Join the club(house)
Clubhouse’s days of sort-of-being-available in China are numbered.1
The invite-only voice chat app blew up over the weekend among Chinese-language users, with those both inside the country and abroad promoting the platform as a place for uncensored discussions of sensitive issues such as Xinjiang, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
People taking part in or listening to these marathon chats — one room hosted by citizen journalist Zola was going for almost 120 hours — described remarkable conversations taking place. This was particularly true on the issue of Xinjiang, discussion of which has been tightly controlled inside China, while coverage outside has largely focused (rightly so) on victim testimony and calls for investigations, sanctions, etc. Moderators of these channels did a good job ensuring that both Uyghur and Han participants were able to participate fully, and it was interesting to hear both from Han who recognise the crackdown for what it is, and feel disgusted and helpless to act, and from self-described Sinified Uyghurs about how they too have been subject to discrimination and worse, despite doing everything the government asks of them in terms of integration.2
Such conversations are rare in China today, particularly in public, and the experience of listening to them has got a lot of people understandably excited, with one friend saying she had “goosebumps.” Writing of her own experience with the app, Berlin-based Chinese journalist Melissa Chan said: “I can’t explain what it feels like to be in these Clubhouse rooms. They partly feel like confessionals, and there’s a great sense of yearning from people — for sympathy, for expression, for ambivalent feelings about the Party or about democracy.”
Just as hyper-censored-Weibo is not representative of true Chinese public opinion, we should be very careful about ascribing any views expressed on Clubhouse to the population at large. As many people have pointed out, the Clubhouse crowd is very self-selecting: the app is invite only, and you have to be able to access the US iTunes store (which isn’t overly difficult, but is still enough of a barrier for some to give up). While this did not stop it being targeted by bots and trolls, the big Chinese-language channels were nevertheless heavily-dissident leaning, with many users based overseas. There were also many users from Hong Kong and Taiwan joining from outside the Firewall, who may have further skewed the general political tone of the channels.
With more and more people joining over the weekend, attention soon turned to when (not if) the app would be completely blocked in China, and the dangers of using it before then.
Fergus Ryan, an analyst as ASPI, pointed out that Clubhouse’s servers appear to be dependent in part on Agora, a Chinese company which would be subject to the country’s cybersecurity laws. While Clubhouse founder Paul Davidson dropped in to some chats to reassure users that the company doesn’t save (too much) data, and to say he’d love to open an office in China (yeah, good luck with that Paul), there are serious potential risks of using the platform for Chinese users. Some tankie creeps were boasting about recording and transcribing chats, presumably for future reporting purposes, while others spoke of the possibility of state security agents doing same.
We’ve seen in recent months a massive uptick in the Chinese authorities going after Chinese Twitter users (both inside China and overseas), so it’s reasonable to expect that Clubhouse would be treated the same, and these security concerns won’t go away, even after the app is inevitably blocked and becomes, like Twitter, VPN only.
I don’t think anyone doubts that censorship is inevitable, but I would argue this is more because of the massive growth of the last few days, and the press attention that has come with it, than any specific dangers posed by Clubhouse itself. The biggest test for the censors when it comes to banning a given service is whether it can be used for organising, for planning protests and other offline activity. I’m not convinced that Clubhouse is necessarily a good platform for this, certainly it wasn’t designed for this type of activity (unlike say, Facebook, which while intended to be apolitical, is actually a pretty great organising tool, as QAnon adherents and others have discovered).
Clubhouse, like many other services or anti-censorship solutions that briefly challenge the Great Firewall, is primarily an information sharing platform. This can be impactful, and I don’t deny the potentially radicalising effect of taking part in some of the conversations currently taking place on Clubhouse, but the effect is ultimately limited, particularly so long as the authorities control all the nodes people would have to use to spread the information/opinions they have gained beyond the echo chamber of the app itself. The Great Firewall has always had holes in it. Clubhouse is currently a particularly noticeable one, that is sure to grow a lot smaller in coming days, but it is not one that is going to damage the structural integrity of the Firewall itself.
I think the likely future for Clubhouse is as a parallel service to Chinese Twitter, which is already heavily dominated by dissidents and overseas users, with the occasional state media journalist thrown in. This could serve to tie the exile crowd closer together, and will be interesting to see how debates that affect that community (such as the ongoing rift over Trumpism) play out. It will also potentially mean we see a shift in opinions on Taiwan and Hong Kong, as users from those two territories outside the Firewall become more dominant on Clubhouse, and can engage with Chinese users who, while they may be anti-government, are still nationalist when it comes to Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Once Clubhouse’s servers are blocked inside China, making it unusable without a VPN, that should be enough to stop major growth and dissuade many new users, particularly as it remains invite only, meaning there are three hurdles you have to clear before you can even access it (app store, invite, VPN). There’s also the fact that once the app is officially blocked, plausible deniability about what one is using it for goes out the window. The risks then of using a “dissident app” go up massively.
Flagged for review 🚩
It’s the one year anniversary of the death of Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who attempted to warn friends about the coronavirus over WeChat and was reprimanded by police, before eventually contracting the virus himself. I wrote about Li’s legacy, and the authorities’ attempt to control it, last year.
Internet access remains spotty across Myanmar a week after the country’s military launched a coup. Some restrictions were briefly lifted late last week, and given that protests soon followed, I think we can expect them to be back in place pretty soon.
The app is only available on the US iTunes app store, but its servers are not currently blocked by the Great Firewall, meaning if you can download it, you can access it.
In my book, I write about Ilham Tohti, who was a model Uyghur in many ways, but still fell afoul of the government because he sought to exercise the barest amount of self-determination for his people.