Amid the ongoing tightening of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological control, the campus media “Jingshi Xueren” at Beijing Normal University quietly shut down, becoming the latest example in the wave of over a thousand campus media outlets disappearing since 2024.
The account of “Jingshi Xueren” displayed as “voluntarily cancelled,” without providing an explanation to readers for the closure.
Currently, the introduction of “Jingshi Xueren” on Baidu has also been deleted. Online records show that “Jingshi Xueren” was a student supplement of Beijing Normal University, also a magazine, founded in 2006 with issue number BNU-001, organized and run by the Student Journalist Group of Beijing Normal University (established on May 18, 2004).
The public account of “Jingshi Xueren” was established in 2013, covering academic popularization, campus rights and livelihood issues, with a perspective beyond just the campus.
A former member of “Jingshi Xueren” posted on Xiaohongshu, documenting the closure of this campus media outlet that had been running for 20 years.
The post mentioned their belief that the articles they carefully wrote with insight, about campus rights, livelihood issues, and beyond, were precisely what brought warnings upon them.
It is believed that the crucial turning point came in November 2017 when the media outlet reported on a major news event (not specified in the original article), which led to being summoned on the same day and forced to submit articles for review. Subsequently, their space was gradually restricted: the office was reclaimed, the public account ceased updates, ultimately disappearing completely through voluntary cancellation.
The former member expressed outrage upon seeing the screenshot of the public account’s voluntary cancellation: “Anger burns within me. Six to seven hundred articles vanished like this, not even leaving us a cyber tomb, a thorough extermination.”
Reportedly, “Jingshi Xueren” had long focused on labor rights and the living conditions of Beijing’s migrant workers – topics often conflicting with the mainstream narratives demanded by the Chinese Communist Party.
According to a report by “China Digital Times,” which focuses on Chinese internet censorship, the experience of “Jingshi Xueren” is not unique. Between November and December 2024, over 10 well-known universities across the country rapidly cancelled a large number of WeChat public accounts: Fudan University took down 258, Wuhan University closed over 200, Communication University of China cancelled over 120, followed by Southeast University, Tongji University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, among others, with a total of over 1,000 accounts affected.
The reports mentioned that the announcements for the closure of these campus media outlets had highly consistent wording, citing reasons such as “improving the quality and effectiveness of online public opinion guidance,” and “streamlining, efficiency,” among others. It is widely believed that there exists a unified superior deployment behind these closures, although the Chinese Ministry of Education has not publicly released any relevant administrative orders.
Meanwhile, in 2021, the Chinese state media reported that the Central Propaganda Department, the Central Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Education, and the Communist Youth League had initiated the construction of a batch of so-called “high-quality university ideological and political education” public accounts. The first batch included 12 types and 200 public accounts, mandated to adhere to the guidance of “Xi Jinping Thought,” and so on.
Regarding the voluntary cancellation of “Jingshi Xueren,” an article titled “A Decade of Decline in Campus Media” by the author Dongmu was published on the WeChat account “Yue Ye Qiu Du.”
The article expressed that “as physical space is gradually restricted, the boundaries of discourse are silently shrinking. Selecting topics for coverage becomes increasingly difficult, conducting interviews becomes harder, and those corners where one could once question are disappearing one by one.”
“The death of campus media is not just a problem of the media itself. It is a combined effort of the broader public opinion environment, macro policies, and media technologies. When the review mechanism becomes stricter, when algorithms replace subscription relationships, when short videos chop attention into seconds, how can an in-depth report that takes weeks to craft compete against a 15-second transformative video in the torrent of information?”
The article concludes, “I firmly believe. They have declined, but only in form, continuing to grow.”
This article has been deleted.