For a long time, I did not understand why China’s national firewall only blocked my blog after I went into exile in the Netherlands.

I probably do not count as an anti-communist in the traditional sense. What I oppose is any dictatorship, including the Chinese Communist Party. I am not someone who ignores right and wrong and opposes things for the sake of opposing them.

If I had to say which article touched a nerve, it was probably the one titled “Why I Went into Exile in the Netherlands”.

I had already opposed Xi Jinping's continuation in office on my blog. I wrote there for years, still using a .cn domain, and it was never blocked.

So why was my domain only blocked when I wrote about “GFW” and “distant-water fishing”—predatory policing outside the officers’ own province?

For a while, I kept thinking about it and could not work it out.

Now I think I have worked it out.

Because mainland China's highest rulers do not care whether you have suffered injustice or harm, or whether a local government has extorted you. Nor do they care whether those local officials want to take your money or harm you. Even if they want to kill you, they do not consider that important.

What really concerns the highest ruling class is that you have spoken about these things and made them widely known.

They build the firewall to prevent people from learning about the outside world and threatening their regime, to keep everyone stupid and make eunuchs feel proud.

But they did not expect people within their own ranks to use this tacit understanding—“everyone knows, but nobody says it outright”—to make money. They handle cases on legal grounds that do not exist at all. They are clearly after money, yet fly the banner of law enforcement.

Low-level police dare to do this because they know that making money or even harming people under this pretext will attract little criticism: the higher levels support it. But they do not realize that those higher levels are afraid of the world discovering how China systematically controls the internet and freedom of expression. These low-level officers have broken that tacit understanding.

Police at the lowest level in small county towns even invent a supposed Ministry of Public Security campaign called “scaling the wall and breaking the net” to lend legitimacy to their own enforcement.

In fact, the Ministry of Public Security has no such campaign at all. In Xiajin County, for example, after I exposed it, they rushed to delete the boastful articles on their official WeChat account.