Attempts to silence a student who drew attention to sexual abuse allegations at a Chinese university have inspired tech-savvy activists to use blockchain technology to dodge censors and keep the fledgling #MeToo movement alive in the country.
The uproar began when a student wrote an open letter this week accusing a staff member at Peking University of trying to intimidate her over a petition she launched urging the school to make public an investigation into a 1998 sexual abuse case.
The student’s missive was quickly taken down from Chinese social media after it went viral, only to resurface on the blockchain service Ethereum on Monday night, attracting hundreds of comments that are virtually unassailable.
“This is how we use technology to [fight] against brutal tyranny,” one commenter said, while others hailed it as a “historic moment.”
The #MeToo movement has been concentrated in university campuses in China, and authorities have tolerated some social media commentary about sexual harassment allegations over the past few months.
However, the furor over the Peking University case appears to have been too much for censors. A search for the student’s name on a popular microblogging platform yielded no results.
Foreign languages student Yue Xin (岳昕) coauthored a petition with about 20 others, demanding that the university release details of the probe into allegations a student was driven to suicide after being sexually abused by a professor.
The professor, who now teaches at Nanjing University, was suspended pending the investigation after the allegations emerged earlier this month.
In her open letter, Yue said a student adviser came to her dorm at about 1am on Sunday, with Yue’s “terrified” mother in tow, and demanded that she delete all information related to the petition from her smartphone and laptop.
Yue wrote she had also received veiled threats from university officials over whether she would be allowed to graduate.
The university’s actions had caused her mother to have an “emotional meltdown” and had “broken their relationship,” she said.
“When I saw my mother crying, slapping her face, falling on her knees and threatening to commit suicide, my heart was bleeding,” she said in her letter.
Chinese social media users often find roundabout ways to avoid censors. In this case, some resorted to posting a photograph of the letter upside down to avoid detection technology.
The text has also found an impregnable home in hard-to-crack blockchain — a technology usually associated with cryptocurrencies.
A blockchain is essentially a shared, encrypted ledger that cannot be manipulated.
However, finding the letter is not easy. It is attached to a transaction viewable on a link.
Seeing the letter requires downloading the entire blockchain and searching for it with special software, Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong president Leonhard Weese said.
Embedding her message into a blockchain is “largely a symbolic move,” Weese said.
“It’s true that this message cannot be deleted [or altered] from a blockchain, because all participants of the network will be forced to store it forever, but this won’t help in spreading the message,” he said.
However, censors would struggle to delete the nearly 300 comments that have appeared so far.
Yue’s treatment has angered her peers.
An open letter reportedly from students and faculty dated on Wednesday condemned the school’s “unjust treatment” of Yue.
It has circulated on the WeChat messaging app.
Students and alumni have vowed to boycott the university’s 120th anniversary celebration next month.
Yue was not the first student to be speak out about the case.
Another student at Peking University, Deng Yuhao (鄧宇昊), wrote on WeChat that he was summoned by university authorities at midnight on April 7 after he penned a letter with others demanding transparency on the same 1998 case.
His message has since been deleted.
Similar cases of students being called in for questioning after signing online petitions related to other sexual harassment cases have emerged at other universities, Chinese feminist activist Xiao Meili (蕭美麗) said.
Officials at her alma mater, Communication University of China, had asked students whether they were “influenced by foreign forces” when they penned a letter raising concerns about campus abuse, she told reporters.
“Chinese universities are wasting time clamping down on students instead of tackling the issue of sexual harassment,” Xiao said.
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