Tiptoeing along the red lines
Résumés
En 2016 a été fermé l’un des principaux sites internet musulmans chinois. La mort de tels sites soulève une série de questions sur la censure que subissent et exercent les musulmans chinois dans le cadre du développement de l’islam digital dans la Chine d’aujourd’hui. Ce récit suit Yahyaa, un modérateur de site musulman et rend compte de sa pratique d’autocensure. Dans le paysage numérique de ce pays, hautement réglementé, mais néanmoins poreux, quels sont les périls et les défis propres aux musulmans ? Qu’est-ce qui est tu et qu’est-ce qui parvient à se faire entendre ? Le récit de la vie de Yahyaa et de son activité de modérateur et de webmestre permet de suivre au plus près ses tactiques et les choix éthiques auxquels il a fait face dans sa gestion d’un espace musulman en ligne. Yahyaa guide en effet sa modération suivant le principe non pas de la contrainte mais d’une agentivité propre (guanli), qui lui autorise une interprétation créative des lignes rouges (hongxian) définies par les réglementations étatiques. L’histoire de Yahiyaa montre comment son art de la censure et de l’autocensure est contraint et contraignant, mais aussi émancipateur. Elle permet plus largement de comprendre le paysage numérique chinois qui se déploie sous censure, et en particulier le cyberespace créé et manié par des minorités confessionnelles tels les Chinois musulmans. L’agentivité mise en œuvre dans la censure laisse poindre un développement d’espaces publics et de sociétés civiles quel que soit le poids de la censure imposé aux citoyens.
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Narrative
1The air conditioning was incessantly working to fend off the summer heat in 2016. Yahyaa’s office was small, clean, and brightly lit. We sat next to his desktop. Yahyaa browsed the Zhongmu website—the largest Muslim-run website in mainland China—and showed me years of the online activities he carried out as a moderator. Like other moderators in the seventy-seven regional communities nationwide, Yahyaa is a Chinese Muslim who used to spend much of his time in managing online communities. “The online discussion forums are sort of like, you know,” he paused as if in search for a proper term, “a space for democratic enlightenment (minzhu qimeng).”
2At first, Yahyaa’s seeming optimism about the democratic potentiality of cyberspace puzzled me. Since the introduction of the Internet in China in 1987, the censorship system has developed into a complicated assemblage of surveillance, blockade, leakage, diversion, friction, and disjuncture. The Chinese government has built a massive-scale, sophisticated information-filtering system, which is also known as the Great Fire Wall (GFW). This virtual wall aims to prevent China’s Internet users from accessing information from abroad, though studies have shown that many people used tools such as virtual private networking (VPN) to “jump the wall.”
- 1 Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, University of (...)
- 2 For reports on Islamophobia in China in the 2010s, see James Leibold, “Blogging Alone: China, the (...)
3Besides blocking information through the fire wall and through official laws and regulations, politically sensitive topics are among the “red lines” (hongxian) that most people try to tiptoe along. Such topics, which include criticism of top party leaders, collective expressions, ethnic minorities, and territory-related issues, have also been constantly censored on social media platforms. As a result, self-censorship has become what Michel de Certeau calls ordinary “tactics” in the everyday life of many Internet users in China.1 Such practices have been particularly salient for ordinary Muslims in China today owing to growing Islamophobia and the strengthened digital surveillance of the Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.2
4Spotting my expression of curiosity at his words, Yahyaa smiled and further explained what he and other moderators had tried to achieve through online space. A long timeline appeared on his webpage. Yahyaa recounted both the online and offline community activities that he had organized between 2012 and 2016. The webpage started to show a virtual archive of individual and collective memories of daily life in the local Muslim community.
Fig. 2. A plaque from a mosque in Lanzhou, May 2016

It says (from top to bottom, left to right): Four Maintenance; Maintain the dignity of law; Maintain the rights of people; Maintain the ethnic unity; Maintain the national unity. By the CCP Chengguan District’s United Front Work Department and Chengguan District Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau
Photo: Jing Wang
5Several months after our summer conversation, the Zhongmu website was permanently shut down in December 2016. It is reported that some overseas Chinese students posted an open letter to the PRC’s President on the website. Though not directly addressing the Muslim question in China, the letter crossed the red lines by calling on Xi Jinping to resign. Yet neither the website managers in Lanzhou nor any government officials publicly explained the sudden death of the website. What mattered to people like Yahyaa most, however, was the disintegration of its extensive cyber communities. The discussion forum that Yahyaa showed me no longer existed. When I texted him shortly after the website’s closure, he simply responded, “Yes, it’s closed. All contents gone. I don’t know when it will reopen.”
6The brevity of Yahyaa’s last response stayed with me. Despite the closure of the website, he has continued to be active online and to post articles on other social media platforms. Given the hardening ethnic and religious policies in China today, the life and death of China’s most influential Muslim website thus prompt us to learn more about ordinary Chinese Muslims’ use of digital technology under constraints. In a sense, Yahyaa’s continuous efforts to be heard online pose urgent questions beyond his own struggle: what does it mean to creatively engage with the ever-evolving censorship system in China? In this highly regulated yet porous digital landscape, what are the unique risks and challenges an ordinary Muslim may be facing?
***
- 3 Dru C. Gladney, Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality, New York, H (...)
7In 1976, Yahyaa was born in a Hui Muslim family in the Northwestern city of Anchang. Hui Muslims are the largest Muslim ethnic minority, with a population of over 10 million in China, while the second largest are the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the far Northwestern province of Xinjiang. Unlike the Uyghurs, Hui Muslims are ethnically indistinguishable from Han Chinese and live all across the country, mostly speaking China’s various regional dialects.3
Fig. 3. An Arabic-style mosque under renovation in a northwestern city in Gansu province, May 2016

The scaffolding in the minarets suggest the constraining structure toward Muslims in China.
Photo: Jing Wang
8In the city where Yahyaa grew up, the local Muslim community began to see a religious revival in the 1980s. Old mosques reopened. New mosques were constructed in the Arabic style with green, onion-shaped domes and concrete structures. Studying Arabic in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia became a new trend among some local residents. Meanwhile, economic reforms led to a booming tourist industry. Many local Muslims became small vendors and restaurant owners specializing in halal food. Yet Yahyaa’s family stories both resemble and diverge from these trends.
9Yahyaa’s grandparents were devoted, practicing Muslims for most of their lives. But his parents had little chance to practice Islam. Rather, their life choices were profoundly shaped by the political and social transformations that took place between the 1950s and 1970s. Yahyaa’s parents grew up in the heyday of Marxism-Leninism in China. Muslim women were required by the state to get an education and to become socialist workers. Both of Yahyaa’s parents, together with their siblings, worked in state-owned factories located in the city. After the Cultural Revolution, they managed to keep their jobs until retirement. Owing to his parents’ work schedule, Yahyaa grew up with his grandparents. As he later told me, it was like “living between two worlds”—one was “very much influenced by his grandfather and his library full of Islamic classics,” and the other was deeply shaped by a socialist temporality even after reform and opening-up started in 1978.
10Under the influence of his grandfather, Yahyaa learned the basics of Islam by attending some local classes of Qur’anic recitation and prayer during school vacations. He went to the kindergarten, as well as the primary and middle schools in the Muslim area. Thanks to his outstanding performance in class, Yahyaa enrolled in a prestigious high school in the city when few of his Hui contemporaries were able to make it. Later, he became one of the few Hui students who passed the national entrance examination and attended university in the mid-1990s.
- 4 IDG News Service, “China Celebrates 10 Years of Being Connected to the Internet,” Computerworld, M (...)
11From early on, Chinese research institutes and universities have been hotbeds of digital technology development. When Yahyaa was finding his way in college, China had just begun to develop a permanent Internet base. In 1986, the Universität Karlsruhe in Germany helped Chinese researchers and engineers to establish the China Academic Network. One year later, the first international email was sent from China to Germany, stating, “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world.” In 1994, China saw the establishment of its first web server. Meanwhile, the US company Sprint collaborated with Chinese institutions to open the first direct Internet link.4 It was amidst this dizzying array of technological development that Yahyaa became interested in the Internet and media technology. As a result, he chose computer engineering as his major at university.
12However, his first job after graduation was unrelated to his major. “The state was still allocating jobs for university graduates at that time,” he recalled, “I was given a job in an insurance company which belonged to the banking system.” After two years, he quit. “It was a stable job in a state-owned company, much like my parents’ jobs. But it was so boring, you know. Every day, you just made some tea in the morning and read newspapers. I could see no future.” Later, he found a job in a software developing company in Shanghai on condition that he could run the Northwestern branch based in Anchang. He also helped develop the company’s Xinjiang branch between 2004 and 2006. In total, he worked for the company for fifteen years until 2012. Beginning in 2013, Yahyaa collaborated with several friends to start a travel agency that mainly caters to Muslim consumers. When I first met him in 2016, he was busy preparing for the next trip to Jerusalem.
13When he quit his job as a software manager in 2012, Yahyaa took a year off to explore alternative career paths before embarking on his travel business. He started to post articles online and participate more in offline activities through the Anchang online community hosted on the Zhongmu website. Thanks to his knowledge of digital technology and active participation in online discussions, Yahyaa soon attracted the attention of the website’s administrators in Lanzhou. At their request, he agreed to take up responsibilities as a moderator of the Anchang branch.
- 5 Wai-Yip Ho, “Islam, China and the Internet: Negotiating Residual Cyberspace between Hegemonic Patr (...)
- 6 David A. Palmer, “Cyberspace and the Emerging Chinese Religious Landscape—Preliminary Observations (...)
14To Chinese Muslims like Yahyaa, the voices of Muslim minorities were largely underrepresented in the state-run media and propaganda system before the advent of the Internet. From the 1990s, the new information technology enabled the emergence of China’s Islamic cyber environments which mediate between local communities and the global umma.5 Local-based, multi-ethnic Muslim groups have begun to create their own space of communication in the highly fragmented cyberspace. Various Chinese-language Muslim websites started to appear in the 1990s and grew quickly to number around seventy in the next decade.6 The Zhongmu website, established in 2003 in the city of Lanzhou in Northwest China, is one among them. At the time of its abrupt closure in 2016, it was one of the most influential Muslim websites in mainland China.
15Yahyaa as well as the Zhongmu website managers attributed the success of the website largely to the model of the local community. As Yahyaa told me, “There were some other Muslim websites larger than ours at the beginning. But later they all shrank in size. Some just died out. But we survived, grew, and became one of the most influential websites because of our local communities all around China.” Indeed, one prominent feature was the local online communities. There were seventy-seven local communities located under four large geographical subsections—the Southwestern District, Northern District, Southern District, and Northwestern District to which the Anchang community belonged.
- 7 Dale F. Eickelman & Jon W. Anderson, New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Bl (...)
- 8 For more information, see the official websites at www.norislam.com (for simplified Chinese langua (...)
16This structural set-up creates an extended network of civic participation in public spaces, a digital Islamic phenomenon widely observed in the West and the Middle East yet understudied in the context of East Asia.7 Another highly influential Muslim website is “The Light of Islam” (Yisilan zhi guang), the first Chinese-language Muslim website established in Hong Kong in November 1999. Wai-Yip Ho, through his online ethnography and offline interviews, observes that websites such as “The Light of Islam” have connected Chinese Muslims to the global umma while reaching users in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Sinophone diasporas.8 Similar to “The Light of Islam,” the Zhongmu website has enabled people like Yahyaa to find what they call a more “meaningful” space than other non-Muslim Chinese websites. Yet unlike the Hong Kong-based website, the Zhongmu website is much weaker in its global outreach infrastructure. Instead, it is oriented toward local communities in mainland China and more heavily monitored by China’s censorship system.
17Thus, cultivating a vibrant local community while tactically dealing with the state censorship system has been a constant struggle, one which Yahyaa has been experiencing through his position as a moderator. Throughout my fieldwork between 2014 and 2016, I regularly browsed the online discussion forum in the Anchang community, which Yahyaa moderated. It contained constant updates about the local Muslim community’s various offline activities. People shared information such as debates about anti-alcohol campaigns, information on the annual hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), complaints about neighborhood disputes, and postings of job opportunities. Once, Qin Ahong, a local imam in Anchang, mentioned to me, “Yahyaa is well known here. Many people log in to check what’s going on in our community.”
18Besides the local Muslim community members, these people also included local government officials and Internet censors. To Yahyaa, state regulation and self-censorship always go hand in hand in daily online maintenance. In fact, he tried not to keep all complaints inside his community. When official censorship was unavoidable, he saw self-exposure as an opportunity for community improvement. “Now all the Muslim websites, especially local communities like us, are being watched. I hear that, for example, the first thing for some officials in our district is to log online and look at what happened in the local community. Is it totally a bad thing? There are certain things we cannot resolve, either. If someone posts about illegal encroachment of public space or traffic jams, someone else [from the government] might take care of it. If no one responds to the needs of our community, it is not necessarily a good thing.”
- 9 The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress issued the “Cyber Security Law of the Peo (...)
19When asked how he moderated the community’s online activities, Yahyaa smiled, “The Zhongmu website company has a few guidelines stipulated by the state [including vague but overarching stipulations such as not to impinge negatively on national security and unity].9 If anything goes against the country’s laws or involves malicious insults, moderators must immediately delete the posted messages.” Then, he paused and added, “Well, it sounds really simple if you just take it by the literal meaning.”
20“Literal meaning?” I pursued.
21“Do you know what is meant by ‘malicious insults’ or what is really against the country’s laws?” Yahyaa looked at me from behind his desk, “For example, two Muslims are calling each other names and using some nasty words. Is it a malicious insult or against any law in China? I don’t really think so. But I still selectively delete those posts because it is not ethically compatible with being a good Muslim. But what if a Muslim wants to criticize the misconduct of a local mosque? He would find our online community the best channel to express his concern without being identified. I would not take down these kinds of posts even if someone else uses his connections and asks me to delete them as a personal favor. This is my principle of guanli.”
22Rather than censorship (shencha), Yahyaa constantly used the term guanli. While shencha often implies a top-down approach to censorship, guanli conveys a sense of bottom-up agency in relation to managing online content. As a de facto censor in the online Muslim community, Yahyaa did not take the state censorship rules literally but interpreted them based on the principle of guanli, which was also shared by other community moderators and website company managers.
- 10 Dominic Boyer, “Censorship as a Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media (...)
23This emphasis on guanli reminds us of the work of censors in the German Democratic Republic. As Dominic Boyer points out, the censors exercised their agency vis-à-vis the state ideological apparatus to interpret and apply rules according to specific situations.10 Similarly, Yahyaa emphasized how he had applied basic civility and the Islamic ethical conduct of being a good Muslim through the principle of guanli. This principle also extended from the online community to offline activities. The “Ramadan Gift Package” project was an apt example.
24The Ramadan Gift Package project was initiated across different Zhongmu communities in 2012. The idea was based on zakāt (tianke), the alms tax levied to benefit the poor and the needy. Each participant was allocated 200 yuan (about 25.7 euros) per package for the purchase of basic supplies such as meat, oil, flour, and rice. Then, each package would be redistributed to fellow Muslims who were in need of it during Ramadan, a month of fasting observed by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the first revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad. The recipients included those who were socially marginalized and economically disadvantaged at home and abroad. These ranged from migrant workers to people with disabilities, widows, orphans, and those who suffered from war or famine in Afghanistan and Syria.
25The project did not go well in the first couple of years. Yahyaa remembered, “In 2012, we only received twenty-nine packages. It’s online and people all use pseudonyms. I use my own Qur’anic name, yes. But still, that’s sort of a pseudonym online, you see? Our community needs time to develop mutual trust. That is a real test of our faith and abilities.”
Fig. 4. A Chinese-style mosque with red plaques in praise of harmony (left), ethnic unity, social progress, patriotism, and love of religion (middle), and national glory (right)

Photo: Jing Wang
26Pseudonymity is a double-edged sword in the online community. While it protects users’ real identities, it also conditions them to distrust others in terms of their motivations and intentions. To cultivate Muslim users’ trust, Zhongmu administrators and moderators worked together to design a more open and transparent procedure for implementing the project. The moderators would oversee the following responsibilities in their own communities: collecting money; making donor lists; contacting mosques and Muslim communities in need of help; compiling a list of qualified recipients; organizing volunteers to send the packages to identified recipients; tracking the flow of money; documenting the processes; and, finally, writing a detailed report after Ramadan and presenting it to the Zhongmu website administrators for overall evaluation.
27Moreover, when online and offline activities become intimately interwoven, the red lines of different juridical and institutional branches also intersect with each other to create new zones of friction. Besides the cyber security law, China’s new Charity Law dictates individually initiated donation as illegal. The latter raises the standard for social organizations to be registered as philanthropic associations or groups authorized to carry out philanthropic projects. Although the Ramadan Gift Package was framed as a philanthropic project, such religiously based projects could not function as charitable foundations so as to retain funding for future use.
28Yahyaa, other moderators, and the website administrators were highly aware of these murky zones both online and offline. As the Ramadan Gift Package project grew in size and influence, Yahyaa did not stop worrying about the potential risks associated with the online Muslim communities. How could he prove himself as a trustworthy Muslim in handling the flows of money and information? How could he maintain the transparency of philanthropic information online without incurring suspicion from the state? How far does online censorship extend in terms of monitoring and regulating related offline activities? ... These questions constantly came up as he organized gift packages every Ramadan.
29The bottom line was to never keep money in individual moderators’ hands or in the account of the website administrators, using the Internet as a tunnel to let resources flow to those in need. “We keep a low profile online. If someone does it too conspicuously, a moderator should take heed of that. After all, it is our zakāt. Nothing to brag about. Neither I nor the Zhongmu website retains any monetary donations. If we do that [retain money in an individual or organization’s account], it is officially illegal … Like many things in China, laws say one thing whereas people still do whatever they need to do. But the risk is that everything we do is posted online. Once they want to catch us, they have the evidence. To tell you the truth, we have to tiptoe along the red lines all the time.”
30Even though the official laws, regulations, and some politically sensitive topics serve as red lines for self-censorship, the problem with such red lines is that one never really knows where they are until one transgresses them and gets censored. Such line crossing is prevalent not only in the highly controlled digital space but also in everyday life under an authoritarian regime like China’s. Being a Chinese Muslim deeply engaged with digital Islam, Yahyaa knows and conforms to the rules. Yet he also tiptoes along the red lines through self-censorship—or in his own words, the principle of guanli—to reinterpret what can or should be circulated publicly. As a Muslim moderator, he is both a censor and an individual whose words and actions are being censored and surveilled. In other words, his censorious agency is both constrained and empowering.
31This multifaceted agency has significant implications for understanding the censored digital landscape in China, particularly in relation to the cyberspace created and navigated by faith-based minorities such as the Chinese Muslims I have focused on here. Such censorious agency holds promise for the development of public spaces and civic societies in contemporary China, no matter how constraining the current censorship that has been imposed upon its citizens. Let us recall Yahyaa’s characterization of the Muslim website as “a space for democratic enlightenment.” Although he is well aware of formal censoring regulations, he still sees potentiality in promoting a Chinese Islamic cyberspace.
32How can one tiptoe along the red lines while creatively cultivating an ethical landscape of faith-based communities? It is a question to which Yahyaa and ordinary Chinese Muslims like him continue to search for answers. Chinese Muslims’ self-censorship—when interpreted through the principle of guanli—is closely involved with their own interpretations of state discourses and Islamic ethics in everyday life. This ethical approach thus creates a co-evolving ecology of digital Islam and offline communities.
Notes
1 Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984.
2 For reports on Islamophobia in China in the 2010s, see James Leibold, “Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion?”, The Journal of Asian Studies, no. 70/4, 2011, pp. 1023–1041. Also see Haiyun Ma, “The Anti-Islamic Movement in China,” Hudson Institute, June 23, 2019, https://www.hudson.org/research/15095-the-anti-islamic-movement-in-china, accessed on November 13, 2019. For a more recent update of the situation in Xinjiang and the government’s discourse, see James A. Millward, “‘Reeducating’ Xinjiang’s Muslims,” New York Review of Books, February 2, 2019.
3 Dru C. Gladney, Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality, New York, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998.
4 IDG News Service, “China Celebrates 10 Years of Being Connected to the Internet,” Computerworld, May 14, 2004, https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/128099/china_celebrates_10_years_being_connected_internet/, accessed on November 13, 2019.
5 Wai-Yip Ho, “Islam, China and the Internet: Negotiating Residual Cyberspace between Hegemonic Patriotism and Connectivity to the Ummah,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, no. 30/1, 2010, pp. 63–79.
6 David A. Palmer, “Cyberspace and the Emerging Chinese Religious Landscape—Preliminary Observations,” in Françoise Mengin (ed.), Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information (CERI Series in International Relations and Political Economy), New York, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2004.
7 Dale F. Eickelman & Jon W. Anderson, New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003.
8 For more information, see the official websites at www.norislam.com (for simplified Chinese language) and www.islam.org.hk (for traditional Chinese language).
9 The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress issued the “Cyber Security Law of the People's Republic of China” (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wangluo anquan fa) on November 7, 2016. It has become effective since June 1, 2017. For the detailed content, see http://www.miit.gov.cn/n1146295/n1146557/n1146614/c5345009/content.html, last accessed on November 13, 2019.
10 Dominic Boyer, “Censorship as a Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, no. 45/3, 2003, pp. 511–545.
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
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Titre | Fig. 1. Three men walking toward a mosque’s prayer hall, summer 2017 |
Crédits | Photo: Jing Wang |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/docannexe/image/19439/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 179k |
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Titre | Fig. 2. A plaque from a mosque in Lanzhou, May 2016 |
Légende | It says (from top to bottom, left to right): Four Maintenance; Maintain the dignity of law; Maintain the rights of people; Maintain the ethnic unity; Maintain the national unity. By the CCP Chengguan District’s United Front Work Department and Chengguan District Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau |
Crédits | Photo: Jing Wang |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/docannexe/image/19439/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 274k |
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Titre | Fig. 3. An Arabic-style mosque under renovation in a northwestern city in Gansu province, May 2016 |
Légende | The scaffolding in the minarets suggest the constraining structure toward Muslims in China. |
Crédits | Photo: Jing Wang |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/docannexe/image/19439/img-3.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 149k |
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Titre | Fig. 4. A Chinese-style mosque with red plaques in praise of harmony (left), ethnic unity, social progress, patriotism, and love of religion (middle), and national glory (right) |
Crédits | Photo: Jing Wang |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/docannexe/image/19439/img-4.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 223k |
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Jing Wang, « Tiptoeing along the red lines », Terrain [En ligne], 72 | 2019, mis en ligne le 21 novembre 2019, consulté le 24 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/19439 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.19439
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