The following is an English translation of a Dutch opinion piece I wrote in response to a recent essay in FD (Het Financieele Dagblad, the Dutch Financial Daily). It reflects on how China is discussed in Europe and why nuance matters in debates about freedom, safety, and public perceptions of China.

Anyone who says something positive about China nowadays quickly runs the risk of being dismissed as a propagandist. This became apparent again this week when Dutch philosopher Sebastien Valkenberg cited me in Het Financieele Dagblad (FD, the Dutch Financial Daily) as an example of a “hip influencer” who has succumbed to the allure of autocratic regimes.

According to Valkenberg, more and more people in the West are becoming impressed by stories of safety, order, and efficiency. China plays an important role in this. He refers to an interview I previously gave to EW Magazine, in which, according to him, I supposedly nodded along approvingly to remarks about China’s alleged superiority when it comes to public safety.

That is remarkable, because I actually spoke strongly about an unpleasant experience on a Dutch train, where I was harassed one evening while sitting alone in a carriage by a man who pulled down his trousers. The conversation was about safety, freedom, and the different ways societies weigh those concepts.

This is not merely a theoretical discussion. Earlier this year, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei caused a stir when, after visiting China, he said that in certain ways he felt freer there than in Europe. Not because China had suddenly become a liberal democracy, but because he experienced limitations and social tensions in Europe that, in his view, often remain out of sight.

You may agree or disagree with Ai Weiwei. But the fact that one of China’s most well-known critics of the regime makes such observations shows that the relationship between freedom, security, and social order is more complex than is often portrayed.

It should be possible to have a conversation about this without every comparison with China being immediately seen as a defense of the Chinese political system.

The fact that political freedom is important does not mean that physical safety should be off limits as a topic of discussion. Since China reopened after COVID, many Chinese have wondered how free democratic European countries really are when people can be robbed in broad daylight or when women increasingly feel unsafe on public transportation.

According to Valkenberg, however, Chinese people do not ask such questions on their own. They have supposedly been conditioned not to challenge authority. Worse still, he suggests, some people in the free West are now following the same path.

I am not a mouthpiece for Beijing; I am a sinologist. For nearly twenty years I have studied China, lived there, traveled there regularly, and followed discussions about censorship, propaganda, technology, and public opinion. I know that Chinese people do, in fact, question what authorities say. My readers also know that I regularly write about subjects that are anything but comfortable for the Chinese government.

But the bigger issue is not personal.

What strikes me is that Valkenberg makes hardly any distinction between China as a country, the Chinese as people, and the Chinese state as a political system. In his worldview, the ‘free democratic West’ stands opposed to the ‘autocratic China,’ with China almost entirely reduced to Xi Jinping and the Communist Party. Anyone who then says something positive about developments in China quickly risks being seen as someone spreading propaganda.

That is a problematic way of looking at things. Not only because it leaves little room for nuance, but also because it produces a simplified image of China itself. While every move made by Donald Trump is analyzed in great detail, knowledge about China in the Netherlands remains strikingly limited.

It is particularly striking that, in an essay about the dangers of stereotyping, Valkenberg so readily portrays Chinese people as a homogeneous mass that is barely capable of critical thinking. At the same time, he falls back on one of the most persistent misconceptions about China: the idea that every citizen is continuously assessed and scored through an all-encompassing social credit system.

That image of a system in which every citizen receives a personal point score has since been convincingly debunked by researchers. Yet this narrative stubbornly resurfaces in the public debate. Ironically, this shows how even highly educated people can be swept along by techno-orientalist myths and disinformation.

That does not mean there is no reason to be critical of China. On the contrary.

China has censorship. Political freedoms are limited. Dissidents are under pressure. The state exercises extensive control over parts of society, and the Communist Party wields significant power in the digital sphere. These are important issues that deserve serious attention, discussion, and scrutiny.

But precisely because these problems exist, we do not need Orwellian scare stories. Anyone who wants to understand China seriously must be willing to confront reality as it is, not as it best fits an ideological narrative.

You can acknowledge that Chinese cities have become safer without endorsing censorship. You can appreciate the quality of infrastructure without defending state control. And you can believe that more should be done to improve women’s safety on Dutch public transportation without being dismissed as an admirer of an authoritarian regime.

We live in a time when debates about China are increasingly dominated by extremes. Some see the country as a miracle state; others see it only as a dystopian nightmare. Both views fall short.

At a time when China’s geopolitical influence is growing, what we need is knowledge, context, and nuance. And as Europe struggles with its own challenges, it would not hurt to occasionally take a critical look at itself.

The strength of our democracy should not depend on how dark we paint the picture of China. Whoever looks only at the ugly side does not see China.

By Manya Koetse
(follow on X, LinkedIn, or Instagram)

🔔 This edition is available to all subscribers. If you’d like access to more frequent newsletters, deeper analysis, and to support my work, become a paid subscriber here.

©2026 Eye on Digital China/Whatsonweibo. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce our content without permission – you can contact us at info@whatsonweibo.com.

This edition of the Eye on Digital China newsletter by Manya Koetse was sent to premium subscribers. Subscribe now to receive future issues in your inbox.

“Do you still remember going to the internet cafe, paying 2 yuan ($0.30) per hour during the day or 7 yuan ($1) for an all-nighter? Staying up playing games and surfing around?”

It’s the kind of content you’ll often see today on platforms like Douyin or Bilibili — nostalgic videos showing smoky internet cafes (wangba 网吧) from the early 2000s, where people chatted on QQ or played World of Warcraft on old Windows PCs while eating instant noodles. These clips trigger waves of nostalgia, even among internet users too young to remember that era themselves.

Internetcafe in 2005, image via 021zhaopin.com

The current nostalgia wave you see on Chinese social media is indicative of how China’s digital world has evolved over the past 25 years, shifting from one era to the next.

As I welcome a new name for this newsletter and say goodbye to ‘Weibo Watch’— and, in the longer run, to the ‘What’s on Weibo’ title, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic myself. It seems like a good moment to look back at the three major stages of Chinese social media, and at the reason I started What’s on Weibo in the first place.

1. The Blogging Boom (2002–2009): The Early Rise of Chinese Social Media

When I first came to China and became particularly interested in its online environment, it was the final phase of the early era of Chinese social media — a period that followed soon after the country had laid the foundations for its internet revolution. By 1999, the first generation of Chinese internet giants — Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Sina — had already been founded.

China’s blogging era began with the 2002 launch of the platform BlogChina.com (博客中国), followed by a wave of new platforms and online communities, among them Baidu Tieba and Renren. By around 2005, there were roughly 111 million internet users and 16 million bloggers, and the social impact was undeniable. 2005 was even dubbed China’s “year of blogging.” ¹

Chinese writer Han Han (韩寒, born 1982), a high-school-dropout-turned–rally car racer, became one of the most-read figures on the Chinese internet with his sharp and witty blogs. He was just one among many who rose to fame during the blog era, becoming the voice of China’s post-1980s youth.

The rebel of China’s blog era, Han Han, became of voice of his generation.

When I moved to Beijing in 2008, I had a friend who was always out of money and practically lived in an internet cafe in the city’s Wudaokou district, not far from where I studied. We would visit him there as if it were his living room — the wangba was a local hangout for many of us.

Not only online forums and blogging sites were flourishing at the time, but there was also instant messaging through QQ (腾讯QQ), online news reading, and gaming. Platforms like the YouTube equivalents Tudou (土豆) and Youku (优酷) were launched, and soon Chinese companies began developing more successful products inspired by American digital platforms, such as Fanfou (饭否), Zuosa (做啥), Jiwai (叽歪), and Taotao (滔滔), creating an online space that was increasingly, and uniquely, Chinese.

That trajectory only accelerated after 2009, when popular Western internet services, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, became inaccessible from within mainland China.

⚡ The launch of Sina Weibo in 2009 came at a crossroads for China’s social media landscape: it was not only a time when many foreign platforms exited China, but also when internet cafes faced major crackdowns.

As a foreigner, I don’t think I ever visited internet bars in Beijing anymore by that point — internet use had largely shifted to home connections. Laptop ownership was rising, and we all had (pre-smartphone) mobile phones, which we used to text each other constantly, since texting was cheaper than calling.

Some of the mobile phones in China’s 2009 top 10 lists.

Weibo came at just the right time. It filled the vacuum left by the online crackdowns across China’s internet while still benefiting from the popularity of blogging. Weibo (微博), after all, literally means “micro-blog” — micro because the number of characters was limited, just like Twitter, making short-form posts the main way of communication.

Weibo quickly became hugely successful, for many more reasons than just timing. Its impact on society was so palpable that its trending discussions often seeped into everyday conversations I had with friends in China.

In English-language media, I kept reading about what was being censored on the Chinese internet, but that wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to know — I also wanted to know what was on Weibo, so I could keep up with my social circles.

That question planted the seed for What’s on Weibo: the simple curiosity of “What are people talking about?” What TV series are popular? What jokes and controversies are everyone discussing (but that I never fully grasped)? I wanted to get a sense of an online world that was, in many ways, intangible to outsiders — including myself. As I had moved back to Europe by then, it was also a way for me to stay connected to those everyday conversations unfolding online in China.

With scissors, glue, and some paper, I started sketching out what a future website might look like.

Papercrafting the idea for a website named ‘What’s on Weibo’ in 2012.

And in March 2013, after doing my best to piece it together, I launched What’s on Weibo and began writing — about all kinds of trends, like the milk powder crisis, about China’s many unmarried “leftover men” (shengnan 剩男), and about the word of the moment, “Green Tea Bitch” (lǜchá biǎo 绿茶婊) — a term used to stereotype ambitious women who act sweet and innocent while being seen as calculating or cunning.

2. From Weibo to the Taobao Moment: China’s Mobile Social Era: (2010–2019)

Around 2014–2015, people started saying Weibo was dead. In fact, it hadn’t died at all — some of its most vibrant years were still ahead. It had simply stumbled into the mobile era, along with China’s entire social media landscape.

As mobile internet became more widespread and everyone started using WeChat (launched in 2011), new mobile-first platforms began to emerge.² In 2012–2013, for example, apps like Toutiao and Xiaohongshu (小红书, RED) were launched as mobile community platforms. With the rapid rise of China’s new tech giants — Bytedance, Meituan, and Didi — a new mobile era was blossoming, leaving the PC-based social media world far behind.

Spending another summer in Beijing in 2014, I called it the “Taobao Moment” — Taobao being China’s most successful online marketplace, a platform for buying and selling practically everything from clothes and furniture to insurance and even Bitcoins. At the time, I thought Taobao captured everything Beijing was at that moment: a world of opportunities, quick decisions, and endless ways to earn and spend money.

On weekends, some of my friends would head to the markets near the Beijing Zoo to buy the latest dresses, purses, jeans, or shoes. They’d buy stock on Saturday, do a photo shoot on Sunday, and sell the goods online by Monday. You could often spot young people on the streets of Beijing staging their own fashion shoots for Taobao — friends posing as models, Canon cameras in hand.

During that period, What’s on Weibo gradually found its audience, as more people became curious about what was happening on Chinese social media.

Around 2016, Weibo entered another prime era as the “celebrity economy” took off and a wave of “super influencers” (超级红人) emerged on the platform. Papi Jiang stood out among them — her humorous videos on everyday social issues made her one of China’s most recognizable online personalities, helping to drive Weibo’s renewed popularity.

Witty Papi Jiang was a breath of fresh air on Weibo in 2016.

People were hooked on social media. Between 2015 and 2018, China entered the age of algorithm- & interest-driven multimedia platforms. The popularity of Kuaishou’s livestreaming and Bytedance’s Douyin signaled the start of an entirely new era.

3. The New Social Era of AI-fication and Diversification (2020–Current)

China’s social media shifts over the past 25 years go hand in hand with broader technological, social, and geopolitical changes. Although this holds true elsewhere too, it’s especially the case in China, where central leadership is deeply involved in how social media should be managed and which direction the country’s digital development should take.

Since the late 2010s, China’s focus on AI has permeated every layer of society. AI-driven recommendation systems have fundamentally changed how Chinese users consume information. Far more than Weibo, platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu have become popular for using machine-learning algorithms to tailor feeds based on user behavior.

China’s social media boom has put pressure on traditional media outlets, which are now increasingly weaving themselves into social media infrastructure to broaden their impact. This has blurred the line between social media and state media, creating a complex online media ecosystem.

At the same time, it’s not just AI and media convergence that are reshaping China’s online landscape — social relationships now dominate both information flows and influence flows. ³ Not everyone is reading the same headlines anymore; people spend more time within their own interest-based niches. It’s no longer about microblogging but about micro-communities.

China now has 1.12 billion internet users. Among new users, young people (aged 10–19) and the elderly (60+) account for 49% and nearly 21%, respectively. The country’s digital environment has never been more lively, and social media has never been more booming.

As a bit of a dinosaur in China’s social media world, Weibo still stands tall — and its trending topics still matter. But the community that was once at the heart of the Chinese internet has dispersed across other apps, where people now engage in more diverse ways than ever.

In China, I notice this shift: where I once saw the rise of Weibo, the Taobao boom, or the Douyin craze, I now see online and offline media increasingly converging. Social media shapes real-life experiences and vice versa, and AI has become integrated into nearly every part of the media ecosystem — changing how content is made, distributed, consumed, and controlled.

In this changing landscape, the mission of What’s on Weibo — to explain China’s digital culture, media, and social trends, and to build a bridge between Western and Chinese online spaces — has stayed the same. But the name no longer fits that mission.

Over the past few years, my work has naturally evolved from Weibo-focused coverage to exploring China’s digital culture through a broader lens. The analysis and trend updates will continue, but under a new name that better reflects a time when Weibo is no longer at the center of China’s social media world: Eye on Digital China.

For you as a subscriber (subscribe here), this means you can expect more newsletter-based coverage: shorter China Trend Watch editions to keep you up to date with the latest trends, along with other thematic features and ‘Chapter’ deep dives that explore the depth behind fleeting moments.

For now, the main website will remain What’s on Weibo, but it will gradually transition into Eye on Digital China. I’ll keep the full archive alive — more than twelve years of coverage that helps trace the digital patterns we’re still seeing today. After all, the story of China’s past online moments often tells us more about the future than the trends of the day.

Thank you for following along on this new journey.

By Manya Koetse

(follow on X, LinkedIn, or Instagram)

¹ Liu, Fengshu. 2011. Urban Youth in China: Modernity, the Internet and the Self. New York: Routledge, 50.

² Mao Lin (Michael). 2020. “中国互联网25年变迁：两次跃迁，四次浪潮，一次赌未来” [25 Years of China’s Internet: Two Leaps, Four Waves, and a Gamble on the Future]. 人人都是产品经理 (Everyone Is a Product Manager), January 3. https://www.woshipm.com/it/3282708.html.

³ Yang, Shaoli (杨绍丽). 2025. “研判2025！中国社交媒体行业发展历程、重点企业分析及未来前景展望：随着移动互联网兴起，社交媒体开始向移动端转移 [Outlook for 2025! The Development History, Key Enterprises, and Future Prospects of China’s Social Media Industry: With the Rise of Mobile Internet, Social Media Has Shifted to Mobile Platforms].” Zhiyan Consulting (智研咨询), February 7. https://www.chyxx.com/industry/1211618.html.

Spotted a mistake or want to add something? Please let us know in the comments below or email us. First-time commenters, please be patient — we will have to manually approve your comment before it appears.

Eye on Digital China, by Manya Koetse, is co-published on Substack and What’s on Weibo.
Both feature the same new content — so you can read and subscribe wherever you prefer. Substack offers community features, while What’s on Weibo provides full archive access. If you’re already subscribed and want to switch platforms, just get in touch for help. Both feature the same new content — so you can subscribe or read wherever you prefer. If you’re already subscribed on one platform and would like to move your subscription over, just let me know and I’ll help you get set up.

© 2025 Manya Koetse. All rights reserved.