Hu Chenfeng, a Chinese video blogger in his early thirties, had built a modest following by documenting the daily realities of life in his city. Unlike many creators who focused on entertainment or government-approved narratives, Hu captured the world that most people never saw: the struggle, the quiet suffering, the invisible cracks in society.
Early one morning, in a quiet old street of southern China, the streetlights cast a dim amber glow on wet cobblestones. The air smelled of dust, oil smoke, and fresh vegetables from the morning market. A seventy-year-old man bent over, picking through wilted leaves to find something still edible. Every leaf seemed like a fragile thread of hope, almost invisible.
Hu Chenfeng stood in a corner, filming. His assistant adjusted the camera. On a nearby construction site, a seventy-eight-year-old man lifted heavy bricks. At a street stall, an eighty-year-old woman counted her three yuan coins—roughly 0.4 U.S. dollars—a sum barely enough to survive one day, far short of a life with dignity.
Meanwhile, high-ranking retired officials in the city, living in distant office towers, received more than 20,000 yuan per month in pensions, enjoying a life entirely detached from the streets below. Sunlight poured through their floor-to-ceiling windows, mingling with the aroma of coffee, a stark contrast to the dust and smoke of the marketplace. These two worlds ran in parallel: one of struggle, one of protection and privilege.
Hu Chenfeng keenly captured these contrasts. He created slang to describe the divide: “Apple people”—those who no longer believed in communism; “Android people”—those conditioned to obey, the ordinary citizens who had been tamed by the system. These terms spread quietly among young people, like secret signals connecting the awakened to each other.
The state, however, could not tolerate such documentation. Within weeks, all of Hu Chenfeng’s accounts were shut down. His name vanished from domestic search engines; his videos were removed, erased as if they had never existed. Only his fans secretly uploaded clips from his live streams. At the same time, the government spent lavishly abroad, hiring European and American social media influencers to produce videos praising “China’s greatness” and denouncing “Western media lies,” masking reality with a polished fiction.
Yet Hu Chenfeng’s lens had not entirely disappeared. In Apple stores in New York, Tokyo, Berlin, and Seoul, Chinese expatriates quietly placed photos of him. They did not know if they would ever see a free homeland again, but in foreign lands, the courage of this blogger was remembered. This was not a public protest but a silent act of resistance.
Below, elderly citizens bent in the cold, laboring; above, retired officials sipped tea in warm apartments. The clamor of censorship attempted to cover the truth, but the truth fell like dust, occasionally landing on those who dared to see. Each click of a camera, each quietly shared slang term, was a small glimmer illuminating a hidden reality.
This is a city silenced, yet not all acquiesce. Hu Chenfeng’s story reminds us: where freedom disappears, ordinary lives are split between extremes, and those who dare to speak—even when entirely erased—become the brightest shadows in history.
Every person who despises communism should remember its lies and its cruelty. The system’s extreme inequalities—from pensions of just over 100 yuan for the working poor to more than 20,000 yuan for high-ranking officials—are not merely numbers; they are a reflection of oppression and control. Ordinary people who have been brainwashed, conditioned to obey, or forced to embrace the regime’s ideology are largely innocent—they are victims of a system that manipulates truth and stifles freedom. The suffering of the powerless, the silencing of truth, and the distortion of reality are the marks of a regime that trades human dignity for authority. Those who witness it, abroad or in secret, carry the responsibility to remember, to speak, and to ensure that such tyranny is never repeated.
