The Daily - A Marriage, a Secret and a Crackdown in China

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Over the past decade, China has placed more and more restrictions on the lives of its citizens — tightening its hold over what people can do, read and say.When Bei Zhenying’s husband was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison for “smearing” the country’s political system, she was left to pick up the pieces of his life. She now believes that her husband was the writer behind one of the most mysterious blogs on the Chinese internet, which for 12 years had ridiculed the ruling Communist Party from within the country.Vivian Wang, a China correspondent for The Times, tells the story of the couple.Guest: Vivian Wang, a China correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: China took Bei Zhenying’s husband. She was left to uncover his secret cause.China’s search engines have more than 66,000 rules controlling content.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Over the past decade, China has placed more and more restrictions on the lives of its citizens, tightening its hold over what people can do, read, and say. What people can do, read, and say. Today, my colleague Vivian Wong tells the story of a couple caught in that system. One carrying a dangerous secret. The other left to pick up the pieces. It's Tuesday, August 29th. is a blogger called Program Think. I'm going to speak out on behalf of him,

but I need everyone to pay attention in case something happens to me. And what is Program Think? So I had heard of this blog before. It's a Chinese blog, but you had to get outside of China's censored internet, also known as the Great Firewall, to access it. And what made it special was that it really boldly talked about Chinese politics and the Chinese government at a time when the government had increasingly cracked down on the internet and free speech. And nobody knew who this author was, which made it almost kind of mythical to its loyal readers. And then suddenly one day in 2021, the blog went silent.

And then suddenly one day in 2021, the blog went silent. And for two years, there were basically no clues until earlier this year when this woman appeared and said she knew who the blogger was. She was his wife. And I was really intrigued, of course. And so I reached out to her. And she agreed to talk. Okay, so tell me about her. Who is this woman? So her name is Bei Zhenying. She's 45, lives in Shanghai, and she had been married to her husband for nearly two decades. And they had been living what she thought was a pretty typical middle-class life. They owned their apartment in Shanghai

in a leafy university district. She liked traveling overseas. He liked cycling, you know, pretty normal. And then one day something happened that totally upended everything. So when I talked to her, she described that day for me. It was May 10th, 2021.

Started out totally normally. She had ordered bottled water to be delivered to their apartment and around noon, the doorbell rings. So she assumes it's the water delivery and she calls out for her husband to get it. delivery, and she calls out for her husband to get it. And all of a sudden, she hears a scuffle, and someone says, don't move.

So she runs over to the door and discovers that her husband has been taken away. There's a man standing at the door, and she's obviously super confused. She looks at him and says, Are you robbing us? And they look at each other for a second, and then he takes out a police ID. And of course, she's reeling. She has no idea what's going on. And a bunch of police officers take away her phone and start searching the apartment. And they're asking her questions. They say, don't you know what your husband was doing? They say, you know, your husband was writing this blog, and he wrote articles that outlined how to overthrow the government. One officer says, your husband's crime is very severe. It's one of the worst crimes

under national security laws, and he could go to prison for years. She says that she starts crying, her stomach doesn't feel well. She thinks she's going to throw up. God. And as she's trying to process all this, she's also realizing that maybe she knows very little about this man that she's lived with for nearly 20 years. And she starts asking herself, you know, who is this man? And had he been keeping secrets? And had there

been something happening right in front of her without her knowing? In the weeks after the arrest, as she's trying to figure out these questions, she doesn't have any information beyond what she was given the day that the police arrested her husband. Nobody has told her anything else. And that's because of the way the Chinese legal system operates. So they had told her that this was a national security case. And in China, national security cases are completely top secret. The trials are conducted behind closed doors. She's not allowed to see him while he's being held. His own lawyers are not allowed to tell her about their communications

with him or anything about the case. So she's completely in the dark. about the case. So she's completely in the dark. Completely in the dark. And all she has to go on is what she knows about her husband and her life with him. So she starts going back over their entire 20-year relationship, looking for clues, parsing through all the moments they spent together, looking for just anything that will tell her what had been going on all these years. So when Bei thinks back over their life together, where does she begin? Well, she goes all the way back to when they first met in Shanghai in the fall of 1996. Bei was a student at East China University of Science and Technology, and she met a classmate named Ran Xiaohuan. They were both chemical engineering majors, and she says that he was

sort of well-known among their peers for two things. One was his laugh. She said he has this famously loud laugh that would fill the classroom and you could hear it from all the way down the hall. And the other was that he was just brilliant at computer science, even though he wasn't a computer science major. She says that even as a first year, he was so talented and other students would ask him for help with assignments that they didn't understand. And he was also a really generous teacher. He would host tutoring sessions two nights a week. And Bei ended up being one of the students who went to him for help. And as they started spending more time together and started dating, she remembers being surprised that it wasn't just computer science that he knew

a lot about. He seemed to know a lot about everything. He would talk about astronomy, geography, philosophy, history. He read so many books, and he was somebody who always seemed to be looking to learn more, this sort of seeker of knowledge. this sort of seeker of knowledge. And she says that this hungry personality of his was even in his name, Ren Xiaohuan. It was a name given to him by his father, who was a literature professor, and it basically means to know the universe.

means to know the universe. So when it came time to graduate, actually, Ren had spent so much time on computer programming that he hadn't finished all the credits he needed for his chemical engineering degree. But he said, you know what? That's fine. I don't need that degree.

What I'm learning in school is already lagging behind, you know, the most cutting-edge developments in technology anyway. And he figured he would learn more quickly outside of school on his own. In retrospect, you know, this was probably the earliest sign that he was perhaps unusual or at least didn't really care about what society expected of him. But for her, that was fine. That was what she liked about him. She liked that he was independent, that he had his own sense of values that he stuck to. And so it reaffirmed for her that he was really special.

And in October 2004, they get married. And what was their married life like? So they're both very independent people and very focused on their careers. So Bae lands a job in marketing for a multinational firm. She climbs the ladder. She becomes a manager there. And Ran was right about the diploma. He didn't need it.

He worked his way up in major tech companies in China. And he actually became so good at his job that he was tapped to oversee information security for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Whoa, huge job, right? Definitely. This is a massive responsibility. It's the moment of China stepping out onto the world stage. But just a few years later, Ren suddenly decides to leave it all behind. Ran suddenly decides to leave it all behind. Bei says that he told her he felt stifled by the corporate world.

He'd always been motivated by learning new things, by discovering new things, innovation, and he just didn't feel like he was getting that at work. And so around 2012, he quits. And according to Bei, he starts spending more time alone in his study, just day after day, holed up in there. And what exactly does he tell Bei he's doing in there all day? She thought he was just working on his own coding project. You know, the type of stuff that he hadn't gotten to work on while he was still working a corporate job. But when she did actually ask him, you know, what exactly he was doing in his study all day, he didn't really give her any direct answers.

She said that sometimes she would knock on his door and say it's time for dinner or something like that. And he would actually get upset. He would tell her, you know, programming requires a lot of focus. If I'm interrupted, it's hard for me to get back on track. You wouldn't understand. And again, in retrospect, maybe that should have been a warning sign. But at the time, she says, she just thought, OK, programming is complicated.

And so when that study door is closed, I'll just leave him alone. God, it sounds lonely actually. Yeah, and you know, she did say that the more time that he spent in his study, the more withdrawn that he became and she really felt like there was distance growing in their relationship and there would be disagreements. So some of them were small, for example, he would get upset if she bought him a new outfit. He preferred to wear his clothes until they were full of holes. Or if she threw something old away, he would actually take it out of the trash. But other disagreements were more fundamental. For example, she wanted children and he refused.

I mean, he would say he didn't want to raise a child in China given all of the problems that the country had. Problems with the education system, with food safety, with health care. And he would say, you know, why don't you care about these problems as much as I do? How could you want to bring a child into this society? And this became something that they would argue about a lot. She says that he was always pushing her to read more. He gave her this whole list of books that she had to read.

And he said, Once she read more, maybe then they'd be able to find common ground and understand each other better. And then maybe they could discuss having children. Whoa, that sounds hard for her. Yeah, so of course it is frustrating and hurtful for her. But for Bei, at the time, she thinks, okay, people do drift apart. No marriage is perfect. And so at the time she told me she didn't really see this distance between them as a warning sign or anything terribly unusual

until that day in May 2021, when the police stormed into their apartment and took her husband away. So Vivian, even though Bae is trying to work through all of this in her head, she doesn't seem to have any more details about what exactly the government is accusing her husband of doing, right? Like those answers would have to come from the government, which at this point isn't saying anything at all. But does there come a point when the government starts to tell her more about the case? So the only part of this whole process that they can participate in is the sentencing hearing, which is when the court will announce whether or not her husband has been found guilty, what they say he did, and what the punishment will be. And so the only way that Bae can get the answers that she needs is to wait for

that sentencing. That's where she thinks she's finally going to be able to find out what he did. And more importantly for her, you know, who he really was. So what happens? The day comes and? Well, so first, the sentencing hearing doesn't happen until almost two years after he's been arrested. So it was February 2023 when Bei is finally notified that she can attend his sentencing hearing. And of course, you know, leading up to that day, she's feeling really anxious. She describes making sure that she'll get to court early. She puts on makeup. And she says that she wore a really bright green down jacket because she had no idea what the scene was going to be like inside the courtroom.

But she wanted to make sure that no matter what, he would be able to see her really easily. She's about to see her husband for the first time since he was arrested nearly two years ago. So she walks into the courtroom and officers bring her husband, Ran Xiaohuan, in. And she says that she sees him scanning the room, looking for her, and they lock eyes for a moment. But her reaction is just that he's barely recognizable. She says that his hair has gone almost completely gray. And he was really, really thin. She remembers that, you know, the lawyers had at least told her

that he was being fed okay in prison, but now, you know, it just looks like he was wasting away. way. And so sentencing begins and the judge begins to read out the verdict that she has been waiting so long for. And the verdict says that her husband was guilty of subversion of state power because he had published a large number of, quote, subversive articles starting in 2009. But as Bei is listening, she's realizing that it's not giving any details on what it was that he supposedly wrote, why it was subversive, or even the name of this blog where he supposedly published these articles. So the government isn't really laying out a case in the way that Bei expected them to. Exactly. So all of the answers that she thought she was going to get on this day are not there. And then she hears the sentence, which is seven years in prison. I mean, she was just shocked, she said, by how long that sentence was,

especially because she still has no details about what it was that he supposedly did. And then the sentencing is over and the bailiffs hold onto her husband's arms. They escort him outside. And she says that while he's being escorted hold onto her husband's arms. They escort him outside. And she says that while he's being escorted out, her husband is turning around, craning his neck, trying to look at her, just trying to have their eyes locked again. And she says that she could see a cry for help in his eyes. She says, you know, I realized in that moment, I just needed to save him. I needed to do everything I could, because no matter what he did, he doesn't deserve to be treated like this.

Vivian, what's in her mind at the moment? I mean, what does she think he had done? I mean, subverting state power does communicate something, right? He's run afoul politically somehow of the Chinese state. Well, she really just doesn't know. Clearly, the state has taken it really seriously because they gave him such a heavy sentence. But she's still totally in the dark. And the other thing for her is, you know, starting to go over, well, why was there so little information in this verdict? It seems like the government isn't telling the whole story. In fact, to her, it seems like the government is hiding something. And so she realizes that if she wants to find out, you know, what exactly he did and what's going on,

if she wants these answers, she's going to have to find them on her own. We'll be right back. So Vivian, how does Bay go about answering these questions she now has burning in her head what does she do after the sentencing so of course the most important thing for her to do is actually figure out what was this blog that he wrote and the verdict did say that it was an overseas website so to find it she knows that she has to go over China's internet firewall. And that's not something that she's ever really felt the need to do before, because as we said, she was pretty happy with her quiet middle class life. She didn't really think about politics. So for the first time, she learns how to install anti-censorship software.

And because she's worried that the government is monitoring her internet at home, she actually goes to an internet cafe to do this. And it takes her several hours to figure out how to get over the firewall. But once she finally gets it, the first place she goes is Google. And she doesn't have much to go on because she has so little information. So at first she's just plugging in different combinations of keywords. And when she tries 2021 missing blogger, she stumbles upon a news article asking what had happened to a blog called Program Think.

And the article says this blog had exposed the secrets of China's powerful insiders. And so as she's reading this article, she's thinking, you know, wow, could this be my husband? And then she opens the blog. And the first post from this blog dates back to January 2009. The title is basically an introduction to this blog. And it lays out this sort of dorky statement of purpose saying it's going to be a place to share software engineering tips, industry information. And the early posts are all very wonky, you know, just sort of complaining about common coding mistakes or recommending books on programming. But within a few months, the blog starts to take on this sharper edge. The blogger notes that China's censors have started blocking more websites, such as Twitter.

And the author says, this is terrible news, and it's time for me to write about something other than technology. And so soon, the blogger starts posting about all sorts of things, politics, history, literature, just a really huge range of topics. And as Bei is reading all of this, the first thing that strikes her immediately is the blogger's tone. Because in her telling, it was totally her husband's voice. It was eager to learn, eager to teach, but also, you know, sort of swaggering, sort of arrogant. And she also notices that there's this ongoing list of book recommendations that the blogger had kept updating.

And as she goes through this list, she sees that a lot of them are the same books that her husband had recommended to her and insisted that she read. So, you know, there's 1984 by George Orwell. There's Thinking Fast and Slow. By Daniel Kahneman. Yeah. And there's another clue beyond just the voice or the overlap in the book recommendations, which is the timing of certain posts. So, for example, the verdict had said that the problematic posts in the blog started in 2009, which is the same year that this blog, ProRoundThink, had been founded. And the very last post on this blog is May 9th, 2021, which is the day before Bae's husband was arrested. Wow. And so she's putting all of these things together, the voice, the interests, the timing, and she becomes absolutely convinced that Program Think is her husband.

But does all of this really feel like proof? The overlap in dates and a couple of book recommendations? Well, so it's important to note that it's basically impossible to 100% confirm if Program Think really is her husband, Ren Xiaohuan. She has not been able to speak to him and ask him about this herself. But there are these things that line up, and at least for Bei, it's enough. There are these things that line up, and at least for Bei, it's enough. She spent 20 years with him, and she is certain that this blogger and her husband are the same person. Okay, so Bei is absolutely certain she's found him. How does she process all of this?

So I asked her this, and she said that her first reaction was actually jealousy. Because remember, this blog had an intensely loyal following. Some of these posts have hundreds of comments under them. And the blogger actually took the time to respond to many of them. And as she's looking at this, you know, she's thinking, wow, my husband spent all of this time doing all of this for his readers. All of these years,

it was these people who had his attention when his study door was closed. And, you know, what did I get? All I got was a reading list. But beyond her emotional reaction, she also still just wants to understand what exactly was he writing that the government thought was so dangerous. And so over the next few weeks, she returns again and again to the blog to read it in really close detail. And she combs through all the posts that she thinks could potentially be the most

provocative or the most sensitive. And it's true that a lot of them do take on information that is sensitive in China. So for example, there are posts that explain the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. There are posts that show how the Chinese government has manipulated historical photographs to fit the narratives that it likes. There's also a series of posts where he collects information from foreign news reports about Chinese leaders' financial relationships and maps them all out for his readers. And this is really, really sensitive. The Chinese government does not like anybody to be talking about family or financial relationships among its leaders. But Bei's argument as she's taking in all of this information

is that there's a difference between criticism and subversion. And she says, you know, he never called for violence or riots. She says, you know, he never called for violence or riots. In fact, he said that his motive was to improve the state, not to subvert it. But isn't that a little bit naive on her part? I mean, clearly this is the kind of activity that would be banned by the Chinese government and the people get in trouble for all the time. Yes, you could definitely say that she's ignoring the realities of China's political climate. But technically, at least on paper, she's not wrong.

There are no explicit laws in China saying, for example, that you can't talk about Tiananmen. And so putting all this together, reading all of this, she comes to the conclusion that this blog does not cross a line. And in fact, she actually starts to believe that not only had her husband not done anything wrong, he had actually done something really important. She told me he created something that allowed people to see the outside world, to think independently, to have their own thoughts and opinions. And as she's spending her time reading over this blog, seeing what she thinks her husband was trying to teach other people, she actually starts to go on that journey a little bit herself, too.

And she says, you know, I'm realizing that there was a great man living next to me the whole time and I just didn't see it. the whole time and I just didn't see it. And one thing she said that was really moving was that, you know, as she's reading the blog, she's actually reminded of the Ran Xiaohuan, the person that she met in college, the person that she fell in love with. And she sees this person that she looked up to who was always seeking out information for himself,

charting his own path, and trying to pass that on to other people. And she said, you know, I'm not the type of person to worship anyone, but there was a little bit of that old college feeling. And I guess in some ways, you know, her husband isn't there, but it feels like she's in conversation with him because she's reading this blog and what she thinks are his writings. And it's a conversation they never really had during their marriage. Yeah, I think that's right.

And she says that she regrets not having that conversation sooner. Because for over 10 years, he had to hide a part of himself from me. There was no way for him to be honest, and probably I wouldn't have understood the things that he said anyway. But now I do. That's all in the past, and she says what matters is that now she's ready to support him in any way that she can. So Bae has this new information and, you know, in some ways new resolve. What does she do?

So if he's done nothing wrong, then in her mind, it means the government has wrongly convicted him. His case has been wrongly decided. So her first action is to hire two prominent human rights lawyers to help her appeal the case within the legal system. But she also realizes, because she's not naive, that this can't be her only track. She's seen now that there can be problems in the legal system, like the verdict that led her to this point in the first place. And so she also decides to take a more dangerous path and do something the program

think blogger never did, which is to go public with their identities. So in March of this year, she sends out a WeChat message asking for help, saying that she believes her husband is Program Think and she wants to speak out on his behalf. That's the WeChat message I saw. And she knows that it's risky to draw attention to both of them and to the blog. But her calculation or her hope is that by drawing public attention to this case, she'll create a kind of pressure on the Chinese government and show that her husband wasn't just some nobody that they can throw in jail for seven years. He was somebody with a following, somebody who can garner international attention.

And the government has never denied that her husband is program think. So they think that maybe this attention will create an incentive for the government to treat him fairly during his appeal. And where does Bae's husband's case stand now? So the appeal is still pending. The decision on that was actually supposed to come down several months ago,

but the court again kept postponing it indefinitely without giving a reason. So Vivian, how does this story map on to the broader crackdown in China that's happening? I mean, we know, of course, a lot of people have been put in jail for criticizing the government. What numbers are we talking about here? I mean, Bei's husband is one of approximately how many? Well, it's really hard to give a number on that, in part because there are untold numbers of people who have had their accounts deleted or have been silenced in some way for saying something security charges, we might not know about them because of how top secret these cases are, especially if they don't have someone like Bei to speak out for them. But what we do know is that blogs like Program Think that are written from within China and that express these kinds of thoughts are extremely, extremely rare. Program Think was essentially the last one standing.

And where does all of this leave Bei? Where is she now? And how has this whole experience changed her? Well, she describes it as an awakening. She looks back on the period before all of this happened and says, you know, her life was pretty comfortable. She accepted it for what it was. She didn't question it. And now she says, you know, maybe I was so comfortable and stuck in my way of thinking that I didn't know that I was stuck. But now things are different. She's slowly understanding the society around her.

She took this risk that she never could have imagined before, speaking out and choosing to jump the firewall. And after she did that, she stayed on the other side of it. She read more outside news. And she told me, I used to think that news from inside China and outside China would maybe use two different angles to report the same thing. I never thought that it'd be like two entirely different worlds. They told me I have a different understanding of reality now, and there's no way I can turn back.

Right. Thank you. Bye-bye. And then in early June, Bei's Twitter account disappears and she stops responding to my texts. Oh no. One of her lawyers who I got in touch with also said that he couldn't reach her. After several days, I got back in touch with him and he said that he could say that she was safe, but he couldn't comment further, which is usually a sign that the government has silenced someone. And she hasn't spoken publicly since. I looked back at one of the last texts that she had sent me before she went quiet, and it was about her determination to keep speaking out for her husband. She wrote,

I feel very strong today. I'll keep working hard. Vivian, thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Tuesday, a judge overseeing the federal prosecution of former President Donald Trump on charges he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, set his trial date for March 4th, 2024. Trump had asked to delay the trial until 2026,

after the presidential election next year, in which he's the presumed favorite to become the Republican nominee. The timing potentially brings the trial into conflict with the three other trials Trump is facing, underscoring the extraordinary complexities of Trump's legal situation. And this is going to be a nasty, nasty two days. Do what you need to do to stay safe. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis urged residents to heed evacuation orders as his state braced for what forecasters say

could be a dangerous major hurricane. The storm, Tropical Storm Idalia, was expected to intensify as it passed Cuba and headed north toward the Gulf Coast. Forecasters predict the storm will make landfall early Wednesday as a Category 3 storm with winds of 115 miles per hour. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan and Shannon Lin. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin with help from Michael Benoit. Fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Alicia Vaitube, Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Sophia Landman. And translations by Vicki Wong. And was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for the daily i'm sabrina tavernisi see you tomorrow