Share this contentTAIPEI: More than a year after two amateur computer coders were taken by police from their Beijing homes, they are set to be tried on Tuesday in a case that illustrates the Chinese government's growing online censorship and heightened sensitivity to any deviation from the official narrative on its COVID-19 response.
But what got them in trouble with authorities appears to be archiving articles showing an alternative to China's official narrative about its pandemic response just as the country started facing questions over its handling of the initial outbreak.In keeping the censored articles and providing a place for them to be discussed, the two run afoul of increasingly strict regulations in an already stifling online environment under President Xi Jinping.
"A lot of things happened in China then that made us very upset, and he may have been affected by that," said his girlfriend, Tang Hongbo. She was also detained but released after 23 days when it became clear she did not know much about the project."Every day we were looking at the Internet, and we were all in this tragic mindset.
"It's not just the 'real name' system – the deletions of posts, the bans, have reached a point that’s really shocking domestically," Cai wrote in another 2018 post. "He wants information to flow. He wants quality information to flow freely," said Chen Kun, his older brother."We have this type of value deep in our bones, the independence of discourse on the Internet and the free transmission of information."Cai and Chen met in 2011 at a summer camp hosted by Liren College, a socially conscious educational program.
"They were told that Chen Mei has family members abroad, has provided foreign organisations with information about the pandemic and is basically handing a knife over to the enemy," said Chen Kun, who now lives in France.