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Censorship in China
ChinaPolitics

China’s podcasters wary of censors as popularity grows

  • Chinese podcasters cover a range of niche topics, from hi-fi sound systems to user interface design
  • ‘No one is making podcasts for the mainstream audience. Everyone just does what they’re interested in,’ one producer says

Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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Joey Qi (right) and his co-host Yang Lyu record an episode of The Unemployable in 2019. Photo: Joey Qi
William Langley
Wan Ying, 32, makes a living producing niche podcasts for Harry Potter aficionados and museum nerds. She gets about 200,000 listens per episode. Four years ago, when she was briefly detained for releasing an episode mildly critical of the Hangzhou government – the host of China’s first ever G20 summit – she learned to skirt censorship by making sure any potentially sensitive episodes had “soft and harmless” titles.

“The one thing I learned from this,” Wan said. “Don’t write things down. When in doubt, say it, but don’t write it down.”

She later replaced the suspect episode with a blank audio file and removed its online descriptions. She also takes pains to use vague, non-incriminatory titles to announce her new podcasts on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. A recent episode, discussing debt-ridden Dushan county in south China’s Guizhou province, simply became “Glorious Guizhou”.

But the same trick might not work nowadays. The narrow escape in 2016 was a fluke. A police officer knocked on her door one Sunday evening and took her to the police station. At the station, two officers interrogating her were not the ones who had found her supposedly inflammatory comments.

“At the time, it was very funny,” Wan said. “They asked me what I do, I said, ‘I do podcasts,’ then they asked me ‘what’s a podcast?’”

While China’s online surveillance network is backed by advanced technology, it is often enforced by people unaware of the latest social trends.

Wan said the police officers’ ignorance of podcasting played to her advantage, as podcasts that existed solely in audio form could avoid censors entirely.

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