Kathy Chen is the new China twitter head.
Kathy Chen is new to Twitter - in every sense.
On Friday, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey welcomed Chen, a software engineer who once worked for the People's Liberation Army, as the company's new managing director for "Greater China," which includes, in Twitter's view, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. The same day, Chen published her first couple of tweets.
Those tweets have since come under intense scrutiny, with Chinese netizens in particular questioning her links to the ruling Chinese Communist Party and her apparent plans to collaborate with the Party-controlled press.
Twitter is blocked in China - making the hiring of a China director a little awkward from the start. Chen seemed to compound that awkwardness by using her first tweets to give shout-outs to Communist Party news outlets and her frequent flier program of choice.
China's Great Firewall keeps the vast majority of Chinese from using the service, part of a censor-knows-best strategy that stops many people from accessing Facebook, Instagram, Google and a growing list sites, including the New York Times, and, most recently, Medium.
But the Great Firewall can be scaled using virtual private networks and, over the past 10 years, Twitter has earned a small but loyal fan base, attracting a mix of users that includes, some of the more ardent Communist Party critics and accounts run by the party-controlled press.
Chen's first foray into Twitter started innocuously enough, but very quickly managed to enrage the former by flattering the latter.
The tech exec's sixth-ever Tweet was a reply to CCTV News, the Communist Party-controlled television network. "Lets work together to tell great China story to the world!" she wrote.
Giving a nod to the television network that recently aired a forced confession by a Swedish human rights worker is not the type of public relations that most tech firms dream of - and wags generally met with outrage and derision online. One tweeted, ".@kathychen2016 @cctvnews @jack how about first getting the CCP to unblock Twitter unconditionally? That would be a GREAT China story!"
The tweet's wording was closely parsed. In his campaign to bring Chinese media under tighter control, President Xi Jinping advised Chinese journalists to "tell China's story well."
The notion that China needs to do a better job of communicating with the outside world is certainly not a Xi Jinping-only notion. But Chen's wording -- and stated desire to work with CCTV -- struck some as party-speak.
Chen followed up by telling the folks running the English language Twitter account of Xinhua, a Party-controlled newswire, that she looks forward to "closer partnership" in the future: "@XHNews Thanks and look forward to closer partnership in the future!"
For the legions of Chinese who turned to Twitter to escape tight policing on Chinese-language social media platforms, the idea of a "closer partnership" between Twitter and the ruling Communist Party comes as an unwelcome surprise.
A Chinese political cartoonist who goes by the handle @badiucao captured the sentiment with a drawing of Twitter's logo, a bird, impaled on the yellow star that graces China's flag.
Rebel Pepper, another well-known Chinese satirist, rendered it as a blue bird walking, cheerfully, into its own cage.
© 2016 The Washington Post
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