Guo Yuhua, "Farewell Sina Weibo"

Guo Yuhua, “Farewell Sina Weibo”[1] 

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Guo Yuhua (b. 1956) is a well-known sociologist at Tsinghua University, and an equally well-known Liberal public intellectual.  An interview discussing her scholarly work on “Communist civilization” is available here, and an example of her Internet activism, calling to task Beijing’s haughty urban planners, can be found here.  In person, she is bracingly direct.  Tim Cheek and I met her in the Tsinghua faculty dining hall in December of 2018, and were both impressed and slightly unnerved to hear a full-throated denunciation of the “fascism” of the Chinese government in a very public place (this was at roughly the same moment that two Canadians were detained in China as payback for Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Canada.  Tim and I travel on Canadian passports).
 
The text translated here hardly needs commentary.  Guo has been using Weibo, the Chinese internet space that houses the equivalent of blogs, for ten years, and Weibo has closed her account 80 times over that period, forcing her to go through the hassle of starting over roughly every month and half.   She has written about these hassles before.  She is finally giving up, because they will no longer allow her to use her email, and require instead registration via cell phone, the equivalent of forcing her onto WeChat, which, as Guo rightly notes, is a smaller platform.  One can only admire her determination, and share her frustration.
 
Translation
 
In the summer of 2020, on the day marking the beginning of the ninth solar term [of the Chinese lunar calendar], I bid farewell to Sina Weibo, which I have been using for ten years.  This is not a friendly goodbye, not a reluctant goodbye, but rather an expression of contempt and protest. From the creation of Weibo in the Spring of 2010 (I checked, and the first Weibo post was on February 1, 2010) until today, you have forced me to create a new account 80 times [by closing my existing account].  I tried friendly communication, I tried reason, I tried angry resistance and I even yelled and screamed, but to no avail.  I had to start over from scratch and be “reborn” every time, posting more than ten thousand messages, earning more than ten thousand fans, continuing into my twilight years.  I hung on not out of nostalgia and surely not out of appreciation, and even less out of any hope to expand the realm of free speech.  Once WeChat came along, a lot of people left, tired of starting over again and again, tired of you.  But as everyone knows, compared to WeChat, Weibo is a broader arena for discussion, a bigger public space.  My hope was to maintain a more varied and spacious channel to appeal to friends and family who had lost their freedom, to repost messages from those who are desperate and suffering, to let more people know about them, to lend a hand.  But…    
 
This time, it is not that I changed my mind, nor that I have abandoned my hopes, but instead that I can’t open a new account (you can no longer use your email and have to register through your cell phone).  Moreover, since Weibo has already turned into a huge camp for anonymous “people,” “many people,”  “little pinks 粉红 [nationalist trolls, in Chinese internet slang],”  and “wolf warriors” who don’t have the guts to use their real names, and who use Weibo as a battlefield where they smear, slander, and attack those who tell the truth, it has become no different from a maggot-infested pile of shit, and the stench drives me away.
 
A parting phrase :  you can’t knit a good scarf [围脖--weibo, surely a play on words] out of rotten cotton and short threads; you can’t make a good environment out of maggots and shit.                                      
                                                       
Guo Yuhua, June 8, 2020

Notes

[1] 郭于华, “告别新浪微博,”published online on June 8, 2020, on Guo’s WeChat account, and if all else fails, a pdf of the original is available here.