Clubhouse Opens a Window for Free Expression in China
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2021
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Clubhouse is an audio-only social-media platform offering chat rooms on any subject, allowing thousands of people to gather and listen to each other. Jiayang Fan, who often reports on China, tells David Remnick that the chance to talk in private and without a text trail has opened a window of free expression for Chinese users. (Recently, some questions have been raised about whether the app is as secure as its makers claim.) Suddenly, in chat rooms with names like “There is a concentration camp in Xinjiang?,” Chinese users are able to address politically taboo subjects out loud in large groups. A Clubhouse chat-room moderator explains to Fan that for Han Chinese, who are the beneficiaries of the government’s persecution of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities, the app offers a space for reckoning and protest comparable to America’s Black Lives Matter movement. The government has clamped down on Clubhouse, but tech-savvy young people are used to finding workarounds.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesTranscript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this podcast is brought to you by Wilderness, a conservation-driven |
| 0:06.4 | hospitality company that offers intimate world life encounters in extraordinary remote landscapes. |
| 0:12.5 | Last year, I embarked on two separate solo adventures with Wilderness, one to Botswana and the other |
| 0:18.2 | to Namibia, where the expert guides delivered a truly once-in-a-lifetime |
| 0:23.6 | experience. I promise you, whatever you watch and see before you go won't prepare you for the thrill |
| 0:29.4 | of a wilderness adventure. eBay, it's a place to fall in love with new pre-loved vintage and rare |
| 0:36.6 | fashion over and over again. |
| 0:39.0 | Your favorite designers, expertly authenticated. |
| 0:42.5 | Yeah, eBay. |
| 0:44.0 | Things people love. |
| 0:48.1 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. |
| 0:50.1 | On today's Politics and More podcast, New Yorker staff writer Jiang Fan discusses the social media platform Clubhouse. |
| 0:58.8 | The platform has become a venue for Chinese people around the world to discuss issues censored by the Chinese government, |
| 1:05.8 | including the ongoing persecution of Uyghurs within the country. |
| 1:13.1 | Clubhouse is a virtual space, an app that launched about a year ago, and it's a product of Silicon Valley. |
| 1:19.5 | But it's found a particularly powerful niche in China. |
| 1:23.3 | Jiang Fan, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has been spending a lot of time lately in Chinese |
| 1:29.0 | language chat rooms in Clubhouse. Its biggest innovation is the fact that it is based around |
| 1:37.5 | voice communication. So you launch the app and it immediately shows you this list of rooms that you can join. |
| 1:46.8 | And you go in there and you can hear actual people talking in real time in their own voice. |
| 1:52.9 | The conversations often circle to pretty taboo subjects. And those topics are not discussed because people don't like to leave a trail. |
| 2:04.3 | So hearing in real time Chinese youths discussing subjects that they have never been allowed to |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.