Teacher Li played a crucial role in helping Chinese protesters, then doxxing and attacks followed

Plot twist: the attacks did not come from the Chinese government. They are from a famous Chinese Twitter influencer who is supposedly critical of China

Teacher Li, an anonymous painter from China who now lives in Italy, played a crucial role in spreading protest videos documenting last week’s nationwide unrest in China against stringent zero-Covid policies. His Twitter account, where he shared hundreds of protest videos sent to him from people inside China, became a source, if not the source, for journalists outside the country who reported on the demonstrations.

In interviews with several media outlets, he talked about how the Chinese police has visited his family and asked whether he was paid to post videos or has a team behind him.

Soon, online doxxing and accusations against him began. The Chinese government has in the past used these methods to attack overseas dissidents. But this time, the attacks didn’t come from China.

They come from a famous Chinese Twitter influencer who has been critical of the Chinese government. Fang Shimin, who goes by his pen name, Fang Zhouzi, in the past few days has released a series of attacks against Li, questioning his legitimacy.

With scant evidence, Fang claims that Li has a team working for him to find and post videos. He said Li is either an agent for the Chinese government or part of an international scam syndicate, indicating that Li is collecting personal information from people who sent him videos and would one day report, or has already reported, their information to the Chinese authorities or use it to conduct scamming operations.

Ignoring information that contradicts his claims and blocking people who challenged his accusations, Fang went on to find Li’s personal information and post them on his Twitter account.

Li has denied all of Fang’s accusations.

Fang started his attacks on December 1, with a tweet “The Teacher Li that just popped up recently asking netizens to send materials to him and got quoted frequently by foreign media is obviously not a personal account. Who knows who’s behind him?”

After getting blasted by some users who supported Li, sometimes with very rude comments, Fang claimed that these accounts were paid trolls. Later, without evidence, he claimed that the alleged troll attacks were coordinated by Li and his team.

He also claimed, without evidence, that many of the accounts who attacked him were sponsored by the Chinese government.

From then on, he tweeted frequently about Li and accused him of various things. First he said Li was working with either Fa Lun Gong, Mile Guo, Chinese propaganda organs, Chinese security forces or financial scammers. Later he narrowed it down to just Chinese government or an international scam syndicate.

To discredit Li, Fang has so far engaged in tactics including presenting distorted information, blocking opposite voices, making accusations without evidence and straight up lying.

Fang claimed that Li, at some point, was receiving over 40 tips per second through Twitter’s Direct Messages, which Fang said was impossible for Li to handle without a team helping him.

But this claim was based on a piece of distorted information. In an interview with Radio Free Asia, Li said that he was receiving 30 to 40 tips per second “when things inside the country got really heated” and that he would lose a bunch of messages before being able to post them because of the huge influx of new messages.

Li never said that he could handle all the messages. And yet Fang took the number out of context in order to cast doubt on Li’s honesty.

Interestingly, when I posted the original text from the interview under one of Fang’s tweets, he hid my reply and subsequently blocked me.

Fang routinely hides comments that question him, attack him or contradict his accusations. He later said that it was because those were trolls. But I stated clearly in my Twitter bio that I work at Voice of America. His definition of troll remains unclear.

On December 3, Fang tweeted that Li “seems to have removed all his tweets posted before he got famous. Is it because he is afraid that I’m digging”, with a screenshot showing empty search result for Li’s tweets before April 1, 2022.

Previously Li had said in an interview that he did not start using Twitter until April this year, although his account was registered in 2020.

Fang still has not retracted or added a correction to the claim.

Fang also claimed without evidence that Li had purchased bots to increase his follower number, which is now over 826 thousand. To support the claim, Fang said Li has only a handful of replies under each of his tweets, suggesting that most of his followers are inactive.

A ten-second viewing of Li’s tweets would prove Fang wrong. Each of Li’s tweets has at least dozens of replies. Hundreds are fairly usual.

Fang would frequently present a possible or even plausible scenario and then hint at something nefarious to explain why said scenario didn’t happen in order to add suspicion to Li.

To imply that Li could be working with the Chinese government, Fang asked why the Chinese police didn’t take actions against Li’s family when the nationwide protests were going on and is only now visiting them.

For days, Fang has been pressing Li to reveal his face and identity. In one tweet, Fang wrote that “if (China’s) national security already know who Teacher Li is, then he has no need to keep his identity a secret. Why are some people so afraid that I’m asking who he is?”

Failing to get Li to reveal himself, Fang started doxxing. In a recent tweet, Fang posted a screenshot of a news story about Li’s personal art exhibition when he was 19. Fang wrote: “(I) also have other information. I’m not posting them just yet. I have (Li’s) photos too.”

Responding to doxxing criticism, Fang said he is investigating Li “based on public information” and that investigating Li, who Fang calls a public figure, is for the good of the public.

To further discredit Li, Fang blamed overseas Chinese language media for failing to detect Li’s lies and accused them of operating as propaganda tools “that are essentially not different from media in China”.

He also asked whether a CNN journalist, who Li had said would publish Li’s photo if Li unexpectedly dies, was working with Li as an international scammer. His evidence was that the journalist had blocked him.

After finding out that the journalist was really a journalist at CNN, Fang did not apologize or retract his tweet.

These tactics wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who know Fang. Now living in the US, Fang was once a popular science writer in China who made his name by waging public campaigns against academic plagiarism and fraud.

While some of his crusades were universally praised, others were more controversial. His ghostwriting accusations against popular Chinese author and blogger Han Han in 2012 was one example. Although Fang never presented any direct evidence to prove that Han’s novels and articles were actually written by Han’s father, he continued to raise questions and asked Han to prove his own innocence. Even as of today, there is no public consensus on whether Han was guilty.

Fang himself was accused of plagiarism in 2011. In 2019, the manager of an anti-fraud fund, where Fang was the main beneficiary, was sued in a fraud case and lost.

Fang’s campaign against Li has made many question if Fang is actually the one working with the Chinese government to silence Li. in a recent tweet, Li asked why Fang was able to have access to Li’s locked QZone, a MySpace like website that Li said he stopped using a long time ago, and found a post from four years ago that shows Li’s pro-China sentiment at the time.

Li later clarified that the post was a sarcastic one. He then asked why Fang wouldn't post the rest of Li's old posts from QZone that would clearly show Li wasn't a little pink.

Fang denied the allegations that he works with or for China. There has been no direct evidence to support these allegations.