Chinese writers navigate censors to earn cash!

BEIJING: When outspoken professor Qiao Mu posted his resignation letter on a popular Chinese messaging app, sympathetic readers tapped their phone screens to send him money, leaving him with a 20,000 yuan payday.

China’s widely-used applications have given writers like Qiao an outlet to self-publish and make money -- as long as their words respect the boundaries set by online censors inside the country’s "Great Firewall".

With Facebook and Twitter blocked in China, they post their works on WeChat, a messaging service with over 900 million worldwide users, or Weibo, a microblogging website -- both monitored by the Communist authorities.

"I’m a typical Chinese person. I love my country and I want to change it. To reach the majority of the Chinese people I need to stay inside the Great Firewall and write in Chinese," Qiao told AFP.

Qiao, 47, quit his library job because he was fed up of doing dull translations after getting banned from teaching in 2014 for vague "work violations". Growing pressure on writers and academics is part of a tightening of controls on civil society that began in 2012, when President Xi Jinping took power.

In April, the former director of the prestigious Beijing Foreign Studies University’s international communication studies programme posted his resignation letter on WeChat.