Another China policy critic vanishes from social media ahead of party congress

Weibo account of respected criminal law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing wiped clean

Lao Dongyan is latest policy critic to either voluntarily tone down public opinions or have them removed

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Lao Dongyan, a prominent China policy critic and law professor with Tsinghua University, had her social media account emptied last week. She is the latest intellectual to be silenced in China, a month before the party congress. Photo: Baidu

Published: 5:08pm, 20 Sep 2022Updated: 7:46pm, 20 Sep 2022

When followers of Lao Dongyan, a criminal law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, clicked onto her Weibo social media account last week, they made an unnerving discovery – her entire account had been wiped clean.

Lao, a prominent China policy critic with more than 400,000 followers, had become one of the latest intellectuals to be silenced online, one month before the Communist Party is set to convene its 20th national congress.

It remains unclear how or why Lao’s account on Weibo, the major Chinese microblog platform, was emptied and her posts taken down. She refused to comment on the Weibo incident when contacted by the South China Morning Post.

Over the past two years, Lao had become well-known for her critical stance on abuse of Covid-19 restrictions by various mid- and low-level governments. She has argued that those abuses have threatened the rule of law and have changed the power structure in China.

Aside from posting her opinions on online media like Weibo, Lao has frequently spoken at academic seminars and written columns in Chinese media outlets.

Lao is also a vocal critic of China’s widespread use of facial recognition technology. In May, she openly questioned a move by Beijing’s traffic regulation authority to merge transport payment data with the personal information of passengers, such as health code status and facial recognition. Lao was concerned that the unification of data from the transport and healthcare systems could allow for the specific identities and social relationships of individuals to be monitored anytime, anywhere.