Endless Thread - Rice Bunny

Episode Date: May 17, 2018

How Chinese #MeToo activists are keeping the movement alive, despite government censorship.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. When an idea goes international, sometimes parts of that idea are tricky to translate. This is especially common when it comes to names,

like the name of something in the original country gets phonetically translated instead of actually translated. So, Ben. Yes. You recently told me your name from your Chinese language class. I did. What is it? Zhang Pinsen, which it's been a while since I took Mandarin, and I have no idea what that actually means or I can't really remember, but my instructor gave it to me because Zhang Pinson sounds a little bit like Ben Johnson, right? Sure.

And I also know somebody else when he came to the states from Taiwan, he had the name Jingza. And so when he came here, he took the name Jin. because even though it doesn't mean the same thing as Jingza, they sound kind of similar. Yeah, and this idea is how we get the popular Chinese social media hashtag, rice bunny. Because when you translate the words rice and bunny into Chinese, with the help of Google translate, for instance, you apparently get... Me. Putsu.

Which can be shortened to me and two, as in the Me Too movement. Today we learned that in China, the Me Too movement against sexual harassment and assaults. assault is represented on social media by the words for rice and bunny, or the emoji of a rabbit and a rice bowl. And this is interesting because this phonetic translation came about as a result of Me Too activists and supporters in China who are trying to constantly keep the movement alive despite government censorship. Rice Bunny is just part of a crazy story that we found on Reddit.

It involves an old case of sexual assault at a prestigious Chinese university, a woman's effort to bring that case to light, intimidation, family pressure and the use of cryptocurrency to keep this story alive despite a massive machine built to scrub the internet of anything controversial in China. Amory, time for us to give this episode a name, maybe one that doesn't make sense, except when translated phonetically into Chinese. Are you ready? Yep.

Rice Bunny. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are listening to Endless Thread, a show featuring stories from the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my producer and co-host Amory Sieverts, and we are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Okay, so just in case you didn't know this already, cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Dogecoin is a very popular topic on Reddit. Lots of different crypto communities, lots of debate and hand-wringing, mostly about the roller coaster ride of volatility and value of decentralized, unregulated, definitely not FDIT, insured currencies that seem designed for the future but are not quite yet working in the present. Right. But this episode isn't about cryptocurrencies and their monetary value. This is about

other kinds of value, like using some of these cutting-edge technologies to protect people, or at least to protect their stories. And this story really starts way before Reddit, let alone Bitcoin. It starts 20 years ago in 1998 at a university in China. And for this particular case where we're talking about Peking University, one of the top universities in China. Introduction time. This is Echo Huang. I'm a reporter for courts. I'm based in Hong Kong. And I cover China's technology and social media. It's easier to report on censorship and other politically sticky issues in China from Hong Kong because the rules are more open there when it comes to the reporting you can do. Also, the interneting you can do.

I first heard about the story actually through my WeChat, a popular chatting social media in China. Quick refresher on WeChat. It's a social media app made by Chinese tech giant Tencent. You can transfer money to people like you would with Venmo. You can order meals like Grubhub. You can buy movie tickets and shop online. Most importantly, maybe, it's a communication tool for people to talk to first. friends. It's like a massive combination platter of a bunch of different apps here in the U.S.

So stuff goes viral big time on WeChat because WeChat reportedly has a billion monthly users. So I saw a lot of people posting an open letter from a girl who claimed to be from the Peking University. And she detailed about how her petition to the school for a case that happened like two decades ago was censored. she encountered a bit of difficulties and harassment during her effort to ask the school for more transparency. The student who is trying to get information is a current senior at Peking University. Her name is Yue Xin, and she heard about this old case at the university, a story about another student. 20 years ago, in 1998, a sophomore at Peking University named Gao Yan committed suicide.

And before she killed herself, she told a friend that she had been harassed and assaulted by, a literature professor at the school. But according to her and her friend, Peking University's response was to sweep it under the rug. The professor got a slap on the wrist, nothing more. We know all of this because the Me Too movement in China has really gained steam this year. Enough steam that the Me Too hashtag has been blocked online there,

which is how we got that whole rice bunny hashtag replacement thing. How has the Me Too Movement taken hold in China in comparison to your understanding of of how it's taken hold in the U.S. Okay, for my understanding, a lot of Me Too movement happen in the U.S. are coming from, like, the entertainment industry, and it spreads out all through the whole society. In China, most of the people who stand out to detail

about their sexual harassment experience are young female students at the university. Since Gao Yan killed herself when she was a student at this university, this particular incident from 1998 has become part of the movement. Gao's friend, inspired by Me Too in the U.S., posted the whole story to social media and called for the investigation to be reopened. She named the professor Shenyang, whose most recent post was at another school, Nanjing University, as the dean of the literature department.

And this friend described the whole thing in great detail, which made it new. And that's part of how this story caught fire. Because after those details were revealed, a bunch of current students, including this senior at Peking University, U.A. Shin, filed a petition asking for more information about the school's response to the 1998 case.

But the school's response was basically, we already dealt with this. Not only that, but the original report from the school, said the professor dated this woman out of concern for her mental health. So the stories didn't line up. And then something odd happens. As a result, the school sent over teachers to, you know, harass this student who made the petition instead of reviewing more details.

You said that one school counselor approached, her, like, came to knock on her dormitory on the late night of April 22nd. And the counselor asked a question about, like, her petition. and why would she do that? The counselor also brought along with her mother. Imagine a school counselor brings your mom to your dorm room unannounced late at night to convince you to stop asking questions about a sexual assault case. Yeah, and this happens at like one in the morning or something. It starts with a question, have you been talking to the media?

It gets more intense from there. UA's school counselor starts telling her she has to delete everything she has written about this case online. And if she doesn't, they're afraid she won't be able to graduate. She says her mom is super worried and freaked out. At one point, her mom even says that she's going to kill herself if UA doesn't comply. In the following days, other professors start randomly coming up to UA and talking to her about this, asking her why she is making such a big deal out of it. There's even a sort of official government response.

It comes through state-run media. So I assume you're talking about People's Daily. They wrote a commentary about how the school should deal with a student. To me, that's sort of like a signal of, I would say, like the authorities behind the newspaper, trying to tell the school just to calm the student down and don't make this result in any collective movements. That's my impression.

So now UA's in really deep, because the push she's leading for transparency around this old case of sexual assault hasn't just drawn the pressure of her, University and her family. It's drawn the attention of the government. Back in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully,

make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. All right, so we have a 20-year-old case of alleged harassment and assault that ended in the suicide of a student at Peking University that has been swept up into the Me Too movement by a current student at the university who's calling on social media for transparency. That student, U.A. Shin, says she's been intimidated by school officials. Her family is under pressure to shut her up.

Her mom even threatens to commit suicide over this, which is crazy. So U.A. is under a lot of pressure. We're learning about this story from a courts reporter named Echo Huang, who's been following all of this. But she's far from the only one. My name is Brian. My reddish handle is Zero Wolf 547, and I'm from Sydney, Australia. Brian lives in Australia, but he emigrated there from China. And he would spend summer break at Peking University because a lot of his friends went there. So during summer breaks from his own college time, he'd head to Pecking You and hang with friends, go to lectures and events.

Brian first saw this story on social media, just like Echo. The WeChat network of my friends, they were posting about something that kind of blew up on the Pecking University's social media boards. But Brian read something on WeChat that made this story even a little more strange. The university administrators supposedly lied to UA's mom about what was. going on. According to the student herself, they basically told her mother that she was missing. They couldn't contact her. And that was why they needed her presence there. Yet another layer of messed up. The school allegedly told UA's mom that she was missing in order to get her mom to UA's room to ratchet up the pressure. Brian says this whole thing made him

angry when he found out about it. Also frustrated. It's just, we've been through this. so many times. There's news of somebody doing something that's damaging to the reputation of a prestigious institution or just anything that might snowball into a bigger student movement. Think a big student movement like the one that hit Tiananmen Square in 1989 and exploded into protests and violence. Students at Pecking University played a role in those protests, which called for democratic reforms and really threatened the government. And regardless of whether it's true regardless of whether something illegal or crime has been committed, that it's always just put down, regardless of what it actually is about,

even something as non-political as sexual assault, which you'd think they would let you express some sort of emotion about, but it's still considered a no-go area. How do you know a topic is considered a no-go in the eyes of the Communist Party? Watch it disappear from view. Yeah. If you think things that go viral in the U.S. or meteoric, you should see how quickly these things blow up in China

and are then effectively erased from the Internet. One thing ECHO told us about reporting on this stuff. You have to be fast. You have to beat the censorship. Because a lot of times when this mass public, hot topic happened in China, authorities would be very quick to take them down. For instance, people were posting screenings. of some of the messages about the original case of assault from 1998 and UA's posts about the treatment she got after asking questions.

Because screenshots aren't machine readable, so they're harder to find with computer-aided search. Harder, but not impossible. So a lot of the conversation about this particular story did get wiped from the Internet pretty quickly. And it could have ended there, but it didn't. No, it didn't. Because some people looked at the original case and UA's effort to bring it to light and decided there might be a way to really undermine the censorship machine in China. If you can't beat them on one network, put the information on another network.

So remember at the beginning of the episode when we talked about cryptocurrency and how it was involved in this? As in Bitcoin, sometimes called digital gold, an online currency that may or may not be the future of financial transactions, well, there's another digital currency called Ethereum. And Ethereum, just like Bitcoin, uses something called the blockchain. And some of you a story will now apparently live for eternity on the blockchain. What you might ask is the blockchain again? Here we go. Here we go indeed. I hear you're a dropout. Yes. Tell me more. A lot of cryptocurrency and blockchain, this new technology isn't even taught at schools. It's so it's so nascent. And so even without going to school, you can become an expert in it if you

spend the time and are willing to learn. This is Reddeter, Cryptotrader 2125, which is how he would like us to identify him in this episode. He is our expert. He dropped out of a well-known Ivy League school to make money in the cryptocurrency space, but he is here with us today to explain the blockchain. Blockchain really emerged with Bitcoin in 2009, and Bitcoin was a way of transferring wealth outside of the government or any centralized institutions, whether it be banks or corporate entities and transferring money peer to peer.

And it was revolutionary because it was very difficult or if not impossible to do that before. And the technology underlying that is blockchain, the shared database that's maintained by all the people that are using the network. And it really gives people a stake in the network itself. It's as if everyone were talking together and someone said, I'm going to take this money and I'm going to move it from here to over here. Does everyone agree? And everyone says,

I agree. You are moving it. And then it gets moved. Right. So moving the money requires this kind of consensus, this 51% agreement among the people that are using the network itself. That's what makes it censorship resistant. Because the people using it really control how it's used and how the network works and how money is exchanged. Because the network of blockchain is controlled.

than this really decentralized way, it's hard to censor information that gets attached to that network. So back to the social media posts about the Me Too movement in China. They took their message, which I believe was a letter, and they created a transaction

on the Ethereum blockchain. So one person sent money, or sent, I think it was no money at all, just an empty transaction, from one person to another. But there's a space in that transactional data for a message. for text. And in that text, they put their letter. And now, because this transaction and all the

data associated with it is forever embedded into the Ethereum blockchain, which is stored on thousands, if not tens, and hundreds of thousands of computers all over the world in a permanent way, their message is forever, and it can never be erased. And people could access it all over the world without any fear of censorship or being removed. Only thing is, didn't the censorses, still win here? Who is going to take the time to go to the blockchain, to read up on UA's efforts to ask Picking University for more transparency about a sexual assault case that happened 20 years ago? No, I think you have a very fair point. And a lot of people in the blockchain industry and community recognize this, this idea that it's still very inaccessible for most people.

But I think to be fair, we have to recognize that this is emerging technology. It's very new. When the internet first emerged, it was also very inaccessible. Only relatively few people could use the internet to exchange information from computer to computer, etc., to build these networks. And as this technology evolves over the next three, five, ten years, there's going to be an effort to make it much more accessible to the mainstream consumer and to everyday people. Essentially, everything in good time. This is why, says our buddy crypto trader, a ton of startups and even larger institutions, are experimenting with the blockchain for things as fundamental as

voting in elections. People can have more trust in voting that's done in a database that's shared and maintained by the people of the country and not by the government itself. So there's arguably some true potential here, not just for currency,

but for protecting information with a system of radical transparency, which brings us back to what rice bunny activists are advocating for. radical transparency, truth and reconciliation regarding past alleged crimes so that healing can happen. Speaking of which, we should get back to what's going on with UA. There have been some reports that she went home for a while but is now back at school. Do you have any idea of what U.A. Shin is up to now?

I have been trying to contacting her, but I just can't find her. So I don't really know what's happening, what's exactly happening to her right now. But I guess she's just trying to graduate, I guess. Do you think she'll be okay? I mean, is there any chance that something truly terrible will happen to her? Like she'll be imprisoned or something like that? I don't think things would go that extreme, but I'm sure she has to do with her family.

Because as I mentioned, like her family was really worried about her. That's from the family part. For the rest, I really, I don't want to speculate, but I don't think going to prison would be a likely situation. Is there anything else that this particular case, as part of the larger Me Too movement in China and larger questions about censorship, makes you think about? I really want to know what's the bottom lie of China's censorship.

Like if they are censoring, just advocating for one's right of not being harmed by the others, I just really want to know how far we China's. kind of tech it to in terms of freedom of speech and a development of civil society. Now that all this has happened, the professor Shenyang has been fired from Nanjing University. So some change did come from all of this, even if his former employer, Peking University, still hasn't come clean about what actually happened and how the school responded in 1998. And that fact gets it something bigger that people like UA and other Me Too activists are up against

in China. Brian, that Chinese Redditor living in Australia, thinks about this too, this tension between the lofty ideals of higher education and decades of authoritarian rule. There's a statue on campus called Democracy and Science. It was created a long time ago, but I think it symbolizes the kind of ideals that the university would like to stand for, and its faculty would like to promote. However, the realistic situation is obviously a bit different and they have to face the actual reality of being in a kind of country and a kind of authoritarian rule like this. Emory, I hate to say this, but I don't hold out a ton of hope for the internet or Bitcoin or

Ethereum or the blockchain totally democratizing China and making space for free speech anytime soon. But I will say that I think using some of this technology to hold the institutions and people accountable for bad behavior does give me hope generally as long as we don't have one oppressive government regime controlling all of the computers in the world anytime soon. Yeah, well, in the spirit of that hope, we're going to close with U.A. Shin's own words. Translated excerpts from the post she made on social media last month that went viral. UA writes, Over the past few days, I've been woken at 4 a.m. by dreams in which friends have come under

pressure because of their shared articles, signed petitions, blockchain inscriptions, or big character posters. This anxiety is because I've brought trouble on so many friends. I'm anxious not only for my friends, but also for my family, because I know only too well how anxious they are for me. If anything happens to me, they really might suffer physical and emotional collapse. On top of the anxiety, I feel frustration. I can't let the next Gao Yan be compelled to suffer in silence, even at the end of her life. When participating in campus affairs, keep matters out in the open. Do not mince words. This is not to push certain students or teachers towards the heart of the struggle, but to promote a real solution on a systemic level. More and more students are coming

forward despite the pressure of potential interviews, not for self-promotion, but so their basic rights are not infringed upon, so that more students can participate in campus affairs by their own initiative and not be suppressed. We are all seeds. United and working in concert, inevitably we will break through and flower. Amory. Ben.

Long live rice bunny. Here, here. Long live rice bunny. Endless thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she says, WTF. Iris Adler is our executive producer

and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of Mildly interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus who whenever we go to record in the field with them, they remind us Nature is lit. Our web producer is Megan Kelly who looks at our attempts at writing web copy

and goes, Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit and whenever we try to have a serious meeting with him, he's all... I'm a toddler. Our theme music is by Squelcher. By the way, you can find U.A.S. Open Letter in full on our website WBUR.org.org slash endless threat.

Big thanks to WBUR education reporter and fellow Redditor Max Larkin, who tipped us off to this story. Also, WBUR Morning Edition producer Yasmin Ammer, who hooked us up with our blockchain expert. This week's episode, Art is called Pixel Bunny. It's from Reddit user QYZYZ. Don't know if that's a phonetic or literal translation of anything. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. if you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip

so we can tell it like we did today. Hit us up. This show is produced by Josh Swartz. Also my producer and co-host, Amory Severson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.