When China’s prodigious tech influencer, Naomi Wu, found herself silenced, it wasn’t just the machinery of a surveillance state at play. Instead, it was a confluence of state repression and the sometimes capricious attention of a Western audience that, as she asserts, often views Chinese activists more as ideological tokens than as genuine human beings.
I hope not :-)
Someone pointed me at this series of Medium articles she wrote on an incident with Vice running an article outing her after explicitly agreeing not to. So that’s where the general air of animosity towards western journalists probably comes from.
I was also told that The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj took clips from another interview she gave and put them together out of context in support of a story on China’s censorship. I haven’t watched either interview yet, but that story apparently got the attention of the government and resulted in her being detained by the police. The “first strike” implied in this article.
I really hope she’s able to make more videos. I was a kind of dismissive when she would pop up in my YouTube feed… I figured she was just a paid presenter, had to be, right? But you pick up on her dry humor and depth pretty quickly.
I have to say I would be very upset if she came to harm and would not forget :-(