The New Yorker Radio Hour - Clubhouse Opens a Window for Free Expression in China

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Clubhouse is an audio-only social-media platform offering chat rooms on any subject, allowing thousands of people to gather and listen to each other. Jiayang Fan, who often reports on China, tells David Remnick that the chance to talk in private and without a text trail has opened a window of free expression for Chinese users. (Recently, some questions have been raised about whether the app is as secure as its makers claim.) Suddenly, in chat rooms with names like “There is a concentration camp in Xinjiang?,” Chinese users are able to address politically taboo subjects out loud in large groups. A Clubhouse chat-room moderator explains to Fan that for Han Chinese, who are the beneficiaries of the government’s persecution of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities, the app offers a space for reckoning and protest comparable to America’s Black Lives Matter movement. The government has clamped down on Clubhouse, but tech-savvy young people are used to finding workarounds. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're going to start today in a place called Clubhouse. Clubhouse is a virtual space, an app that launched about a year ago, and it's a product of Silicon Valley. But it's found a particularly powerful niche in China. Jiang Fan, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has been spending a lot of time lately in Chinese language chat rooms in Clubhouse. Its biggest innovation is the fact that it is based around voice communication.

So you launch the app and it immediately shows you this list of rooms that you can join. And you go in there and you can hear actual people talking in real time in their own voice. The conversations often circle to pretty taboo subjects. and those topics are not discussed because people don't like to leave a trail. So hearing in real time Chinese youths discussing subjects that they have never been allowed to discuss in classrooms or even really in cafes, that's incredibly intriguing and keeps me on there for hours at a time. Clubhouse is where Diane came across a woman she's calling Didi. So if you open up your clubhouse app, what do you see? Okay.

I'm opening the app. So the first room that I see is ADHD co-working room. Work 45 minutes, chat 15. I don't know what that I say about me. Tech support, career advice, Q&A for tech workers. And then, yeah, some of the more interesting stuff. And occasional chat about Chinese law and politics. Yep, I'm on that one too.

I'll try to translate this. I'll read the Chinese title and I'll try to translate this. Listen to talk about, Shochu, Mianzhu Shariae, the Han-Suzhapis, too people, after listening to the room discussion on minority issues,

I feel like there are way too many dumbasses amongst the Han Chinese. Now, to be clear, both Jiang and Dedi themselves are Han Chinese, and that is the dominant ethnic group in China. Both have lived in the U.S.

many years. But the chat room, Didi is talking about concerns the rights of ethnic minorities, particularly the Uyghurs who have been subjected to extraordinary persecution by the government. And this is a very dangerous topic in China. So let me tell you about the first chat room I went into when I joined a clubhouse. This is actually where I met Didi. She's a moderator in this chat room. Can I use the Chinese thing for that room? I can use the Chinese thing? Of course. And then I'll translated to English, called Xinjiang There's a concentration camp in Xinjiang, question mark.

There are about 12 million Uyghurs who are mostly Muslim, and it's believed that a million of them are currently detained in concentration camps or what the Chinese state say are re-education camps. So I saw the title of the room It was like, okay, there is so many ways that this can go down. I think one thing that a lot of people don't realize is that in the country was such strict speech control

like China. Conversation about Uyghur camps are still happening, but mostly in private. So there's two types of conversations that people are roughly having about what is going on, either that people are trying to piece together the facts based on something in the red, they read on Twitter, something read on Weibo, heavily censored bits of information on

Weibo. And then another part where people would try to rationalize this atrocity that they seem to be witnessing by coming up with a narrative. Most likely, they would want to choose a narrative that would make them feel good. So I think the first 30 minutes of the conversation, that's what people were mostly doing. And what we quickly realized is that CloudHout as a platform has the opportunity to be more than that. This is a very fleeting window to have the possibility to have like thousands of people actually sit down and listen to Uyghurs who actually live through this. We're still separated from their loved ones.

And then that's when the moderators start to step in and be proactive in terms of saying that we might have the opportunity to actually listen to people who experience this. we want to amplify their voices. So if you are battling denial or if you're going through different faces of emotions, that's your own homework, but do your best to listen and do your best to be respectful. Is there an example or was there a moment

in your many, many hours of moderating that was particularly uncomfortable or that made a particularly deep impression on you? So one person came up, so basically after one, lady shared that shared her cousin's experience of being like

the hunger that she experienced a Chinese girl stepped up and said well can you give me a little bit more about like why did she got in like why was it her why wasn't everybody else and then I think I feel like the room just

took a deep collective breath in like how why did you say that why would you say that and yeah and then the weager lady took it like a champ, she said, like, I do not appreciate these questions because it made me feel like we are responsible for what the crimes that were experiencing, but I'll give you the reason. And then she offered her explanation. But what I noticed was the girl who asked the question, after she asked the question, she left the room. That moment when you said that there was this collective intake

of breath. And this is, you know, 5,000 people in a, in a single room listening to a voice. How did you feel as a moderator? Could you feel this temperature change in the room when there are these moments of conflict or of verbal denial? Yeah, I think start at the beginning of the room, there was a lot more denial. So most of the times, if you're Han Chinese, when you're watching a video of a we go talking about his or her experience, or her family's experience in a concentration camp, there's always an English voiceover.

And then that makes it so much easier to fall into denial because, oh, it's the Western media who they are trying to portray China into as some sort of like a political devil type of situation. So in Clubhouse, these people are speaking Mandarin. It sounds like that person sounds like your friend, your neighbor. You immediately recognize his northwestern accent because you went to college with somebody from that region.

It was so, like, the distance closed up so quickly. You can almost feel like a lot of people are immediately drawn in. That connection is built, like, at that moment. After some of the personal stories were shared, I think that was one of the reasons why this was such a phenomenal experience because it forced people into a long-overdue sense of empathy. It almost, like, dragged all 5,000 people

over the hill of denial that you wouldn't be able to climb by yourself. That's Dedi, a moderator in Clubhouse speaking with Jayang Fan. More in a moment. Jayang Fan has been reporting on the app called Clubhouse,

which, as of this moment, has been sort of partially banned in China. Now, Jiang, a bunch of young Chinese people talking openly about the government's persecution of the Uyghurs and the Chinese government has been packing Uyghurs into camps since 2017, that has got

got to sound to Xi Jinping, like his worst nightmare. Is the Chinese government doing anything to block Clubhouse? I think that everyone had been anticipating some kind of a crackdown. And in early February, it came from Beijing. Many people cited that they had trouble logging onto the app. and it was considered somewhat of a soft ban because only some people were experiencing it, and the way that the ban was being meted out was confusing. But nevertheless, people had significant trouble logging onto the app, and it's expected that the ban will only be extended in the coming days and weeks. But it seems to me that the Chinese government always gets better and better at control.

social media, that it's a matter of time that it'll be very, very difficult for residents of China to deal with Clubhouse. Am I wrong? Not at all. But there is a pattern you see where those who are interested in free expression. You see them also growing more cunning in the way that they deal with censors and how quick they are to seize these opportunities to speak. So after Clubhouse is banned, I first start notice, you know, people are sharing how to get on. So basically, like, do not ever log off from your Chinese phone. Because if you're logging from your phone, you wouldn't be able to get the two-factor authentication.

Oh, yes. Yeah. And then, like, do that. It's the five steps you have to go through. And then this is the VPN we recommend. But if it's too expensive for you, it's the expensive option. Yeah, it was, like, full-on, step-by-step Wiki-Hau tutorials of how to. to do it. I think this really speaks to the nature of like public discourse in China is that

it's a constant dance with censorship. Part of the game of self-expression is trying to find a gap to express through. And Clubhouse was definitely one of them. Zhang, as a reporter and as someone who is intensely interested in what's going on in China, how valuable is this to you? given the dearth of spaces where you can hear Chinese people talk honestly, candidly, about the most taboo of political and social subjects. Even having the brief window of a few days or weeks where you can hear these conversations, you know, that's the dream. I mean, you are really getting a sense of what people are thinking in the privacy of their hearts. Reckoning about your nation's original sin, try to figure out what that means to you as a person,

is something that, I mean, like, American audience would be pretty familiar with living here as a Chinese diaspora. I would almost like look at these conversations. that people are having during BLM, the United States versus... Black Lives Matter. Yeah. The Black Lives Matter movement last summer. As a sense of lawning, like, I wish we have something like that. You know, I wish we have this public space where you can talk about your doubts.

You can... You feel like, how do I be a good person as a Han Chinese, where such atrocities are being conducted in your name, in a sense? in your interest. Yes, maybe you're already a bad person by being complicit. And then you start to think hard about these issues and start to talk to people around you about these issues

and humble ourselves and start to learn about them and talk to people about them at Clubhouse as one of the public forums that allows this still. And maybe that's where people can start to build, you know, some sort of narrative of how, as a Han Chinese, how do you live? How do you behave? How do you help people?

You feel people coming up just, you know, guns blazing. I have shed every bit and bit and piece of self-censorship, and I will scream like Xi Jinping for five minutes until everybody gets uncomfortable. Everyone is very eager to get the mic. And in a room where everyone is, at least in the rooms that I have attended, where everyone seems to have waited at least, you know, seven hours to speak. Yeah, Wang was like, you have no idea how hot my phone is at this moment. Many people had battery issues.

Everyone was down to like 2% and was like, please let me speak before I go down to 1%. And I'm from New York. I'm a millennial. The person went off and I was like, there you go. I'm so sorry, yeah. Thank you so much, D.D., for spending even more time in front of the screen. but it's been terrific to have you. Thank you so much. That's been so much fun. Happy Chinese New Year, by the way.

Happy Chinese New Year to you. Happy Year of the Ox. The New Yorker's Jayang fan. She spoke with the woman we're calling Didi, who lives in the U.S., but whose family is in China, and she didn't want us to use her full name. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio, Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avey Corby, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina and Dowman Fund.