Wozy Yin is a Chinese dissident who while living in China secretly published a blog critical of the government. Risking imprisonment, he continued to publish while avoiding Chinese censors and the authorities. I interviewed Wozy (not his real name) via a secure email account, edited the transcript of our interview, and published the essay in Wired magazine, where we shared a byline. I promised Wozy the lion’s share of the fee we received for the piece, but then we had to figure out a secure way to get him the money. We couldn’t transfer the funds from Wired or me into his bank account for fear that the Chinese authorities could get wind. We couldn’t use Paypal either, since we risked a similar problem. Finally we learned of a Wired employee flying to Hong Kong, where a friend of Wozy’s accepted the cash payment. Wozy then confirmed receipt of the funds.

Wired editors and I agreed that our ethical duty was to protect him, and that meant avoiding any chance that Chinese authorities could figure out his identity.

--Adam L. Penenberg

You can call me Wozy Yin. Is it my real name? Does it matter? I must remain anonymous for reasons you will understand shortly.

I first heard the word blog in 2003, when a Chinese woman using the pseudonym Muzi Mei created an uproar by blogging about her sexual experiences. At the time, few Chinese wrote or read blogs, and fewer recognized their potential. But my interest was awakened.

As a Chinese citizen, I realized that blogging could unleash the power of individuals to combat our repressive regime. Predictably, the authorities arrived at the same conclusion, and they have been doing their best to censor us. The government holds more than 40 print journalists in prison, and it's only a matter of time before the first blogger joins them. Perhaps it will be me.

I've been blogging since January 2005, criticizing despotism, corruption, ultranationalism, and the state-run media that disseminates propaganda packaged as news. I have posted hundreds of blog entries, many of them long essays, all of them written in Chinese. China will never be free unless people like me are willing to risk their own freedom.

I experienced problems almost immediately after posting my first entry on Tianyablog, a blog service hosted by a Chinese Web bulletin board called Tianyaclub. That week Zhao Ziyang, who had supported the 1989 demonstrations for democracy, died under house arrest. To express my grief I copied the official Xinhua Agency news piece announcing his death—nothing more. Yet even republishing the bland government-approved report could be construed as an expression of approval for Zhao, a dangerous view. The entry disappeared without a trace.

The authorities deploy numerous methods to squelch digital dissent. ISPs maintain lists of forbidden words, including June 4 (六四), the date of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, freedom of speech (言论自由), the religious group Falun Gong (法轮功), former leader Jiang Zemin (江泽民), and Jiang Yanyong (蒋彦永), the doctor who first revealed the SARS crisis in 2003. They use filtering software to block posts with these words or replace them with asterisks. Posts that circumvent the filters are deleted, either by ISP employees or the government's Net police. The authorities announced that all domestic Web sites and blogs operating without government approval must register or face being blocked and shut down.

Many of those that resist have their pages hosted abroad. Still, the authorities often block their domain names and IP addresses, so people outside China can read their work but people inside can't. Meanwhile, Chinese government agencies employ thousands of Web censors, Internet cafe police, and computers that seek to scrub any forbidden content, a system that has been dubbed “the Great Firewall of China.” Any email, chat or instant message, or blog that contains that term could be expunged.

For every advance in censorship, bloggers find a way around it. We replace banned words with Chinese characters that sound the same when spoken but have a different meaning when written (the equivalent of homonyms in English), or we transliterate these words into Roman characters. Recently I came up with another technique: After the authorities blocked one of my entries, I reposted it with the characters aligned vertically instead of horizontally. The filter couldn't recognize the words, but anyone reading them could. Mainly we just keep moving our blogs. We take advantage of proxy servers, and as soon as the government shuts one down, we move to another. These days, some rely on Freegate, created by Bill Xia, a Chinese expat living in North Carolina, who, like his family in China, is a member of the banned religious group, Falun Gong. Freegate enables people living in repressive nations like China, North Korea, Syria, and Vietnam, among others, to view sites blocked in their home countries. It is simple and effective. The software masks websites a person visits while Xia’s company, Dynamic Internet Technology Inc, blasts to Chinese Web users a mass email with temporary URLs that host forbidden material and leads recipients to other banned sites.

My own cat-and-mouse game with the government is never-ending. Soon after my initial tribute to Zhao Ziyang disappeared, I moved to a new blogging platform, TypePad. At the end of June, however, the authorities blocked all TypePad blogs, regardless of content. Even after they relaxed the ban, they continued to block my page. So I switched to WordPress. That gave me total control over my archive of posts, making it easier to move from server to server. I went to Weblogs.us, but got shut down there. Then I tried the virtual hosting service GoDaddy.com, but got swatted again. After that, Budget CMS—same thing. Finally I realized my domain name itself, wozy.net, was blocked. Recently, I registered a new domain. That's worked thus far, but I don't know how long it will last.

Not long ago, I posted to CNBlog.org, a group blog that promotes Chinese blog culture: “Even if my blog is censored 100 times, I will write it for the 101st.” I will never give up.