Also in China news: The ChiComs have canceled Mrs. Derbyshire!

My wife graduated from college in China in 1983. She married me and came to join me in New York three years later. She kept in touch with her college classmates somehow, though — mainly by snail mail—all through the eighties and nineties.

With the rise of the internet around the turn of the century, she was able to email them. Then, when Chinese social media came up in the early 2010s, she joined the most popular platform, WeChat. She set up a WeChat group for herself and her friends in China, and they gossiped away happily for ten years.

Then, a few days ago, she couldn’t access the group. The ChiComs have wiped it out.

From WeChat conversations relayed back to me by my spouse over the years I don’t believe that she and her classmates were plotting to overthrow the Chinese government. I don’t think they talked Chinese politics at all.

My guess is that this is just a further enlargement of ChiCom xenophobia. They don’t want their citizens having anything to do with foreigners at all. It’s also probably just technical advance: their Artificial Intelligence algorithms constantly being refined to capture more and more of internet traffic that the authorities don’t approve of.

Merrick Garland’s FBI is looking on with keen interest.

In the same general zone, the ChiComs are trying to kill the YouTube channel China Uncensored.

If you don’t know the channel, it is absolutely the best place to go for a quick fifteen-minute check on China-related issues. China Uncensored is an offshoot of the Epoch Times, which is itself an offshoot of the Falun Gong movement.

They are of course hostile to the ChiComs; but they present their commentary with wit and style. I don’t agree with all their opinions, but they’re well-informed, not vituperative, and when their factual knowledge overlaps with mine, they are correct.

The ChiComs naturally want to destroy China Uncensored. They launch regular bot-swarms at YouTube, complaining that the channel’s vidcasts are age-inappropriate, which is ridiculous. The bot-swarms, however, cause YouTube’s algorithms to blank out the channel’s short and occasional ad spots, killing revenue.

You’d think this would be something YouTube could deal with, but they don’t seem in a hurry to do so. The October 22nd edition of China Uncensored explains in more detail and tells you how you can help. Please check it out.