Late at night on July 1, 2026, Zheng Yuhuang, a former professor at Tsinghua University who was traveling in Spain, suddenly discovered that all of his social-media accounts—including Douyin, WeChat Channels, and Weibo—had been completely blocked and wiped out at the same time. Thousands of videos he had posted over the previous several years disappeared from the Chinese internet almost instantly.
The marketing scholar, who had amassed millions of followers and become an online celebrity, suffered this sudden “social death” simply for expressing a pessimistic assessment of China’s economy as “macroeconomically bleak” during a lecture.
Yet Zheng Yuhuang is far from an isolated case. In recent years, Tsinghua has seen repeated cases of professors being censored, having their accounts blocked, or even being dismissed because of their speech—from law professor Xu Zhangrun and sociology professor Guo Yuhua to criminal-law professor Lao Dongyan. Although these cases involve different academic fields and circumstances, together they appear to delineate a clear red line: in China’s current public discourse environment, regardless of one’s academic stature or how “safe” one’s field may seem, crossing certain boundaries in speech can result in systematic erasure almost overnight.
It is worth noting that Tsinghua University has not always had such a restrictive academic environment. In the 1980s, its law school, School of Economics and Management, and humanities and social-science departments were home to a group of scholars willing to speak publicly and participate in broader social debates.
Public lectures and even graduation addresses by some professors frequently included direct references to values such as the rule of law and freedom. Over the past decade or more, however, as China’s system of speech controls has steadily tightened—and as social-media censorship mechanisms have reinforced a culture of student reporting—the space for Tsinghua professors to publicly express dissenting views has continued to shrink.
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Case one: Xu Zhangrun — dismissed for criticizing constitutional amendments
Xu Zhangrun was a professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Law and was once recognized as one of China’s “Top Ten Outstanding Young Jurists.” His turning point came in 2018, when he published a lengthy essay titled Our Present Fears and Expectations, openly calling for restoration of presidential term limits and rehabilitation of the official verdict on the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. The essay generated a major public response.
He subsequently continued to publish articles criticizing the trend toward a cult of personality and calling for political reform. His writings were repeatedly deleted, while his search results on Baidu reportedly plunged from hundreds of thousands to just a dozen or so.
In March 2019, Tsinghua University officially announced that it was suspending all of Xu Zhangrun’s teaching and research duties, barring him from teaching classes and supervising students, and launching an investigation into him. Numerous scholars and hundreds of Tsinghua alumni signed a joint statement in his support, criticizing the university for “imposing punishment before reaching a conclusion” and calling for his position to be restored.
The open letter of support stated bluntly that the university’s handling of the matter was “evasive, rash, and arbitrary,”and called for Xu’s reinstatement and an immediate end to all measures against him. The university, however, never issued a substantive response and never publicly explained which specific university regulations Xu had allegedly violated throughout the entire affair.
In July 2020, Xu Zhangrun was detained by police in Chengdu, Sichuan, for six days on allegations of “soliciting prostitution.” Shortly after his release, Tsinghua University formally dismissed him, citing the incident along with a series of articles he had previously published, which the university said “violated the code of professional conduct for teachers.” The decision drew widespread criticism from the international academic community. Several prominent overseas scholars wrote to Tsinghua calling for Xu’s reinstatement, but received no response.
At the time, Zhang Qianfan, a professor at Peking University’s School of Law, publicly wrote that the Xu Zhangrun case was a typical example of “being punished for one’s speech,” arguing that Xu’s views contained “nothing radical or biased.”
Case two: Guo Yuhua — from Weibo ‘reincarnation’ to her books being taken off the shelves
Guo Yuhua, a professor in Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology, was born in 1956. She served in the military in her early years and joined the CCP. In the 1980s, she entered Beijing Normal University through the national college entrance examination to pursue a doctoral degree. She gradually developed an independent perspective on Chinese social realities.
Beginning in 2000, she taught at Tsinghua University and focused for many years on issues affecting China’s marginalized communities, including the rights of migrant workers, the plight of laid-off workers, and labor-rights activism. She published several fieldwork-based books documenting the difficult conditions faced by rural residents and farmers.
In 2014, she publicly announced her withdrawal from the CCP. Afterward, she became a particular target of official censorship for openly criticizing current affairs on Weibo. According to Guo herself, her Weibo account was blocked a total of 80 times, while her WeChat account was blocked five times. Her accounts were repeatedly “blown up” whenever they accumulated a certain level of influence, prompting Chinese netizens to jokingly describe the process as “reincarnation.”
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Guo Yuhua criticized the authorities for concealing information about the outbreak, saying that “this kind of rule is no less toxic than the virus—in fact, it may be even more so.” That same year, after changing her profile picture and posting a candle emoji in mourning for Dr. Li Wenliang, her account was promptly blocked.
The impact of her WeChat account being blocked was even more immediate. At one point during the pandemic, it prevented her from properly teaching through online education software linked to her WeChat account.
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