Thread by @WilliamYang120

Since the beginning of the #chinaprotests, @whyyoutouzhele's account has single-handedly provided the most timely and comprehensive update about the situations across #China. If you read mandarin, here's an exclusive interview with him by @RFA_Chinese: rfa.org/mandarin/yatai…

"This is actually something that happens by accident. I would often read and receive contributions from domestic netizens, and these contributions were not just about ongoing social events, but many of them were about themselves, or their moods, and so on.

It's not because I'm the one who compiles information, but because people know that I receive contributions, they establish the habit of contributing to me."

"Then, when social events happen, they take the initiative to submit materials to me, and in the process, more and more people know about me and more and more people submit materials to me.

Because they are afraid of their accounts being discovered, they want others to help them send out what they want to say, and what is happening in the country."

"There are popular protests happening all over China right now, and at 5 or 6 p.m. local time in Italy on November 27, when events in the country are at their most intense, I was getting about 30 to 40 pitches per second.

That means when I just verified a message and tried to go to edit, that message was bounced out and was bounced to some other message somewhere."

"Instead of having different messages for one thing at the same time, it had different messages for countless things. I covered Beijing and Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu and Wuhan, the biggest cities in China, all of them at the same time that evening.

"There were countless submissions, including some users who would send some of the content that they didn't know was already sent, so my private messages were very, very full."

"Instead of having different messages for one thing at the same time, it had different messages for countless things. I covered Beijing and Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu and Wuhan, the biggest cities in China, all of them at the same time that evening.

There were very large numbers of people using Twitter, very large numbers of people pitching me on the spot. And also some of the smaller places, some of the schools, their students are trying to do something, and they're pitching me, including what's happening in their schools."

"First I would judge the authenticity from experience. Also, if there are more than ten people sending materials about the same story at the same time, then you can basically judge the authenticity of the story.

If a story is exaggerated, and only one person sends it, then it is most likely a fake story."

"For me, I hope I can report the information objectively, accurately and timely, but as a self-publisher and as a person, I put timeliness first.

I want to get the news out as quickly as possible, so you can see that I can get the news within minutes of the event. And as a result, I make some mistakes, which is something that can't be avoided. But I try to fix it."

"There were so many messages that moved me because they were things I had never seen before, and in 1989, before I was born, I just knew what they were doing through documentaries and pictures.

But today, when people really took to the streets, when they shouted those slogans, as soon as I opened my phone and opened my private messages, I was really in tears while I was editing the content."

"The most impressive ones are probably two. One is in the live stream, when I saw the gate of Foxconn was set on fire by the people, and then these people confronted the police.

This is the most impressive thing to me, because for many years, I have not seen this kind of mass event, especially in this way."

"The other thing is that in Shanghai on November 26, when people shouted together to depose Xi Jinping and the Communist Party from power.

And then there is Chengdu. Chengdu was very different on November 27 because they were always protecting the people around them when they were marching.

They would constantly remind to prevent trampling and then help each other. Then what was very moving was Shanghai, when the police went to arrest someone, everyone went to stop it, and went to each other to pull that person back."

"People's demand is very simple, which is they need to eat, need to live, can't continue to live under the extreme zero-covid strategy.

This is a very basic demand. All this anger is from the lockdown. Long-term lockdown brings no income, brings economic decline, including restrictions on travel, and all kinds of chaos extending from zero-Covid."