Clubhouse Opens a Window for Free Expression in China

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.7	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're going to start today in a place called
0:15.3	Clubhouse. Clubhouse is a virtual space, an app that launched about a year ago, and it's a product of Silicon Valley.
0:22.7	But it's found a particularly powerful niche in China.
0:26.5	Jiang Fan, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has been spending a lot of time lately in Chinese language chat rooms in Clubhouse.
0:35.4	Its biggest innovation is the fact that it is based around voice communication.
0:42.8	So you launch the app and it immediately shows you this list of rooms that you can join.
0:50.0	And you go in there and you can hear actual people talking in real time in their own voice.
0:56.7	The conversations often circle to pretty taboo subjects.
1:01.9	And those topics are not discussed because people don't like to leave a trail.
1:07.0	So hearing in real time Chinese youths discussing subjects that they have never been allowed
1:13.6	to discuss in classrooms or even really in, you know, cafes, that's incredibly intriguing and
1:23.1	keeps me on there for hours at a time. Clubhouse is where Jiann came across a woman she's calling Didi.
1:30.1	So if you open up your Clubhouse app, what do you see?
1:33.8	Okay. I'm opening the app.
1:35.9	So the first room that I see is ADHD, co-working room.
1:40.0	Work 45 minutes, chat 15.
1:42.0	I don't know what that I say about me.
1:45.5	Tech support, career advice, Q&A for tech workers.
1:50.4	And then, yeah, some of the more interesting stuff
1:53.3	and occasional chat about Chinese law and politics.
1:57.1	Yep, I'm on that one too.
	...

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