![]() ![]() But since January 2022, r/China_irl’s subscriber count has still tripled.Īccording to Thomas Qitong Cao, a PhD candidate at Stanford University studying information and political behavior, the Covid-19 pandemic might have contributed to the surge in Chinese Reddit users. Because Reddit is banned in China, users in the country have to use virtual private networks (VPNs) to jump the firewall. As China has tightened its grip on online speech, the platform has become an unlikely refuge for banned Chinese internet groups such as Kai Fang Qu, Japanophile community Kanagawa Chonglang Hub, and popular gossip forum Goose Group which migrated from Chinese social media platform Douban. R/China_irl is one of many popular Chinese-language subreddits that have emerged on Reddit in recent years. Popular discussion topics include the recent Texas mall shootings and whether or not TikTok will get banned. Since then, the subreddit, known as r/China_irl in English, has grown into one of the largest Chinese-language subreddits on the platform, with over 180,000 subscribers. Like the film’s protagonists, they too were escaping a hostile environment in search of a new habitat. ![]() Inspired by the recent science-fiction blockbuster, The Wandering Earth, they created a subreddit and named it “Wandering KFQ” in Chinese. Shortly after the ban, Kai Fang Qu members migrated to an alternative home outside of the Great Firewall - the American website Reddit. On Hupu, stereotyped as being dominated by young, college-educated men venting about their dating struggles and debating NBA results, the forum had been an outlier - a rare community where participants discussed current events, and more serious topics such as the war in Ukraine and China-U.S. Kai Fang Qu was part of Chinese sports commentary platform Hupu, which shut down the forum in a move to curb politically sensitive content.Īn avid member of Kai Fang Qu, Cao was sad to see his community disappear. Jeff Cao, a finance worker from China, still remembers when the popular discussion forum Kai Fang Qu, or “Open Realm,” was banned from the country’s internet four years ago. ![]()
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