In the spring of 1989, James Qiu was one of the thousands of students on the streets daily in the Chinese metropolis Shanghai, hoping, like his peers nationwide, that their activism could change his country into a freer land equal to the West.
Their dreams were shattered that June, when the Chinese Communist Party’s tanks rolled in to crush students who staged peaceful sit-ins on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing thousands by some estimates. Around half a dozen students whom Qiu knew by name never came back from the capital.
As the regime began a systematic campaign to hunt down protesters, Qiu received a police summons over his role in the movement.
Thanks to a visa that had been approved around the same time, Qiu left China that July for a graduate program in computer engineering in Canada, sparing him from a massive political prosecution that saw many outspoken activists cast as “rioters,” and ostracized, fired, or jailed as a result.
In the years that followed, Qiu forged his career in Silicon Valley, working at tech firms including Apple and Oracle.
But despite his exit from China, those memories from 1989 never went away for Qiu. While in North America, he was able to freely express his opposition to Chinese Communist Party rule. During his graduate program, he once organized a student protest in Ottawa in defiance of Beijing.
It was in Montreal that Qiu took up the spiritual practice Falun Gong, which he learned through his mother in China. It was 1998. By that time, tens of millions of Chinese were practicing the discipline.
The practice, involving meditative exercises and a set of beliefs centered around the core values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, had spread like wildfire in the country off the back of adherents’ reports of improvements to their health and character.
But similar to what happened in 1989, the Chinese communist regime couldn’t countenance a large portion of its population holding a set of beliefs contrary to the Party’s atheist Marxist-Leninist ideology. Deeming Falun Gong’s popularity a threat to the regime’s authoritarian rule, Beijing launched an overwhelming elimination campaign in 1999, upending the lives of an estimated 100 million adherents.
From an ocean away, Qiu could only watch helplessly as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) again set its crosshairs on a group of people targeted merely for holding a belief not sanctioned by the regime.
As an early user of the internet in 1995, it didn’t escape Qiu how the regime was using the technology for its propaganda and repression.
The internet censorship in China rose to a new level after the launch of the persecution of Falun Gong in July 1999. Under the Great Firewall, Beijing’s vast internet surveillance apparatus built as early as 1996, Falun Gong remains one of the top topics for censorship alongside the Tiananmen Massacre. Most information outlets are off-limits to mainland internet users unless they use special software to bypass the blockage. State media and official Chinese regime websites, meanwhile, are saturated with negative portrayals of the faith.
In the West, Qiu observed news outlets and websites copying articles from mainland China, effectively “poisoning” people elsewhere in the world. Meanwhile, Beijing was bribing its way overseas to further silence dissenting views, he said.
“Our human rights were canceled by the CCP,” said Qiu. “We didn’t have anywhere to have our voices heard.”
That stifling atmosphere still holds true for the vast Chinese populace today. When the “white paper movement” erupted all across China in recent weeks against the regime’s inhumane zero-COVID policies, Chinese state media stayed mute, and the censors rapidly erased any mentions of the protests on social media and online.
The lack of a countering force in the face of suppression, he said, was the inspiration behind Gan Jing World, a platform established earlier this year designed to “present the information from the source.”
In Chinese, “Gan Jing” means clean, a concept to which Qiu and his team gave their full attention.
In an age where every mainstream platform, according to Qiu, carries a “hidden agenda” and seeks to hook people in, the CEO wants Gan Jing World to be an alternative: a family-friendly digital town square for all to share knowledge and viewpoints without fear of censorship.
Besides politics and finance, the platform—with content in both English and Chinese—focuses on delivering family-friendly material on a range of topics from arts to lifestyle to the supernatural.
“The value we deliver here is truly providing a neutral platform,” he said.
Gan Jing World, in Qiu’s words, is a “complete ecosystem” supported by its own cloud architecture, a work that has impressed some of his former colleagues at Apple.
“James, I’m really impressed by this, because I believe in Apple, if you want to create an ecosystem like this, at least it’s a three to five years project with more than 100 engineers, but you guys did it,” he recalled a friend saying.
The platform is firm in steering clear from inappropriate content based on the four concepts of “no violence, no pornography, no crime, and no drugs or harm.”
Qiu believes this is what fundamentally sets Gan Jing World apart amid competition with other major existing big tech platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, both of which have been in hot water recently over censorship and bias allegations.
Gan Jing World, he said, focuses on “content and what it delivers” regardless of the individuals’ race, political standpoints, or beliefs, while other platforms focus on the content creators and what topics they deliver.
There’s one more type of content that Qiu made clear will not be on the platform: anything advocating for communism.
Communism was built on violence from its very origin, he said. While the CCP’s propaganda has trumpeted the Party as a gift to the Chinese people, Qiu and many others have witnessed how far this is from reality.
“I’m not going to be cheated by them, so that’s why I want to make sure that on our platform, we are not going to promote the voice of the CCP.”
Gan Jing World is accessible on the web, or as an app on Android and iOS.
