He who must not be named

September 28, 2022·38 min·3 clips

The Economist's Su Lin Wong filed China stories from police toilet stalls before being denied a Hong Kong visa.

Eric Liu began with orange and red words. At Weibo, China's version of Twitter, the system pulled up sensitive language and forced a fast call. His shifts dragged on. A team leader could assign a few minutes of posts, and that small slice could take eleven hours of judgment. Eric called it factory-line work, and the host lets the image sit there before widening it into something colder: censorship as labor, habit, and fear made ordinary. The scale keeps shifting. Eric's team had about 120 people. In the host's telling, that becomes millions working inside China's censorship machine. The human cost is quieter. Eric describes people living in fear without quite naming that fear as the air around them. That is where the episode gets under the skin. The Party does not only delete complaints; it stops anger from turning into organizing. WeChat becomes the host's own test. Even while making the podcast, he avoids sending messages there because private online space cannot be assumed private. Then the story pulls back again. China's surveillance state appears through cameras, police access, online monitoring, and systems that connect movement, speech, identity, and suspicion. Consent gets murky under pressure. The host does not claim everyone is secretly opposed, but he will not call that consent fully informed. Xi's ideology tightens the machine. By the end, censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and official obedience feel like a ratchet, turning toward more control. Xinjiang is next.

As heard by us

A sharp account of how China's censorship machine turns online fear into political control.

The Prince makes China's censorship system concrete through Eric Liu's years at Weibo, where flagged words, rushed calls, and 11-hour shifts turned political control into factory-line work.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the view from inside China’s censorship machine, start here.

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