of the points, or play down...

ANNIE MINOFF: So Gary and Jen’s research assistants, they’re writing about people, they’re writing about policy, and they are writing about protest: People taking to the streets, organizing, doing something.

ELAH FEDER: Like in April, the first month of this experiment? The team sees a bunch of posts on social media about Panxu. This is a village in Eastern China.

JENNIFER PAN: A block of farmland had been requisitioned by the municipal government, supposedly to build a golf course.

ELAH FEDER: So some of these villagers were being kicked off their collective farm to make room for a golf course. And they were pissed! They started protesting.

JENNIFER PAN: The police arrived…

ELAH FEDER: Some of the villagers were arrested.

JENNIFER PAN: And the villagers I think had surrounded the municipal government? So when the police arrived, they kind of liberated the officials and tried to negotiate with the villagers...

ANNIE MINOFF: It’s a total mess. And this mess spills out onto social media.

ELAH FEDER: So the Harvard team has to move fast. They pump out a hundred posts about the protests. A few days later, they go back. See if their posts are still there.

ANNIE MINOFF: Now, at the same time that Gary and Jen’s research assistants, people like Minette, they’re pushing China’s censors, seeing what they’ll put up with, essentially. Chinese internet users are kind of doing the same thing.

ELAH FEDER: In fact, you could say that they’ve been running this exact experiment for years.

ANNIE MINOFF: In 2010 and 2011, you have to remember, social media is changing so fast. The Arab Spring’s happening. And a lot of it is coordinated online.

ELAH FEDER: Microblogging is suddenly a thing...

ANNIE MINOFF: And no one knows quite what to expect. So Chinese social media users are just figuring it out, day by day. How much can they get away with?

ELAH FEDER: According to Josh Chin—that’s the Wall Street Journal reporter—the real breakthrough moment happens in July 2011. With another accident.

NEWS REPORTER: A deadly crash of a high speed train in China dents public confidence and raises concerns about possible corruption...

JOSH CHIN: There was this high speed train crash in the city of Wenzhou, where it looked like the government had been— maybe tried to cover it up? And there was just this onslaught of public commentary, mostly on Weibo, you know internet users just heaping abuse and doubt on the government over its handling of this.

ELAH FEDER: And the censors just couldn’t keep up! So a lot of these posts are staying online. And for Weibo users, it’s like overnight, dissent had been normalized.

JOSH CHIN: So then it became a kind of a pastime after this. And you did have internet users going after officials who they thought might be corrupt. And it became a bit of a game almost, almost a form of entertainment.

ANNIE MINOFF: Some of the people who were taking shots at the government were so-called Big Vs. The V’s for verified account. So basically, these are the important people on Weibo. The internet celebs, people with millions of followers.

ELAH FEDER: So you’ve got Boss Hua, he’s posting about all these suspicious watches from his verified account...

ANNIE MINOFF: But the real heavy-hitters in terms of audience anyway are guys like Charles Xue. Xue’s a Chinese-American venture capitalist. He’s liberal-leaning. He’s got about twelve million followers on Weibo. And he’s posting about how rival political parties should have a role in government.

ELAH FEDER: One post he shares about tainted food? It gets re-shared seventeen thousand times.

ANNIE MINOFF: Xue has one of the biggest megaphones in China, he’s criticizing the government, and he seems to be getting away with it.

ELAH FEDER: It’s like what do you have to do to get a censor’s attention?

ANNIE MINOFF: By July 2013, Gary and Jen are in a position to answer exactly that question. By this point, their team’s submitted twelve hundred posts to a hundred different Chinese social media platforms all over China. Research assistants like Minette have checked back, they’ve recorded which of those posts got taken down.

ELAH FEDER: And the results are clear. Here’s Gary:

GARY KING: You can criticize the leaders and their policies and the state as much as you want. But if you say, and let’s go protest, that will be censored.

ANNIE MINOFF: Those are the magic words right there.

GARY KING: Those are the magic words.

ANNIE MINOFF: Protest. Those moments when people in China are out on the streets, organizing, taking action…

ELAH FEDER: Like those villagers in Panxu…

ANNIE MINOFF: Those posts that talked about protest were censored about thirty percent more than posts that didn’t.

ELAH FEDER: According to Gary and Jen, social media censorship in China, it’s not about stifling political speech. It’s about stifling political action.

ANNIE MINOFF: I want to read just one post that you included in your study. And this, this is not one that one of your students wrote. This is an actual post from someone posting on Chinese social media. And this person wrote: “Don’t talk anymore about anti-corruption. Don’t even talk about China’s current democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Those things were completely destroyed over twenty years ago under the treads of tanks. Our so-called court of law is merely for show. The party providing oversight on the party is an absolute joke. Wake up Chinese citizens.” That is allowed to remain on the Chinese internet.

GARY KING: Absolutely, that’s right.

ANNIE MINOFF: Wow. It’s kind of a profound insight that the Chinese government has made here though. Essentially they’re saying actions not words are what matters.

GARY KING: I think— I think that’s right. That’s right. Sticks and stones, right? It’s really, it’s really that.

ANNIE MINOFF: According to Gary and Jen, this is the line the Chinese government has drawn on social media. Criticism, ok. Action, not ok. Argue all you want, in your strongest, most vitriolic language. Just don’t try to do anything. And you could call it the “sticks and stones” rule.

ELAH FEDER: And according to this sticks and stones rule, Boss Hua, our Weibo vigilante should be golden. He’s not posting about protests, he’s just observing.

ANNIE MINOFF: “Hey, this smiling official has a lot of nice watches!”

ELAH FEDER: And it’s true. Boss Hua says his posts about the smiling official’s watchers were not generally censored. Though, one reason for that might be that sometimes he did the censoring himself.

ANNIE MINOFF: Boss Hua says a lot of the time, he’d go back a day later and delete his own posts.

ELAH FEDER: He figured, one way to stay on the censors’ good side was to basically do their jobs for them.

ANNIE MINOFF: Still, his Weibo account wasn’t suspended. His posts got around. In fact, it kinda seemed like the authorities were taking note and agreeing that the smiling official was a problem.

ELAH FEDER: In August, 2013, almost a year to the day after Boss Hua’s watch-spotting spree? The smiling official appears in a Chinese courtroom, surrounded by press photographers.

<<Clicking cameras>>

ELAH FEDER: In the CCTV footage, Yang Dacai sits between two police officers. He’s wearing a bright orange prison vest. And a judge reads him the charges. That he took bribes and has undeclared bank savings.

CCTV AUDIO: Judge speaks <<Chinese language>>, Yang Dacai speaks <<Chinese language>>…

CCTV REPORTER: He has no objection to these charges.

ELAH FEDER: A week later, the smiling official is sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

ANNIE MINOFF: And I asked Josh Chin, the Wall Street Journal reporter, like this can’t possibly be a good press day for the government right? And he said, actually, it kind of was. Because halfway through 2013, the party’s in the middle of this huge anti-corruption campaign.

JOSH CHIN: They know that they have a problem with this and it's really hurting the party's image to have all these these guys running around with luxury watches or driving around in Mercedes and whatnot. So it's good! When Yang Dacai goes down it looks good for the party, and it's you know, all around sort of a feel good story.

ANNIE MINOFF: The watch-spotter Boss Hua? Definitely comes out ahead. In 2013, he’s being feted by Sina, the company that owns Sina Weibo, at this fancy awards ceremony in Beijing.

<<Award ceremony sounds...Chinese language>>

ELAH FEDER: The government gets some good press. Gets to look like it’s getting rid of the bad apples. And Weibo users, they get to feel like their voices matter. So like Josh says, everyone’s smiling. Including the one guy who really shouldn’t be. Smiling official Yang Dacai.

JOSH CHIN: During his sentencing there was— there was sort of CCTV footage of him listening to a sentencing and he’s there and he’s kind of smirking again.

ANNIE MINOFF: But this is where our story takes a profoundly weird turn.

JOSH CHIN: So the really kind of, the strange twist on the whole Yang Dacai story is that, you know, he goes to trial. He gets convicted. Everything seems great. And then, you know, the next month one of the heroes in this story is suddenly taken away by police for interrogation.

ELAH FEDER: So. It’s 12 days after the smiling official’s sentencing, and Boss Hua is in Beijing.

ANNIE MINOFF: He’s actually there to pick up a real-estate award. For some company that he’s just joined.

ELAH FEDER: Remember, Boss Hua’s got this side gig as a luxury hotel reviewer. So naturally, he’s staying at one of the city’s poshest hotels. A Shangri-La.

ANNIE MINOFF: The hotel’s inside Beijing’s tallest skyscraper. It’s actually sixty-four floors before you even get to the lobby. And then, everywhere you look, it’s these floor-to-ceiling windows and these crazy master-of-the-universe views.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): I don’t usually get up early but I did that day. I was at the elevator on the sixty-fourth floor. And as soon as I stepped out, I heard someone call my name. My full name. Usually people don’t do that. They usually they just call me “Mr. Wu” or something like that.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): I thought those two men were event staff. So I nodded, and they just charged at me. They didn’t say who they were, didn’t produce a badge or anything. They put handcuffs on me and pushed my head down. It was like the scene you see in Chinese movies, when criminals are taken away by police. They grab your hair and they push your head down. But this was a luxury hotel, so there were a lot of foreigners around. Everyone was shocked because no one knew what was happening. And I’m also this pretty well-known reviewer in the hotel industry, so the people at the hotel, they didn’t know what was going on. And everyone was nervous.

ANNIE MINOFF: There’s this kind of ridiculous keystone cops moment. After they make this big show of cuffing Boss Hua in the lobby, the police remember they haven’t actually searched his room. So they put him back in the elevator. And everyone goes back up to his room so that they can confiscate his stuff.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): The hotel staff thought this was all very disgraceful, so they told us to use the freight elevator instead of the guest one to go downstairs. We went down, and I got escorted into the police car.

ELAH FEDER: The news hits Weibo, and the internet flips out. Partly, it’s the whiplash.

ANNIE MINOFF: Just weeks ago, CCTV had been running stories about how…

CCTV REPORTER: Internet surveillance has given the public an increasingly active role in monitoring the authorities…

ANNIE MINOFF: And now? One of the internet’s most beloved corruption-busters is in cuffs.

ELAH FEDER: Even Boss Hua isn’t totally sure how he got here.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): At first, they didn’t say at all why they took me. My first instinct was “oh was it because of Yang Dacai?”

ELAH FEDER: Was it because of the smiling official?

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): They just gave me this mysterious smile and said, guess.

ELAH FEDER: Boss Hua says he spent twenty-four hours in police custody. Most of it being interrogated in the police station basement. He says the cops never asked about the smiling official’s watches. Instead, they accused him of blackmailing a shady luxury goods company.

ANNIE MINOFF: Which he denies. It’s kind of messy. But what we can say, is what happened to Boss Hua seems to fit a pattern. At the exact same time that the official’s being sentenced—at the same time that the state looks like it’s cleaning up its act—social media celebrities, and journalists, and activists are being detained.

ELAH FEDER: Beijing calls it a campaign against online “rumor-mongering.” Weibo users see a crackdown on dissent.

ANNIE MINOFF: And Big Vs, those important people on Weibo, with millions of followers? They’re among the hardest hit. So Charles Xue, the Big V who blogged about rule of law? He’s arrested.

ELAH FEDER: Officially, the charge is soliciting prostitutes. But pretty soon Xue’s on state TV, baggy-eyed, in a prison vest, confessing that he posted quote “irresponsibly” on Weibo.

ANNIE MINOFF: Boss Hua did not have the million plus followers that Xue had. But he might’ve been influential enough to get caught in the net.

ANNIE MINOFF: Wall Street Journal reporter, Josh Chin:

JOSH CHIN: I mean if you talked to Chinese media scholars and Internet watchers, you know what they were telling me was that Boss Hua had just become too big a figure. Not that he had any interest in organizing anything or leading anything, but that he was just— he was becoming a rival source of authority. Which is something the communist party just can’t brook. I think that’s probably the dynamic that was at play. And they thought he was getting a little too big for his britches and they decided to, to have a talk with him.

ELAH FEDER: If you go to Boss Hua’s Weibo today, you won’t find a trace of his watch-spotting. The posts are all gone. He’s deleted them.

ANNIE MINOFF: Boss Hua followed the sticks-and-stones rule. He posted about watches, not protests. And in the end it didn’t matter. But I don’t take that to mean Gary and Jen were wrong. The whole reason their work is powerful is it does not rely on anecdotal evidence. It relies on lots and lots of data. And that’s not to say that those eleven million posts are the entire story of censorship.

ELAH FEDER: Right. Boss Hua’s surprise in the hotel lobby, it happened offline. That doesn’t get picked up in social media data.

ANNIE MINOFF: But what all those posts can do is give you an aerial view of censorship as a system. This is the ten thousand foot view. And from ten thousand feet, you can see order in this chaos.

ELAH FEDER: But if you’re one of those people on the ground, like Boss Hua? Chances are, it just feels like chaos.

ANNIE MINOFF: Actually, at one point in our interview, Boss Hua asked this question:

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): Have you seen Game of Thrones? Hidden within Game of Thrones are a lot of issues with China’s internet censorship.

ELAH FEDER: Ok so hear him out…

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): First, there’s the game of the various government departments. Different departments are battling it out for the right to manage the internet. And secondly, among the people using the internet, two different camps emerge. Some maybe really do support the government. Some maybe just want to get something out of siding with the government.

ANNIE MINOFF: In other words, it is a chaotic, dark, Game of Thrones world out there. A lot of shady characters, competing interests…

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): There’s scheming. There are a lot of desires, and also, a lot of things that are deprived of basic human decency.

ANNIE MINOFF: And if you’re a person living in this chaotic, Game of Thrones world, trying to predict how you fit into these convoluted plotlines, what’s gonna happen to you? You just can’t do it. You’re Robb Stark, thinking you’ve just made this great alliance with House Frey. And you walk into what you think is gonna be this celebratory banquet….aaaaaand it’s the red wedding! Total. Slaughter.

ELAH FEDER: Or you’re Boss Hua. Stepping into the lobby of a five-star hotel, thinking you’re gonna pick up an award. And instead you’re handcuffed, and shoved in the freight elevator.

ANNIE MINOFF: And this might be the Chinese government’s greatest asset in the end. Uncertainty. Because from ten thousand feet up, you can see order in this chaos. But on the ground? You can never be sure if what’s statistically significant across millions of posts will be significant for you.

ANNIE MINOFF: In retrospect, it seems possible that Gary and Jen caught Chinese social media—or Weibo, anyway—at a transitional moment. They ran their experiment in the Spring of 2013. At which point, Josh Chin, the Wall Street Journal reporter, he thinks they were basically on the money.

JOSH CHIN: At the time, I think there was this very clear line, between sort of criticizing the government, and making calls for political action. But what’s happened recently under Xi Jinping is that the line has shifted so much so quickly, that, you know, people are no longer really trying to skirt the line as much as they used to. Like people are just so scared that it’s gonna— that it’s going to keep moving and they’re going to get caught on the wrong side, and now they don’t even really bother tiptoeing close to it anymore.

ANNIE MINOFF: These days, Boss Hua plays it safe. His instagram feed is all pretty pictures of hotels and food.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): He says he’s leaving Weibo this month.

ANNIE MINOFF: Oh so you’re not going to be on Weibo by the time we air it.

BOSS HUA: <<Chinese language>>

ISABELLE (TRANSLATING BOSS HUA): He said he will log in but he won’t post anything new.

ANNIE MINOFF: The man who brought down the smiling official is now, officially, a Weibo lurker.

**************

ANNIE MINOFF: Undiscovered is reported and produced by me, Annie Minoff.

ELAH FEDER: And me, Elah Feder. Our editor is Christopher Intagliata. Thanks also to Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.

ANNIE MINOFF: Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. I am Robot and Proud wrote our theme. Special shoutout this week to our story consultant, Ari Daniel, to Isabelle for translations and voicing, and to the third member of that Harvard team, Gary and Jen’s colleague Margaret Roberts for her assistance.

ELAH FEDER: Gary, Jen, and Margaret actually have a new study coming out. They’re looking at the stuff the Chinese government secretly posts to the internet. Not what they take down. Super interesting stuff. You can check that out at undiscovered podcast dot O-R-G.

ANNIE MINOFF: And thanks to our launch partner, the John Templeton Foundation.

ELAH FEDER: See you next week.

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