BEIJING — The repression of Muslim Uighurs, the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and S&M hook-ups — nothing was off-limits in the rambunctious, unfiltered chatrooms of Clubhouse, before China’s censors silenced the conversation.
For around a week, robust, open discussion on China pinballed across the American audio app, recently lent an air of exclusivity after an endorsement from Elon Musk.
It offered mainland and Chinese-speaking users a rare space to dissect taboos across politics and society, a plurality of voices normally muted inside China by the Communist Party.
Then late on Monday, an error message appeared to Chinese users logging on without a VPN to establish a secure connection, a telltale sign that state censors had got hold of the debate.
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“Under Xi, the ban was a matter of time,” said Lokman Tsui, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, of the reflex to scrub unregulated social media sharpened under China’s President Xi Jinping.
Users took to Clubhouse chatrooms and other social media platforms to lament the block, which closed a brief window for freewheeling exchanges in a country where overseas networks such as Twitter and Facebook have been banned.
