WeChat: an app but more
When I started working on this article as a reluctant volunteer for the pitch from my newsroom’s editors, I reflected on and soon was disturbed by my non-disturbance from news of the WeChat ban.
A few days after the White House announced its executive order to ban WeChat Aug. 6, my grandpa eagerly called me at midnight Los Angeles time. I missed the call, and he followed up with a voice message asking me, worringly, if it was true that WeChat will be banned in the US and that I would no longer be able to chat with him over it. Then my parents called, asking if they should download Zoom so we could continue to video call every week. They knew we the kids studying abroad have been attending Zoom universities and obviously they wondered if they should catch the trend. I suggested nothing.
WeChat, a multifunctional all-in-one superapp that has about 3.3 million monthly active users in the US and 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide, is the lifeblood for many. More than 90% of people living in first-tier cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen — are registered users. Mostly used in the US by members of the Chinese diaspora and sometimes other Asian countries, WeChat is the platform of choice that connects these immigrants to their overseas families and each other.
Besides the basic social media functions such as messaging, calling and sharing and interacting over content, WeChat offers banking, gaming, ordering a cab or food delivery or pet grooming among other services. In some cities, you can even take the metro by scanning a QR code without having to buy a physical ticket or bring a metro card. Compared to Facebook, it has a cleaner interface, less self-indulgent than Instagram, and more private overall because everything that appears on your feed — which in WeChat is called Moments — is strictly limited to your added friends with little to none interruption by ads. It is the only social app that has its own place outside of the folders of social apps on my phone. It is the app I wake up to checking if my grandparents or cousins have posted anything interesting in the family group chat, and go to bed with reading articles or poetry from my favorite subscription accounts. Although now I barely post on Moments anymore, I still check it regularly to see what my peers are up to and stay distantly connected with people and friends from days of yore. WeChat is a life staple.
Having got WeChat in middle school, I did not value it much until I went to high school. QQ at the time was still in style, a similarly multi-functional social media app as well as web portal incarnated by the iconic penguin in red scarf. My WeChat contacts back then only consisted of family members and maybe few close friends.
I remembered the first encounter I had with the prominence of WeChat. At the first club fair in my ninth grade, over a hundred clubs were tabling and promoting themselves in four separate rooms as well as people holding their banners and recruitment posters while roaming in the yard between rooms. Every club I signed up for asked me to either add them individually on WeChat group or join their WeChat group in which they make ensuring club announcements or schedule interviews. It then dawned upon me I would be embroiled in this world connected via WeChat for years to come. There was also a WeChat group for my home class, where the home teacher would post school announcements everyday in the morning and answer our questions any time of the day. School events were often primarily marketed on WeChat, as students post and repost texts with images on Moments. No longer a platform that you click in out of boredom or unnecessary curiosity, the app became a necessity in order to staying informed and connected.
The more dedicated and tech-savvy clubs or ambitious individuals have registered for official accounts — a subscription-based blog-like function which also characterizes what is called self-media. Without the training in reading newspapers or trust in any official publications, these self-media accounts for me represented to me the new frontier of radical personal expression and generative public sphere. From individually-run accounts posting articles about life as a professional woman to those run by full-time professionals who post educational articles on sex and intimate relationships to activist accounts producing monthly newsletters and event info, WeChat exposed me to worlds and knowledge I could never otherwise have gotten from school or family.
However, the increasing effort in online censorship by the Chinese government has led to the disappearance of many WeChat accounts — even some of great popularity with a large following. In 2018, a sweeping censorship campaign has shut down two beloved accounts: Feminist Voices and News Lab. While I lost track of the whereabouts of the former, I was able to keep following the latter up to today via email newsletters and alternate social media platform. It was and is not unusual to click upon an article and found a red warning sign saying the content has been blocked for discussing “sensitive information”. 2018 was also the year I graduated from high school and left for America. Without the need to use it as my primary source of information plus the disappointment for the narrowing sphere of speech, I increasingly grew apart from the app.
It was never my intention nor has it ever occurred to me that I could rid myself of WeChat completely. Having stayed in my college dorm room rather than flying back home as usual over summer, I have taken up the habit of taking pictures of my food and sharing them in my family group chat almost religiously. In response, my dad would always send pictures of his meals of the day, proudly showing me his experimentation in the kitchen when my mom was not home or good frozen food he had recently discovered to be good. I used to deride people who take pictures every time they have a meal, but at this time, eating meals and sharing them virtually seemed to be the only things that could maintain my teetering sense of routine and stability. Every time I clicked on the green little box, I knew I would see responses from the other side of the ocean for even the most boring pictures. That little interaction everyday on WeChat gave me a sense of control — not too much, just enough to keep my secluded world together and running.
The reason I was not disturbed by the proposed ban — maybe even now — was not that I grew disillusioned with WeChat, that I no longer use it and have found alternative platforms to express myself and connect with people. On the contrary, it was exactly because WeChat was so important that it was preposterous to talk or think about it not being there anymore. Saying WeChat will be banned is almost like suggesting the air no longer existing or the ground disappearing. How can you be disturbed by something that intuition and reason prohibit?
Despite the many serious flaws of WeChat, its significance for me and many of the Chinese American community is undeniable. In response to the Aug. 6 executive order, a group of “ordinary WeChat users” in New Jersey founded the non-profit US WeChat User Alliance and filed a preliminary injunction against the order Aug. 27. The injunction was approved by the federal judge Laurel Beeler for the Northern District of California hours before the ban would go into effect Sept. 20. The ruling was later appealed by the federal government.
So it may come a day when I have to part with WeChat permanently although for now I cannot imagine that future. Despite how I might resent and scoff at the app from time to time, I have to acknowledge its role in bridging my family and myself together at this time. It is like that endearing annoying cousin you grew up with: you don’t love them always, but they are always there for you — sometimes with loving support and others infuriating pranks. They are what ties the family together, where ever you are, however far you are.
Speaking of which, I will end here and go call my parents now — before it’s too late.
(This article was originally published in The Occidental newspaper Oct. 13, 2020 in abridgement. This is the edited full version.)
