Wang Ju’s Case (20220509)｜Why was I banned?
Today I’m going to talk about why I was banned. I was suddenly banned from the entire network on June 4, 2019. Of course, it’s not particularly objective to say “banned from the entire network” because the accounts on three platforms were simultaneously shut down. One was Sina Weibo, another was “Today’s Headlines,” and the other was the WeChat public account. These three platforms are particularly important; other small platforms are not that important. When I was first banned, it wasn’t a complete network ban; it was the three most important platforms that were banned. I remember this day very clearly to this day because it was “6.4,” and I was banned on that day.
So after I was banned, a rumor quickly spread on Sina Weibo, saying that I was banned because I participated in the “6.4” rally in the United States. I had actually returned from the United States at the time. In June 2019, I went to the United States to discuss with American lawyers about suing Fang Zhouzi in the United States. I returned to China on June 3, so this was obviously a lie, a rumor. Because I am an investigative journalist, my exact itinerary is not reflected on public platforms when I go out, and I don’t let others know my particularly accurate travel information. I have a plane ticket to prove that I returned on June 3.
So after this rumor came out, I posted a statement on Twitter because my Weibo account had already been shut down, and I couldn’t post a statement. I stated that I returned to China on June 3 and that the rumor that I participated in the “6.4” rally in the United States was a fabrication, and I reserved the right to take legal action. These two pieces of information were put together, and this matter looked particularly like a conspiracy. On June 4, my account was shut down, and at the same time, it was spread online that I was in the United States, participating in the “6.4” rally.
You can actually imagine that because I have been doing news work for many years, and I have also worked at CCTV for many years, I also know what can be done and what cannot be done within the domestic system. Because I need to conduct interviews in China and work in China, how could I possibly go to the United States to participate in the “6.4” rally? There is no possibility at all. Who exactly started spreading such information online? It’s easy to think that it was the people who wanted to get me, because they shut down my account on “6.4” and put a political symbol on this matter. That also means that the people who want to get me want me to never be able to turn over. Everyone knows that “6.4” is a very, very sensitive day and a sensitive event within the country. If you get involved in this matter, you will never be able to be rehabilitated. So those who once wanted to get me intentionally chose the day of “6.4” to get me, which is very likely to be premeditated, just to make me never be able to turn over.
Of course, after the ban at that time, the loss to me was very, very great. The first loss was that a large number of articles in my WeChat public account and Weibo were gone because, in addition to doing interviews, I also wrote some articles, and these articles were published on my WeChat public account, including the top articles on Weibo. After the account was shut down, these articles could not be copied again, but there were many of those articles, scattered in the computer, and not all of them were saved. If I want to find my articles, the most complete ones are actually my WeChat public account and Weibo’s top articles, but they were all gone after the account was shut down. At that time, many publishing houses also approached me to talk about publishing books, and after the account was shut down, these articles could not be found. For people like us who write, if the words we write cannot be found, it’s like losing our own children. Many people may understand this feeling.
More importantly, at that time, our program “The Situation” was discussing the contract for the second season with the platform. After my account was shut down, the platform immediately dared not continue to discuss the contract with me. Originally, the first two seasons of “The Situation” had achieved a very, very large influence in the market. At its peak, our program had two or three hundred million views per episode. Like the “Jiang Ge Case” and the “Zhou Libo Drug and Gun Incident,” almost everyone with a smartphone had watched it, both at home and abroad. When I went to Australia to see penguins, on a very, very remote island, we drove from Melbourne, drove for a long time, and in the middle, when I took a break, I went to a supermarket to go to the toilet. The people in the supermarket saw me and said, “Oh, Wang Ju is here. I’ve watched your program ‘Zhou Libo’.” It can be seen that the influence of this program was not only in our country, but also had a great impact on the global Chinese community. So we also had very high expectations for the new season of “The Situation.” At that time, many platforms came to me to find me. In addition to broadcasting on this main platform, another platform would give me several million a year just to rebroadcast the program “The Situation.” Due to the account being shut down, all these jobs stopped immediately, and no platform dared to talk to me.
In fact, as a journalist, especially with “The Situation” being broadcast on an internet platform, the loss is completely incomparable to that of an ordinary person whose account is shut down. For example, if a doctor’s account is shut down, the only loss is the opportunity to speak on a public platform, but for me, it means the end of my career. If a doctor’s account is shut down, he can’t post on Weibo, but he can still perform surgeries, take care of patients, and go to work. But for me? My account being shut down means that my job is gone. And not only is my current job gone, but it also means that I can’t do other jobs related to my original work because you don’t have social media accounts. It’s impossible to continue broadcasting programs on social media accounts or to broadcast my programs on other social media platforms. This is almost a declaration of “social death” for me.
I was very anxious at the time and immediately looked for some friends to ask what the reason was, and who exactly wanted to get me. After the first round of questioning, a friend went to ask and first found out that this matter was initiated by the Social Affairs Bureau of the Cyberspace Administration, and the director of the Cyberspace Administration signed the document and issued it to the Emergency Management Bureau, which gave it to major platforms and banned me, but they didn’t know the specific reason. Then we had to continue to ask people. Of course, because we have been making programs for these years, we still have some friends, and many people are also very anxious to see my current situation, and they all took the initiative to help me ask. After asking, the first feedback was that your account has too much influence. Because of the background at the time, the Cyberspace Administration was also carrying out a rectification campaign, and the core meaning of the rectification campaign was to not allow internet platforms to have accounts with “non-own people” that had a particularly large influence.
Because on Sina Weibo and Today’s Headlines, for a period of time, the official media accounts such as “People’s Daily,” CCTV, “Xinhua Net,” and “Xinhua News Agency” did not have a very large influence online, at least compared to us, their influence was actually not particularly large. This created a situation where, in the eyes of the “relevant departments,” when a social news event occurred, the articles and reports published by these accounts had less influence than our posts, resulting in their desire to convey their voices being affected. And after we posted some voices, it could directly cause a great public response. The people who gave us feedback said that this was not allowed in the eyes of the “relevant departments.”
How big was the influence of my account at the time? At that time, Sina Weibo divided bloggers into different fields, such as science popularization, food, and military affairs. I belonged to social news. My account was the number one account in the country for social news for many years, with several hundred million views every month, and even reached over a billion views at its peak, which was indeed very influential. But is having a big influence a crime? Actually, from my perspective, because I used to work at CCTV, I have always been relatively cautious and low-key in my speech on Weibo. I should say that, as far as I am concerned, there is nothing too outrageous to say. Because I am not a particularly extreme person, and the idea I adhere to is also an image of a moderate builder. If you want me to say particularly extreme words, I may not really say them.
Including the programs I make myself, I have repeatedly told the people in our own team, I said, what can protect us after leaving CCTV? There is only one thing, and that is professionalism. That is, the programs we make cannot allow people to find fault with us in terms of professionalism. Because after you are picked on professionally, who can protect you? No one can protect you. But in addition to being a host of an interview journalist, I also post on Weibo myself, and I am also considered an opinion leader. When I encounter some social hot topics, I sometimes can’t help but express my own opinions. I think I really am, and it’s also my own problem. Because the people in our “The Situation” team are pulling me every day and saying, “Teacher Wang, please post less on Weibo, it’s too dangerous for you to post on Weibo, and you’ll be scared after reading it.” But as far as I am concerned, I haven’t posted any particularly excessive posts, but even so, it’s not okay, and it’s not tolerated.
This is the first feedback. The second time
I asked another group of people, and I asked some people to ask. The feedback from this group was not the same as the information from the previous group. They said that you were banned because the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine sent a document to the Cyberspace Administration, requesting to ban you. Because the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine has opinions about you personally. Everyone knows that I once clearly opposed traditional Chinese medicine and Chinese patent medicine online, especially Chinese patent medicine injections. Like the “Hongmao Medicine Wine” program we did at the time, Tan Qindong was arrested and detained for more than ninety days by the Inner Mongolia police because he wrote a science popularization article. After we finished the interview, the Ministry of Public Security sent a document to “Beijing News,” requesting that the program be removed. So our program was taken down after forty-eight hours. But we felt that “Hongmao Medicine Wine” was too outrageous, and I couldn’t control myself. So I started writing articles online myself and continued to criticize Hongmao Medicine Wine.
Picking out some of its technical problems, for example, Hongmao Medicine Wine, its formula says it contains leopard bone, the bones of leopards. But we all know that leopards belong to the first and second class protected animals in our country, rare animals. How can you still use the bones of these rare animals for medicine? Where did your leopard bones come from? If you have them, it is a violation of the law to use the bones of the country’s first-class protected animals, which is explicitly prohibited by law. If you don’t have the “Wildlife Protection Law,” then you are deceiving consumers. You clearly don’t have leopard bones in your wine, but you still say that the formula contains leopard bones, isn’t this fraud? We continued to work on Hongmao Medicine Wine through these channels. At that time, it did form a wave of public opinion online. I promoted this matter, and then many people, including some media, followed up. At that time, Hongmao Medicine Wine was really very anxious, and they hired a public relations company in Beijing, and this public relations company really wanted to get me. But this public relations company may have been a little careless, and they held a meeting in the corridor outside the company to discuss finding black materials about me.
But there were many companies in that building, and a person in another company was my fan, and he recorded the sound of their meeting to get me, and sent it to me. That is to say, how to collect Wang Zhian’s black materials, how to get rid of him, and so on. Hongmao Medicine Wine specifically hired a public relations company to get rid of me because I touched their cheese, which is understandable. So it’s not surprising that the Traditional Chinese Medicine Department wanted to get me. There was also another thing, which was the incident of Buchang Naoxin Tong before I was banned. The cause of that incident was particularly funny, which was that the United States broke a case at the time, and a group of dignitaries did not go through the normal channels to take the exam at Yale, and they all stuffed some money and sent their children to this school through an intermediary.
After the case was broken, it was suddenly discovered that these dignitaries were mainly Americans, but there were also two or three Chinese people. The price difference was particularly large, that is, these “dignitaries” in the United States spent an average of only 100,000 US dollars to send their children to Yale, and the highest was only 200,000 US dollars. But the two Chinese families, one seemed to have spent about one or two million US dollars, and another spent 6.5 million US dollars. This number sounds shocking. The person who spent 6.5 million US dollars was Zhao Tao, the chairman of Buchang Naoxin Tong. Zhao Tao’s daughter was in high school in the UK and then went to Yale. He also pretended to be that image online every day, saying that his daughter was doing well in her studies and finally got into Yale, but in fact, she spent 6.5 million US dollars and got her daughter into Yale through bribery.
When this news spread to China at the time, everyone was shocked, saying that Zhao Tao’s family was so rich that they were slaughtered as a sucker for sending a daughter to Yale. The general questioning was at this level. After I read this news, I felt that Buchang Naoxin Tong behind Zhao Tao was itself a problematic company. If you check the formula of Buchang Naoxin Tong, the company’s main product, you will find that it actually has no dose-effect relationship. That is, such a small capsule, according to the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, is made into powder and put into that so-called capsule for you to eat. Not to mention that our traditional Chinese medicine theory in China also emphasizes that it must be decocted, and the decoction formed after decoction will be effective after drinking it. It crushes the raw materials and puts them into a capsule. First of all, it is not known whether it is effective, and secondly, it is said that you drink a large pot of soup after decocting so little of the so-called Chinese medicinal materials. He makes a few pills and then tells you to eat them and says they are effective, how is that possible? And it hasn’t been done with a double-blind experiment.
I exposed them through such articles, and then they also sold a product called Danhong Injection. The cost of this Danhong Injection product is only two yuan and five cents, but it is sold very expensively in the hospital, and 80% of the cost is sales expenses. What are sales expenses? That is, the expenses for giving doctors and hospitals kickbacks. Because it is a listed company, these numbers are public, and it is impossible to hide them, and you can find them with a check. So I triggered a denunciation of Buchang Naoxin Tong, a company that has been engaged in near-illegal and criminal activities, through this news. Then, Dingxiangyuan and Pengpai and other media followed up, how many companies are still doing Chinese patent medicine injections across the country, and the side effects caused by these companies, how much money is used for medical insurance funds in a year, also formed a wave of public opinion.
Then you think about it, these companies hate me, that is imaginable. You must know that the sales expenses of Buchang Naoxin Tong are 20 million a day, one day. If they are willing to spend some money to get rid of me, it shouldn’t be difficult. So the suspicion that the Traditional Chinese Medicine Department and the Chinese Medicine Department got rid of me is actually quite reasonable. And the person who gave the feedback at the time said it with certainty, saying that the Chinese Medicine Association wrote a document to the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, requesting that the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine send a document to the State Cyberspace Administration to get rid of me and ban me. After hearing this news, I looked for my friends, because I also have friends who know people from the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. One of my friends also knows the leaders of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He helped me ask about this matter, because he still has a little relationship with that leader, and the relationship is not bad. After asking about that matter, the feedback from the other side said, “I know this Wang Zhian, but did we send a document? I don’t know, I’ll check.” After checking for two days, my friend gave me feedback and said, “Oh, we really didn’t send a document. Although I know this Wang Zhian, he usually opposes traditional Chinese medicine, but we didn’t send a document.”
Because my friend said at the time that if the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine really sent a document, then we would sit down and communicate with him. Because Zhian, although he opposes traditional Chinese medicine, is actually reasonable. I’m not saying that I oppose all traditional Chinese medicine, I’m just testing medicine. Moreover, for the sake of my own career, I can also make some compromises. For example, let me continue to do interviews, then I can’t speak out on the issue of traditional Chinese medicine in the future. I can still make this compromise, because to be honest, we have to achieve a bigger goal, and sometimes we make a little sacrifice, or a big sacrifice, a sacrifice that we have to make, we also understand this truth. But the feedback from the other side said that it was not our document, you should check it again. I told my second friend, the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine said that it was not their document, you should ask again. After asking again, people said that you don’t have to worry about this matter, you know? Don’t ask anymore. It’s like “pa” blocking it. This is the second feedback.
Are there any other possibilities? Then, in the blink of an eye, it was the beginning of 2020. At the beginning of 2020, I went to Japan. Before I came to Japan, I also talked to a platform in China, and I asked if I could first open an audio program, such as a program like “Wang Ju’s Case,” and record it as audio, in the paywall. I’ll talk about it first, and then on the one hand, I can get some income, and on the other hand, I can actually slowly see if it can be accepted by the relevant departments. In this way, I can still make interviews again. After I arrived in Japan, we started to plan this matter. At that time, they said that because I was in Japan, and because the epidemic in Japan had also started, and the epidemic in China had also started. He wanted to do a preheating for the broadcast of our program in the future, and said that we would do a live broadcast and let me introduce the situation of epidemic prevention in Japan. What epidemic prevention measures Japan has taken, whether the people are panicked, and whether the social mortality rate is high, and so on.
I said, okay, no problem. They invited three people, a total of three people during the whole process. They invited Lao Liang, Liang Hongda, Xu Zhiyuan, and me to do three live broadcasts. Lao Liang talked about the plague in Harbin, the great plague, and how China fought the epidemic at that time. I chose the epidemic prevention measures in Japan. Everything was ready, and they also posted posters. I forgot the specific date, and they also did some publicity, and asked me to do a live broadcast of epidemic prevention in Japan. We also prepared some materials, and then I started the live broadcast online. During the live broadcast, as I was talking, I found that the staff under us were suddenly gone. I was very strange, and then I found out that during the live broadcast, my live broadcast was stopped. The Cyberspace Administration came with a document, saying that this person’s live broadcast must be stopped immediately.
Not only was it stopped, but all my other platforms that were not shut down were all shut down that night. For example, Netease, Zhihu, and those websites that haven’t been online for 800 years, such as Qianniao. The accounts registered for the lectures were all shut down. This time I was really banned from the entire network, and banned from the entire network. That is to say, all the accounts I registered on all the internet platforms in China were shut down overnight. They were gone, I couldn’t log in, and I couldn’t see them when I logged in. Then I asked the people on the platform what the reason was. That is to say, you shut down those three platforms in the first round, and the other platforms also don’t allow me to do things, and the other platforms that haven’t been shut down, can’t I do something else? Are you going to kill me? I hope that my friend can go to the Cyberspace Administration to ask why Wang Zhian’s live broadcast was stopped, and why it was shut down. What information did they give back? They said that Wang Zhian has an account overseas, and he has an account on Twitter, and all people like this are shut down. Do you think this is a reason?
I think it’s definitely not the real reason. Why? Because there are so many people with accounts on Twitter, Hu Xijin has one, and Hu Xijin often posts on Weibo. Of course, some people say that Hu Xijin is allowed to go over the wall, and he goes over the wall when he wants to whitewash things and let him send messages. Well, other people also have some people in China who have accounts on Twitter, and it’s not that you have to shut down your account on Twitter. So I think the third reason, that I was shut down because I have an account on Twitter, is a pretext. Moreover, I usually have an account, and they know it, and I also post. But why did they shut down my account during the live broadcast? And why did they say that I was shut down because I had a Twitter account after the shutdown? This reason is too far-fetched. So I personally feel that the real reason is not like this. So, to put it bluntly, what is the real reason? In fact, I am not particularly, completely sure. Of course, I may have an 80% or 90% inference, but if you say that there is 100% evidence of who instructed it, and who got rid of me, I actually don’t have particularly clear evidence.
But there is one thing, that is, after I was shut down, it really had too much impact on my personal career. Because for our profession, that is, for the profession of doing interviews, the age of around fifty is the golden age of life. Because young people do interviews, you may not have so much experience, and you may not have so much experience. Your understanding of life, human nature, this society, and the world, you may not be able to ask those particularly sharp questions, or particularly valuable questions. But when we are around fifty years old, we have actually accumulated to this time period, which is a stage of bursting out. At this time, it should be said that it is the best, the best golden age of creation. It was shut down overnight, and it was gone.
So I personally thought later, because in the blink of an eye, it has been 3 years since the accounts were deleted. I have been thinking about the management of internet accounts by the Cyberspace Administration, and there are a few points I want to say. The longest recording time of my camera is only half an hour, and it will automatically disconnect when the time is up, and it stopped before I finished speaking. Let’s continue to chat. I’m still talking about my views on this matter. I, as the person involved, have several feelings and views. The first is that the internet departments’ management of these account shutdowns is extremely arbitrary. They have no standards, or at least they have no publicly available standards. They shut down whoever they want. If they shut down an account on Sina Weibo now, they don’t need to go through Sina Weibo, they operate directly in the background themselves.
And that is to say, it also has no explicit standards. What you said, I will shut down your account, there is no (standard). This process leaves a huge opportunity for rent-seeking. They control the direction of public opinion of a company on the internet, and even control the power of life and death of media workers like us who use the internet as a platform for dissemination. How great is the power, he can make a person die, and this person cannot live. But there is no supervision in this process. Then you can imagine that some companies, for example, want to get me, Wang Zhian, they only need to get a section chief of the Cyberspace Administration. They don’t even need the director of the department, why? Because they approve the shutdowns in batches every day, and report the list to the leaders, and the leaders won’t look at it, and the leaders don’t have time to look at it. For example, when it comes to “64,” they shut down a group of people and report a list, and there is a Wang Zhian in the middle, who will care?
Don’t think that what I’m saying is sensational. Go to the China Judgments Online to check, check the China Judgments Online. Some companies pay money to people in the Cyberspace Administration to get rid of posts. There are all of them on the National Judgment Documents website, and I don’t know if they have been removed now. There is a particularly ridiculous example, a company offered 500,000 yuan to delete posts, and the middle layers peeled off, and the layers were subcontracted, and how much money did the person from the National Cyberspace Administration get in the end? He got 20,000 yuan. The 480,000 yuan in the middle was deducted by the middlemen one by one. That is to say, the small section chiefs of the Cyberspace Administration are not as greedy as you think, at least in those days, I don’t know now. If they want to get me, how easy is it? So I personally feel that this is my first feeling.
The second feeling is that, according to the principle, there should be a channel for redress for this administrative penalty. You shut down my account, can I apply for administrative reconsideration? Can I sue if administrative reconsideration is not possible? But there is no chance for shutting down the account. First of all, if you go to court, the court will not accept it. After my WeChat public account was shut down, there was a message in the background: According to relevant legal provisions, your account is permanently banned. But if you look up the law, it is a very general and general clause. You compare it, and you find that you have violated which law, you don’t know. And then you go to court to sue, and the court does not accept it. If the court can accept it, we can ask the Cyberspace Administration in person which sentence I said violated the law, and you shut down my account. The court also has a ruling procedure, and the Supreme People’s Court ruled that Wang Zhian’s words did not violate the law, and you restored him. But because the court does not accept it, there is no channel for redress at all.
The third thing I want to say is that these gentlemen, in fact, to us ordinary people, although I am also a public figure, but in their eyes, I am just an ordinary person. Your career, your professional works, your own future development, he doesn’t care at all. He wants you to die, a sentence in an A4 paper, and you die. Isn’t it cruel? It’s that cruel. So you say why I was banned and shut down, many people ask me what the reason is, and I haven’t said it for three years, why? I know that it’s useless to say it, and it may even offend them after saying it. If they can manage Twitter, they estimate that they will shut down my Twitter account. Maybe, they will ask Musk to say that this person, Wang Zhian, shut down his account, and I don’t know if Musk will listen to them.
It’s really sad to think about it. Think about how good our program was at the time, right, and how well it was developing, and as a result, with a single order, my entire career was over. I’m thinking, I’m going to buy a car in Japan in a while. After buying a car, it’s easy to apply for a license plate in this place, and you can easily apply for all kinds of license plates. I have already thought about it, and I will write 64 on the license plate of my car, because this day is the day of my social death within the Chinese internet.
Thank you for watching, and we’ll talk again next time.
谢谢大家观看，我们下次接着聊。
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