A Month (Mostly) Without WeChat
On February 8, 2020, I was forced to abandon a WeChat account I’d used for ten years. Over the following month, I drastically reduced my WeChat usage. Here’s a record of how my mindset shifted, and some reflections.
What Happened
Around noon on February 8, I was on a WeChat voice call with colleagues when a dialog box suddenly appeared, telling me my account had been forcibly logged out. (The timestamp happened to be 4:04 --- ha.)
I couldn’t help yelling an expletive. I re-entered my password to log back in and was met with: “Permanently banned. No appeal.”
I forced myself to calm down and finished the meeting on QQ voice instead.
I’d heard of permanent WeChat bans before, but never imagined it would happen to me. Just recently, I’d spent six solid hours organizing my contact list --- over 1,800 friends, each one tagged.
PS: WeChat’s contact and tagging features are truly abysmal.
PPS: I never segment my Moments posts. The tags were just so I could find people.
I was devastated. At the time I had no idea what being banned actually meant --- could the account be recovered? Could I export my data? Could I re-add friends?
One Hour Later
I Googled everything I could find and reached two conclusions:
- The ban was indeed irreversible. The old account was dead; time for a new one.
- Since there was still money in my WeChat wallet, I could temporarily log in, which meant I could recover my friend list.
Meanwhile, a friend connected me with someone who worked at WeChat’s parent group, who offered to look into it.
As for work, I had no choice but to switch to a WeChat account I’d originally registered for my dog. I wonder what my colleagues thought when they saw a puppy avatar in their meeting.
Two Hours Later
My friend came back with the verdict: the account was gone for good. It had been flagged and nuked by order from above.
Honestly, I don’t mean to sound self-important, but how does a ten-year-old personal account get nuked? Yet the people at the WeChat Bureau said, and I paraphrase: the decision has been made at the highest level --- yours is the one to go. So all I could do was recite an old poem:
Born of the same root, why such haste to destroy each other?
The First Few Days
That evening, after a good meal, I accepted the situation and registered a new WeChat account.
I used Instagram, iMessage, and other channels to send my new WeChat ID to a handful of friends. They spread the word, and many people re-added me.
The whole process was actually… kind of fun? Because everyone would message me grinning: “LMAO did your WeChat really get nuked? My condolences hahahaha.” Some friends I hadn’t talked to in ages reached out again. It was like being a kid who face-plants and ends up in the hospital --- everyone comes to visit, sees you’re fine, and immediately starts roasting you: “You absolute idiot.”
I, too, felt like an absolute idiot. scratches head
But the new account hit some snags. Because I was adding too many people too quickly, my friends started seeing warnings: “Caution: this person may be a scammer.” So I began exchanging secret codes with old friends to verify my identity --- which was also kind of fun.
Then I re-followed Huang Zheng’s official account, and was flagged as part of a bot network inflating read counts. Banned again. Seriously --- Huang Zheng’s account, which posts once a year with genuinely substantive content, needs fake followers?
One Week Later
Through technical means, I managed to export a list of friends from my old account. I was planning to start re-adding them, from A to Z.
But then I stalled. This procrastination has lasted until now.
Partly because the new account had rate limits on adding friends, and I had no idea what the threshold was, so I tread carefully.
The other part was psychological. I have a long history of battling procrastination, and through that struggle I’ve come to understand something:
If I’m putting something off, it means I haven’t thought it through --- either I haven’t clarified the benefit of doing it, or there’s some latent risk that makes me resist it.
This is genuine wisdom, friends. Think about it: if something has clear benefits, would you not do it? Or, you recognize the benefit but can’t see a clear path to execution, so the undefined workload looms before you like a mountain in the dark, its sheer pressure keeping you frozen.
So why was I procrastinating on re-adding friends? Because I’d realized something:
This WeChat account doesn’t belong to me.
Yes, I registered it. My phone number and bank card are linked to it. I set a password unique to me. But it doesn’t actually belong to me. It can be taken away at any moment --- for a chat message, a Moments post, or even joining a group where I never said a word.
And emotionally, this new account was nothing like the old one. The old one held ten years of chat history, every Moments interaction with friends since 2013. The new one was blank. I simply couldn’t feel attached to it.
How could I invest time and energy in a WeChat account that isn’t mine?
Clinging to old bonds so much that you can’t start over --- doesn’t getting your account nuked sound a lot like a breakup?
A Discovery
So I kept putting off opening that spreadsheet full of friends. I fumbled along with the new account, constantly discovering I’d lost all my best meme stickers. All I could send was: I know that feel bro.jpg
Then one day, a post appeared in my Reeder: a blog article about the differences between WeChat’s privacy policies for Chinese and international users. In the footnotes (all praise to authors who cite their sources), there was a guide on how to register a GDPR-compliant WeChat account.
The EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) aims to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, protect the data privacy of all EU citizens, and reshape how organizations across the region store and process personal data. The regulation took effect on May 25, 2018. Among its many provisions, the one relevant here is: any company operating in the EU must provide users with the option to export their data. Violations can result in fines of up to 4% of annual global revenue, or 20 million euros.
The author of that article was already in my RSS subscriptions, but I’d subscribed after the post was published, so I’d never seen it.
Following the guide, I quickly obtained a GDPR-compliant WeChat account with data export capabilities!
I was thrilled!
That night I emailed both bloggers to thank them. One replied instantly; the other wrote back a long, thoughtful response the next day. I felt something almost like a kinship between kindred minds.
But by the next morning, this account was also banned --- something about an illegitimate registration source. I followed the appeal process and got it unblocked. The fact that they’d even set up roadblocks for this was, frankly, breathtaking.
The Past Month
I still haven’t started re-adding friends from A to Z. The reason is that I haven’t figured things out. I can’t decide whether to use the regular new account or the GDPR one going forward, and both are new accounts that need time to “mature.”
Plus, work and life have been busy enough that I haven’t had much spare time, so I just let it sit.
But I did do one other thing --- I set up my own independent blog: (the one you’re reading now)
Anemoi Broadcasting https://anemoi.xyzMigrated to this site
My own domain. RSS support. Even a favicon! (Threw together some shapes in Sketch.)
Everyone’s welcome to subscribe. From now on, all my writing will be published here first; the official account will be a day behind (possibly many days behind).
This website is entirely mine. It uses no services hosted within the Great Firewall. No censorship, no deleted posts, no account bans.
If you’re interested in building your own independent blog, leave a comment --- I can write a tutorial.
Reflections
Getting nuked and the month that followed gave me some things to think about.
The Relationship Between People and Their Tools
People create tools, and tools in turn reshape people.
This month of mostly living without WeChat actually felt… good. No more interruptions from short messages. No more fragmented official account articles. Turns out I didn’t need to be in that many group chats either.
My time became much more whole. With longer unbroken stretches came more thinking --- deeper thinking.
Phones now track weekly app usage and screen time. Check how much time you spend on WeChat. I guarantee you’ll be startled.
Human Social Connections
Marx wrote: the essence of a human being is not an abstraction inherent in any single individual; in reality, it is the ensemble of social relations.
To be fair, WeChat does a genuinely good job of maximizing people’s social connections. It’s incredibly convenient for sharing everything with everyone.
But consider the flip side: all of your social relationships live inside one commercial company’s product, and that company never states its rules clearly (for instance, how many friends can you add per day before getting banned?). And that commercial company answers to an even less transparent authority above it.
Starting to feel a bit Leviathan, isn’t it?
My countermeasure has been to build my own Personal CRM system --- specifically, a contact database with tags, rollups, and relations, storing friends’ WeChat IDs, phone numbers, emails, and other contact methods, as insurance against losing touch.
I’ve even thought about turning it into a product --- maybe a mini-app. Would anyone use it?
Do I Really Need a GDPR-Compliant WeChat?
A GDPR-compliant WeChat account --- so what? It can still be banned.
This isn’t really a WeChat problem. It’s about the broader environment of public discourse and the rule of law.
Am I Really an Idiot?
I later found out that many people had their accounts nuked on February 8. I now have a pretty good idea why.
Was it my own stupidity? My refusal to stay silent about what happened to a fellow citizen got my WeChat nuked, and the consequences fell entirely on me. But if we all stay silent, how will things ever get better?
Maybe you’d say: look, a month has passed, everyone’s mostly forgotten, your refusal to stay silent didn’t change anything, your account was nuked for nothing.
For nothing? Maybe.
“I have seen the ocean. I cannot pretend I haven’t.”
Finally
Friends, please be patient while I get the new WeChat account established and slowly re-add everyone. Don’t rush me…
2020-02-03 @Beijing