⚠️ Important warning: Scammer groups are using publicly available information about me or others to impersonate “case investigators or well-connected intermediaries” and extort people in this industry. Their usual methods are intimidation + reporting people + ddos attacks. There are currently about 2-3 such groups active in China's censorship-circumvention software circles. Do not think paying them will make everything go away: they will keep extorting you. The more you give in, the more they demand, and they will keep demanding money for years. Many colleagues have already reported this to me.

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Footage of my arrest, recorded by my Tesla's Sentry Mode. I am the person in pajamas being held in the middle, with old clothes covering my hands to hide the handcuffs.

I strongly condemn the Shenzhen police. When they arrested me, they had no case paperwork and no evidence. Without producing any documents, they simply burst into my home, handcuffed me, ransacked the place, and took me away! Only afterward, in the detention room, did they have me sign the paperwork retroactively.

First, let me say this: the deeper the love, the stronger the anger. Without love for one's country, one would not speak up for its people. Silencing one person cannot silence millions. What happened to me was a personal misfortune and a tragedy for the country. A country's censorship of the internet and persecution of freedom of expression are deplorable. If this country's ruling party and laws do not change, and power remains unchecked, it is a tragedy for the people!

If you are a Chinese public official, whatever department you work for, and you arrest anyone who helps people circumvent internet censorship or contributes to freedom of expression, you are a criminal in the eyes of history!

Update on February 7, 2025: I now have a general understanding of how this unfolded.

In essence, the cyber police in Xiajin County, Dezhou, have been arresting people who provide censorship-circumvention software across China, imposing fines and confiscating assets without court judgments, while leaving the cases open. Already, 10 people arrested by the authorities in Xiajin County, Shandong, have contacted me. Many more are still unwilling to speak publicly. They are either on suspended sentences or released on bail pending investigation. Four or five, like me, have left the country for places such as the United States and Southeast Asia.

The groups of victims I have been able to contact so far.

The developer of XX. The XX project—you cannot run a proxy subscription service without knowing this one, can you?

Temporarily withheld because of the sensitivity of the case.

A person involved in the 11.20 case.

A person involved with the Guming proxy subscription service.

A person involved with XX Cloud.

Several people are involved. One asked me to remove the information because they do not want the matter to become too public, and their family is in China.

All this information came from the people involved. It concerns payment clearing, proxy subscription service operations, server providers, and more, and I have checked the supporting material. If you do not want to be identified or the information is sensitive, you can contact me to have it removed, but please be polite. A single case involves many people. Although not everyone wants to speak out, others have the right to disclose what happened. Do not immediately accuse me of posting irresponsibly—just contact me, and I will delete it.

Including our 8.05 case, that already makes 6 cases. Adding the information made public by the Xiajin County Public Security Bureau brings the total to at least 10 cases!

Now that I have successfully left the country, I can finally tell my story instead of remaining silent in fear.

10 years earlier, after buying a whmcs plugin, I joined a Telegram group that brought together technical specialists researching ways to circumvent internet censorship. This community was divided into two camps:

1. The online gaming acceleration camp (similar to Xunyou and the UU accelerator): specializing in optimizing gaming connections so players can reduce latency and improve speeds.

2. The censorship-circumvention software camp: developing and selling censorship-circumvention software to help users access the global internet.

I belonged to the online gaming acceleration camp. I had also spent several years mainly selling censorship-circumvention software, but my marketing was not good enough, so I stopped making it my main business. I focused on gaming accelerators and the IDC industry instead—Tiantian Accelerator, Xiaoming Accelerator, Box Accelerator, and others, all of which have now closed. I also used my advantages to help others in the group, for example by buying relay servers at low prices (for example, I could obtain China Mobile servers at thirty percent of the price, and I had a purchase contract with China Mobile in Wuhan) and reselling them to the group, or introducing resources they could bring together.

Technically, the underlying principles of these two types of tools are almost exactly the same; only their user groups differ. Because the industry uses the same technology, I would also regularly share knowledge in the group about optimizing backends, routing traffic, hijacking ping, borrowing connections, and so on. I even developed an industry blacklist system specifically to guard against **“refund-only”** users (people who maliciously buy something and then request a refund, most of whom are cyber-police spies; because most people in China use WeChat or Alipay to pay, every account has a unique payment ID. If someone is flagged as a “refund-only user,” all merchants in the group automatically refuse their purchases. This system was very effective and greatly reduced their losses).

Over those ten years, of the original group of more than a hundred people, after the group had been disbanded many times and we had lost touch with many, there were still thirty active members we could keep in touch with. We have always stayed together, have close relationships, and long ago became brothers who could talk about anything.

In a sentence, it was essentially a harmonious industry association where everyone could speak openly about anything.

Every month, through paid and free services, we help people bypass internet censorship one to three million times!

An unexpected arrest

On August 15, 2024 at 5 p.m., my wife called me. She said someone had phoned her to say my car had been scratched and that I should go downstairs to check. (At the time, she was traveling in Yunnan with our child.)

I was completely unsuspecting. As soon as I opened the door, seven or eight police officers rushed at me and pinned me down. Without even a search warrant, they started ransacking my home. Then they opened Telegram, saw my chat history, and immediately decided I was the person they were looking for.

They then confiscated my iPhone, MacBook, cash, and other things.On the third day, they took me under escort to Shenzhen and then locked me up in the Nanshan District Detention Center in Shenzhen.

Only later did I learn that the origin of this arrest was the arrest of one of our brothers in the group, Zhang Xun (nicknamed 44). He ran a VPN business (with products DuangCloud and Wallless), and his annual net profits exceeded ten million. The Xiajin police in Shandong used a sting operation: they had someone buy his VPN, then filed a report and opened a case, intending to arrest him across provincial borders. But because he had a business in Shenzhen, the Shenzhen police got there first and took him away under “protective law enforcement.”

After Zhang Xun was arrested, perhaps out of fear and ignorance, he thought implicating others would protect him. * (I do not blame him; we are all victims.) He directly named the people in the group he knew, At least 4 members of our group were held in the Nanshan Detention Center in Shenzhen alone.

Arrested by mistake, I became a “political prisoner”

In fact, the Shenzhen police later told me they had not initially intended to arrest me because they had not found any direct evidence that I was selling VPN (I had hidden it well). However, my Telegram name was “Xitler,” and my profile picture was Xi Jinping. They mistakenly thought I was a major dissident, and Zhang Xun had also named me, so they arrested me along with the others. This was also why state security interrogated me: they used the name and profile picture on my telegram as the grounds for my arrest. 😂

During the interrogation, state security focused on these questions:

• Why were you called “Xitler”?

• Why was your profile picture Xi Jinping?

• Did you know “Teacher Li,” Wang Zhian, or other dissidents?

I explained:

“Tler” means “head of state, leader.” “Xitler” simply means “Head of State Xi, Leader Xi.” It was only a joke.

They could not produce any evidence that I was a major dissident. Finally, when I was signing and fingerprinting the interrogation record, I noticed that the name “Xi Jinping” had been replaced with “▲▲▲”.

They did not even dare write the leader's name. At that moment, I thought this country was utterly ridiculous.

Released on bail pending investigation, with my fate uncertain

Criminal cases usually have three stages: the police, the procuratorate, and the court. I was held in the detention center for about 20 days before the case moved to the procuratorate stage.

The prosecutor asked me:

Do you know that what you did was illegal? What you provide are “tools for damaging computer systems”!

I shot back:

How are censorship-circumvention software and gaming accelerators “damaging” anything? Users download them voluntarily and pay voluntarily; they do users no harm! Letting people freely browse the internet, watch YouTube, and play games on foreign servers—is that “damage” too?

I thought to myself, if you say I am guilty, then I am guilty; whatever the Communist Party says is always “right”, so I simply stopped explaining and confronted them with a **“lock me up until I die” mindset**.

Yet on day 28, I was suddenly told I would be “released on bail pending investigation”!

On September 14, 2024, I returned to Wuhan. I thought the case would simply be left to peter out, but never imagined that the nightmare was only beginning——

Extortion by the Shandong police

A month later, the Xiajin police in Shandong came to arrest people again!At the case-handling center in Shenzhen's Nanshan District, they fought with the Shenzhen police over custody, wanting to take all of us to Shandong.

At the case-handling center, they never mentioned money outright, yet everything they said was about money. They asked me directly:

How much did you earn from providing technical support?

I said:Isn't money what you want? Just name a figure, and I will go back and raise it for you.

At this point, the broke bastards—the Shandong police—fully revealed their true nature of “profit-driven law enforcement”:

They repeatedly hinted that if I accepted a fine of around one million yuan and paid it, they would arrange for the offense to be established without prosecution.This matter could be treated as serious or minor; you need to think it through carefully.

I thought to myself, first, I need to keep them placated. I said I would accept it, even sell my house to raise the money, and would do my best to gather it once I got home. They arranged for me to be released on bail pending investigation, so I could return to Wuhan; otherwise, I would have been taken to Xiajin County.

All 4 people in this group of co-defendants were released on bail. Only Zhang Xun was taken to Xiajin County, Shandong, because he had the most money.

The escape route

On December 13, 2024, I received a summons requiring me to go to the Xiajin Public Security Bureau for questioning on December 16.

I knew this meant they were getting ready to close the net. If I could not pay, I feared it would not stop at torment and detention; I would very likely receive a prison sentence.

After all, the servility of people from Shandong and their “deep-sea fishing” policing raids are notorious across the country.

This time, I decided to escape!Because I had been released on bail pending investigation, I was prohibited from leaving the country. Fortunately, my passport had not been confiscated! The border restriction was not much of a problem—after 13 years on Twitter, I knew far too much. I hired a car to travel from Wuhan → Guangxi (without getting out of the car anywhere in China, to avoid the surveillance camera network) → a country in Southeast Asia, where, through insiders at customs, I falsified entry and exit records and successfully activated my passport!

Next, I had my wife and child leave the country and fly to Singapore. We reunited there, then went on to Serbia, took a truck into the European Union, and then traveled to the Netherlands. After many stages of travel—our original destination was the United Kingdom—a turn of events eventually brought us safely to Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

A new beginning

I hope everything goes smoothly in 2025!