“I know there’s a prison bunk somewhere in China with my name on it. It’s just a question of when I have to sleep in it. It’s entirely conceivable that one day they could track me down and knock on my door and drag me away.
“But I don’t live in terror of that happening. There are still a lot of very important things that I want to achieve.”
Truth-teller Li Yin, who lives in an unknown location in Italy, doesn’t seem to have changed much since we first heard about him.
The “artist-turned-citizen journalist” runs a popular Twitter-X account under the awkward but memorable nom de plume “Teacher Li is not your teacher.” His reporting became popular during the white paper protests in China in 2022. The Chinese government was in full censorship mode, but rebels in China “still still found ways to send Li footage, photos and news of events in their area, bypassing the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s strict censorship of social media” (“Exiled citizen journalist Li Ying is a ‘top priority’ for Beijing,” Radio Free Asia, January 29, 2025).
He recently answered questions for RFA. Some of what he said:
How he can trust his contacts in China
“I haven’t really had anyone mess me around [with disinformation]. Sometimes they even take the initiative to confirm the report for me. If they see some content, they will often ask their friends if it’s true, because they’re local to the area, and they might have friends who were there. Only then will they send it to me.
“Back then I was posting about 300 times in the course of a day. I trusted them, and they trusted me.
“I was constantly getting excited and tearful over the content they were sending me. My heart rate got so high I felt like I would die.”
What 2024 was like
“I don’t think online censorship in China has ever gotten to the point before where they have gone after people who follow [the social media account of] a specific individual. It’s the first I’ve heard of it.
“They started going after me in any way they could at the start of this year, including targeting my parents, my friends, anyone who knew me.
“They summoned the whole lot of them and questioned them about me.
“Online, a lot of people were getting direct messages [on social media] criticizing me. I myself was being targeted with about 100 messages an hour every day and…denounced as a traitor to the Chinese people.
“All of these attacks were going on while my account was growing the whole time, reaching 1.8 million followers. It was the fourth most-visited account on X with around 6.2 billion visits recorded that year.”
What Li still wants to achieve
“I want to grow the account even more. I want to live my best life. I want more and more Chinese people to wake up to the fact that China can change.
“If an ordinary guy like me can get the Chinese Communist Party this worried, then there are plenty of people with more learning and talent than me who could do even better.”
No, you’re not ordinary.
