The Offshore Archive

On Li Ying, the petitioning state and making deletion visible

There is a Chinese institution called xinfang, literally "letters and visits," by which citizens may petition the state about their grievances. It has roots in the Western Zhou dynasty, has survived everything, and in its current form channels millions of complaints annually through a bureaucratic apparatus that, per one academic study, resolved roughly 0.2% of them. It was designed to give suffering a mailing address rather than address it.

Li Ying, 33, known on X as @whyyoutouzhele, his handle — or 李老师不是你老师 (Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher) his profile name — understood something important about how Chinese censorship actually works: it runs on disaggregation, keeping suffering local, temporary, and administratively contained, so that a factory protest in Henan never meets a bank protest in Shandong in the minds of the people involved. A thousand private miseries that never accumulate into a public condition. Suppression enforces this but it's a means. The end is that people stay alone with their grievances.

Soviet dissidents had a colder version of the same problem. The Chronicle of Current Events, the samizdat periodical that recorded arrests, trials, psychiatric confinement and censorship was powerful because it made the state’s violations serial and serious. It took what power wanted to keep episodic and anecdotal then made it empirically undeniable and chronologically organized. Teacher Li’s account belongs to that lineage, but with a different tempo. Rather than the slow dignity of typed samizdat, it has the frantic half-life of the deleted post.

Li, who arrived in Italy as an art student in 2016 and graduated from Carrara six years later, built his account from Siena with a hand-drawn tabby cat as his avatar. The handle is a joke aimed at Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who told foreign reporters during Covid they should touzhele — quietly chuckle — at the privilege of living safely in China. Li's implicit reply: chuckle at what, exactly? His profile name doubles as a mock-credential as he's no teacher, no leader and authorised by nobody, he's just built the place where deleted things try to survive. Beijing knows what to do with an opposition figure who claims authority. It has fewer instruments for someone who claims none.

He started on Weibo. Authorities deleted 49 of his accounts before he moved to X in 2022. Then came the White Paper protests of late 2022. X was blocked inside China; domestic platforms were scrubbing footage as fast as it appeared. People filming events on their phones had nowhere to send material that wouldn't result in its immediate deletion or their immediate detention. So they sent it to Li. He was posting around 300 items a day. His account became the circulatory system of a revolt that was also, in real time, being prevented from knowing it was one.

Once Li became a relay rather than a commentator, deletion wasn't enough. The relay had to be made unusable.

The campaign against him has been fairly remarkable and involved fabricated videos claiming he abused cats, coordinated mass reports to X's moderation systems, and so on. But the state understood quickly that online pressure has limits on a man already outside China, so it turned to his relationships. Police visited his parents in Anhui, questioned them, and threatened to cancel their pensions if he didn't delete his account. His Italian address was doxxed in November 2022 — the same day state-security officials appeared at his family home. His Chinese bank accounts were frozen. Friends and classmates inside China were summoned for hecha, "drinking tea," by police.

Then, in early 2024, the state began identifying people inside China who followed Li's X account — which requires a VPN, itself a legal grey area — and summoning them to explain why. When Li warned his followers and urged them to unfollow him for their own safety, around 200,000 did so immediately.

If you can't silence the man, you silence those listening to him, making the act of reading him feel dangerous. The information then becomes next to worthless — not because it's untrue, but because confirmation itself carries a cost. It also backfired, however, because each escalation became evidence against the state. In treating a man with a cat avatar as a national-security threat, Beijing paid him the most expensive compliment an authoritarian system has available.

Meanwhile, in February 2026, OpenAI released a threat report describing a Chinese law enforcement official who had used ChatGPT as a diary, uploading status updates on ongoing "cyber special operations" targeting dissidents. The operation involved hundreds of staff, thousands of fake accounts across multiple platforms, forged court documents, impersonation of US immigration officials, false obituaries for living dissidents, and coordinated mass abuse reports designed to trigger platform moderation systems into removing target accounts. Chinese censorship doctrine, in other words, had reached its third generation: whereas the first had focused on deletion, then the second on flooding, now it was all about platform capture — manipulating the safety systems of Western platforms into doing the work themselves.

Li survived all of this but then handed his critics a gift.

In December 2024, he launched $Li, a memecoin on Solana. The stated purposes were defensible and involved funding a team that had grown to over twenty people globally, building a foundation structure, supporting 611Study.ICU and Niuma.ICU — internet slang for people worked like "cattle and horses" — through which he was crowdsourcing data on student exhaustion and workplace overwork. Given his X ad revenue ran to €568 a month and his Chinese bank accounts were frozen, the memecoin was, in a sense, rational.

Yet it was still a political error. Li's authority rests entirely on his transparency to the signal passing through him — the footage arrives pre-authenticated by the risk its originators had taken to produce it. A relay works because it's absent from what it transmits. A brand, meanwhile, is the opposite. It makes a claim about the value of a person's identity, which is then stamped on any information relayed.

The coin's market cap reached tens of millions on launch and subsequently lost more than 80% of its value. Critics reached immediately for the comparison with Guo Wengui, the fraudulent dissident convicted of stealing over a billion dollars from followers through what prosecutors called an affinity fraud, a scheme that specifically exploits the trust produced by shared political belief. The comparison is unfair as there is no credible evidence of fraud and Li's transparency measures were real. Yet in a community where the state has industrialized distrust, whether Li acted in bad faith matters less than whether the bad-faith reading can be made to stick, or at least half-plausible. Among this audience, Guo had already burned it once.

The scandal made Li smaller. It did not, however, make the archive less dangerous to Beijing. As much became obvious in early 2026 when Italian investigators discovered that Chinese state-linked hackers had conducted a surgical exfiltration of the names, roles, and operational postings of roughly 5,000 DIGOS officers — many of them the officers assigned to monitoring Chinese dissidents, including Li. In March 2026, Italy deported eight Chinese nationals on national-security grounds, the first time it had taken such action specifically on transnational repression grounds, a notable step for a country that had long maintained an ambiguous position toward Beijing relative to its G7 counterparts.

The logic here is almost comic in its tidiness. Beijing's operation against a man with a cat avatar became, by its own internal momentum, an attack on Italian state infrastructure, and Italy eventually responded accordingly. The campaign against Li produced more damage to China's position in Europe than Li's content ever could have done alone.

That is what the offshore archive actually is. Its power isn't only in what it preserves, but in what efforts to destroy it reveal. A deleted video is one fact. The campaign to delete the people who watched it is another. The Chinese state has no clean answer to the following situation: a fact disappears inside China and reappears outside. Attempts to make it disappear again generate new facts. Those facts are also hard to delete. The loop does not close. The more you pull, the tighter it gets.