A dissident on X is enraging Beijing. Now Chinese police are coming for his followers

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Hong Kong CNN —

For more than a decade, Lee has been able to circumvent China’s internet controls to go on Twitter, now known as X, without getting into trouble with the authorities.

The Chinese lawyer stayed away from politically sensitive topics and rarely engaged with other users, treating the platform mainly as an archive to back up his postings on heavily censored Chinese social media.

He has continued tweeting even as Beijing intensifies efforts to control free speech beyond its Great Firewall of internet censorship, interrogating, detaining and jailing Chinese Twitter users who criticize leader Xi Jinping and his government.

Last month, in a sign of the widening crackdown on foreign social media sites, Lee too was summoned by police – not because of what he tweeted, but because of who he followed.

In an early-morning phone call, an officer invited Lee to “have tea” – a euphemism for police questioning – to talk about the “sensitive accounts” he followed on X.

At the police station, it became clear that the officer had only one target in mind: an outspoken and unfiltered Chinese-language X account with a cat avatar and 1.6 million followers whose handle translates to “Teacher Li is not your teacher.”

“The police asked me if I followed the account ‘Teacher Li is not your teacher,’ but I honestly didn’t know,” Lee said in an interview. He logged into X under the watch of the officer, found the account and unfollowed it on the spot, he said.

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