China’s podcasters wary of censors as popularity grows
- Chinese podcasters cover a range of niche topics, from hi-fi sound systems to user interface design
- ‘No one is making podcasts for the mainstream audience. Everyone just does what they’re interested in,’ one producer says
“The one thing I learned from this,” Wan said. “Don’t write things down. When in doubt, say it, but don’t write it down.”
Chinese filmmaker Du Bin detained in Beijing before Taiwan book launch
But the same trick might not work nowadays. The narrow escape in 2016 was a fluke. A police officer knocked on her door one Sunday evening and took her to the police station. At the station, two officers interrogating her were not the ones who had found her supposedly inflammatory comments.
“At the time, it was very funny,” Wan said. “They asked me what I do, I said, ‘I do podcasts,’ then they asked me ‘what’s a podcast?’”
While China’s online surveillance network is backed by advanced technology, it is often enforced by people unaware of the latest social trends.
Wan said the police officers’ ignorance of podcasting played to her advantage, as podcasts that existed solely in audio form could avoid censors entirely.
But as the medium grows in popularity, its content may fall victim to the pressures of commercialisation and censorship. Podcasters are concerned that more money and corporate sponsorship will drown out niche, individual voices, and that its increasingly mainstream status will attract more government censors.
“I think the space is getting smaller and smaller,” said Yang Yi, co-host of award-winning podcast Left/Right and founder of JustPod, a Chinese podcasting company.
“If a podcaster is podcasting for this reason [free speech], they can stop now. Because it will be scrubbed within a year or a year and a half.”
Chinese podcasters cover a range of niche topics, from hi-fi sound systems to user interface design. Yang estimates that although the number of corporate-sponsored podcasts is growing, as many as 90 per cent of podcasters are independent or amateur. The rest are produced by big companies, particularly venture capital firms, and he expects this number will increase.
“Companies are now saying ‘I want my own podcast’, in the same way they wanted their own WeChat or Weibo [accounts] in the past,” he said.
As the audience becomes bigger and the commercialisation goes on, this space will get more cramped
The industry is booming. In 2018, a US report estimated the Chinese podcasting industry was worth US$3 billion a year. In the future, Yang believes it will attract more investment, podcasters and attention.
But more listeners meant stricter censorship, he said.
Also, as more money pours into the industry, competition for listeners will become more intense, which could push producers towards more mainstream topics.
“No one is making podcasts for the mainstream audience. Everyone just does what they’re interested in. [But] I can’t say whether this will be the case in the future,” Yang said.
“As the audience becomes bigger and the commercialisation goes on, this space will get more cramped,” he said.
This will be a challenge for podcasters like Joey Qi – creator of The Unemployable – for whom podcasting represents an outlet for frank discussions on Chinese society.
Qi’s podcast, which covers alternative lifestyles in China, was one of Apple’s top Chinese listens for 2019. Despite its popularity, Qi said it was not the podcast he hoped to make. Previously, Qi covered Chinese politics for The Initium, a Hong Kong-based online media outlet.
“I am a long-time Chinese politics observer,” Qi said. “Ideally, I would start a podcast with politics.”
Nowadays, he balances running one of the nation’s most popular podcasts with his day job as a journalist.
“I want to speak freely, I don’t want to have strong censorship on what I’m saying,” Qi said. “So if you can’t talk about public topics freely, then OK, we turn to ourselves.”
Chinese Communist Party tells online media firms to put loyalty first
While overtly political podcasts were off-limits, part of a podcast’s appeal lay in listeners’ ability to “see the public in private talks”, Qi said.
Podcasters can highlight controversial subjects by discussing their own personal stories, he said.
“Our feelings are real. And my opinion towards public issues is real.”
“People were saying a lot of bad things about Hong Kong, Hong Kong people, Hong Kong life. But our experience is different,” he said. “We can let them know what is happening here, it’s not that bad, it’s different from the things they present in the media.”
Wan Ying – creator of the Museelogue podcast – released an episode in which she talked with a fellow Hubei native about the discrimination he encountered across China in the weeks following the outbreak.
But there is evidence that this kind of podcasting is becoming harder. In February, SurplusValue, a cultural podcast run by three former journalists, interviewed Luo Xin, a history professor at Peking University in Beijing, about the likely effects of the pandemic. Luo was critical of some of the government’s tactics and growing nationalism on the mainland.
“It’s not a question of bravery … it’s not a question of how to do our next episode, it’s a question of how people (myself or all people) want to go on living,” Zhang wrote on Weibo at the time.
SurplusValue, after over a year of podcasting, would release just one more episode before getting cancelled entirely. The team behind it now runs a new podcast called Stochastic Volatility, which limits its controversial discussions to events happening abroad.
Chinese dissident in US says Communist Party froze his life savings
Chinese podcasters talk of “three levels” of censorship: self-censorship, censorship by podcasting platforms, sponsors and advertisers, and government censorship.
Even as an independent podcaster with no corporate sponsorship, Joey Qi has to consider all three. Although taking on corporate sponsorship would be the most straightforward way to turn a profit, it could mean even tougher restrictions.
Although The Unemployable consistently ranks among the most popular podcasts in China, Qi said he “absolutely” could not hope to make a living from it. While he is eager to bump up revenue by getting more advertisers on board, this runs the risk of tougher limits on what he can and cannot say.
For Qi, the whole situation is a symptom of China’s media climate, which he has watched deteriorate since he joined the industry in Hong Kong over eight years ago.
“At that time, we still had hope, we still had kind of freedom of speech. We still felt like we could use media, use Weibo, to change China,” Qi said.
“Not like today, today is no hope at all.”
