China Digital Times rescues posts from oblivion that have been censored by the Chinese Communist Party. Here are excerpts from a few that CDT recently archived.
Gathering dust
Censors deleted this post by WeChat blogger Báihuà Shìjiè (White Birch Version) “despite its rather mild tone and lack of overt opposition to the capital’s tight security environment.”
Say you bought a drone, never flew it illegally, and even obediently left it to gather dust in a cupboard [because of the existing flight ban], and were now required to remove it from the city—would you be understanding about this, or would you struggle to accept it?
On September 11, 2026, the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress passed the newly revised “Beijing Administrative Provisions on Unmanned Aircraft.” This single decree draws an unprecedented line in terms of low-altitude security in the capital: starting from November 15, 2026, drones “may not be flown, stored, brought in, or sold” within the Beijing administrative area. The essence of the new rules can be summed up as a “citywide ban on possession.”…
The logic behind this new rule is to move the security perimeter from the sky right down to the level of equipment possession. Removing drones on the ground and banning their storage across the entire city more thoroughly eliminates the security hazard.
Not indiscriminate
From an article by WeChat blogger Li Yucheng about a mass attacker’s targeting of women in Guanghou. As is standard when such assaults occur, the censors hurried to scrub all mention of it from the Internet.
What his motive was, I don’t know. He didn’t say, and nobody knows. But motive and outcome are two different things, and the outcome is there for all to see: in a crowded commercial district on Monday evening, he picked only women to attack, and then he chose to attack their faces.
The term “indiscriminate” is all over the internet tonight. But targeting a specific gender and a specific part of the body makes it far from indiscriminate. This is a conclusion that can only be reached after the investigation is complete, but it’s already all over the internet tonight….
Learning to keep quiet
From an essay “Eventually, We All Learned to Keep Quiet,” posted by WeChat blogger Xī Píng.
Events in the news remained perennially “under investigation,” punctuated by a satisfying full stop, and followed by a complete blank. People learned to appreciate this unique literary form: the article’s introduction told you what happened, the middle warned you not to over-interpret events, and the conclusion assured you that the whole thing was being properly investigated.
As for what the investigation uncovered, that was a topic for the next article.
Assuming there was a next article….
Asking too many questions makes you stick out from the crowd.
And so people began to self-censor in increasingly sophisticated ways. Before speaking a sentence, they would delete all the adjectives. Before writing a passage, they would delete all the opinions. Before venturing to express a viewpoint, they would delete themselves.
What remained was scrupulously cautious and hermetically sealed.
And naturally devoid of anything at all….
So if one day you discover the streets becoming quieter, your friends’ social media posts becoming tidier, and everyone reacting to a single event in the same way, with the same facial expression, please don’t rush to celebrate the fact that society is becoming more “civilized.”
It might just be that everyone has finally mastered the art of seeing it all, understanding it all, but saying nothing.
A truly vibrant society is never silent.
