An Anonymous Critic Played Cat and Mouse with Beijing for 12 Years. Then He Got Caught.

For over a decade, an anonymous blogger named Program Think pushed back against the rule of the Chinese Communist Party one post at a time, hoping to hasten a political revolution he believed would come one day. Most remarkably, unlike most critics, he wrote from within China, where he took care to hide his digital footprint and taunted the internet police for being unable to catch him.

To evade the government’s extensive surveillance, he kept his identity secret, so much so that when he abruptly dropped off the grid in May 2021, no one knew where or how to find him. He stopped updating his blog, Twitter and Github accounts, leaving many of his followers fearing the worst. 

Little was known about his identity and whereabouts, until February, when a Chinese blogger was sentenced to seven years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power.” 

As it turned out, Program Think hid his online identity and activities even from those closest to him. 

Ruan Xiaohuan, a 45-year-old cybersecurity expert, was seized from his home in Shanghai a day after Program Think’s final post on May 9, 2021. He was tried behind closed doors. Citing the involvement of “state secrets,” authorities kept a tight lid on the case, refusing to disclose details, even to his family. Despite his “grave crime,” the name of his blog, its contents and other particulars were conspicuously absent from the five-page judgment, which first circulated online in March. 

Determined to find out what authorities were hiding, his wife, only publicly known by her surname Bei, scoured the internet, found the blog and read about its missing author. She came to a stunning conclusion. 

“Everything added up and confirmed to me what my husband had been doing,” she told VICE World News. “He is Program Think.” 

The lack of a degree didn’t stop him from launching a successful career in cybersecurity. In the next decade or so, he held executive positions at some of the country’s top firms in the field, including the network security company Venustech, where he helped oversee the information security system of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. 

In 2012, Ruan made another bold move and quit his job. “He felt that at companies, research is often limited by considerations of profitability,” Bei said.

Instead, he chose to stay at home, spending the bulk of his time developing open source software, and reading the news and books. 

Life for the couple continued as normal for many years—that is until May 10, 2021. It started like any other day, but at around noon Bei heard the doorbell and asked her husband to answer it, thinking it was a delivery of bottled water. She heard scuffles and by the time she emerged from her room, Ruan was gone, she said. 

Instead, around ten men—some in police uniforms and some in plain clothes—entered their apartment and began going through their possessions. She was kept out of sight as they went through the apartment, room by room, confiscating all their electronic devices. Her request to see the search warrant was rejected. 

“I couldn’t even contact other people for help or search online to figure out if what they were doing was in accordance with the law,” Bei recalled. 

The search lasted until past midnight, when she was taken to the police station for another few hours of questioning. She didn’t receive his detention warrant until two weeks later, and on that paper was his alleged crime: inciting subversion of state power.

Fuming over growing censorship in China, he wrote in June the same year: “I don’t want to stay silent and avoid these issues anymore. It’s time to write about things other than technology.”

From there, he set off on a different trajectory, covering everything from history and psychology, to cybersecurity and politics. Even as the risk escalated under China’s intensifying repression of dissent, he kept up his writing, pledging never to stay offline for more than 14 days at a time.   

In more than 700 posts, he covered a wide range of topics on his blog—from how to scale China’s Great Firewall of censorship, counteracting brainwashing, and a map of the connections among China’s political elite. He compiled such a valuable trove of online resources over the years that some Chinese social media users credit Program Think for inspiring their political awakening. 

His writing ventured into even the most sensitive topics in China. In an entry published on June 4, 2011, he retraced every step that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre, covering information that was missing even from Wikipedia. 

In 2013, when he won Deutsche Welle’s Best of the Blogs Award, he explained his motivations. “You might not care about politics, but politics will come after you,” he wrote. All major problems in the country—including inflation, food safety and environmental pollution—could ultimately be traced to China’s political system and crony capitalism, and the only way to break its dominance is through a nonviolent revolution, he wrote. It’s why he devoted his time to content that could improve people’s political and psychological awareness, two qualities he considered critical to the resistance.

In 2019, he summarized his game of cat-and-mouse with Chinese authorities and admitted that his activities had drawn unwanted scrutiny. Twice he received Gmail alerts of government-backed attacks. His comment section was spammed with pro-government trolls. 

But he remained defiant. “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” he wrote, citing the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. When readers, concerned about his safety, urged him to leave the country, he cited a line from V for Vendetta. “If all those who dare to resist run away, they would win,” he responded.  

On that day in early May in 2021, he shared 97 ebooks, including historian Charles Tilly’s Democracy and George Orwell’s 1984. It would be his last post.

“He’s a warrior who chose not to leave and stayed in China to fight a good fight,” Yaxue Cao, editor of ChinaChange.org, a website that covers civil society and human rights in China, told VICE World News. 

China Digital Times, a news website that tracks censorship in China, selected Program Think as its 2021 person of the year following his disappearance. 

“Like many of his readers, I admire his technological competence, intellectual capacity and moral courage, and watched as he became a legendary figure and a symbol of resistance,” said Xiao Qiang, the site’s founder and a research scientist at UC Berkeley’s School of Information in California.

Authorities have not revealed how they tracked Ruan down, but in the subsequent two years of silence, Program Think’s followers have desperately tried to figure out what happened to him. 

By cross-checking different leaked databases, a social media user was able to trace Program Think’s public Gmail account to a corporate email once used by Ruan. This might have been the way authorities found him, the social media user told VICE World News, speaking anonymously to avoid government reprisal.

“After all, if an ordinary person like me could locate him, the police must have tried different methods as well,” they said. The anonymous user posted their findings a year ago in hopes that Ruan would not be tried in secret, but it didn’t draw much attention amid a swarm of wild speculation online about the case.

“It’s too difficult for one man to stand against an entire system. Few have such courage.”

Bei has hired three different batches of lawyers to represent Ruan. All kept their lips sealed about her husband’s case, citing non-disclosure agreements they had to sign, she said. She was not even told when the trial, which had been halted by the pandemic, resumed in February. She was given such short notice about his sentencing that she was the only family member able to attend his hearing at the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate Court on Feb. 10.

“I never imagined he could be this thin,” Bei said, recalling that day. His hair used to be black, peppered with white—now it’s the other way round, she said. But he stood strong, Bei noted to herself in the court, until the verdict was announced. 

“I was very shocked by the heavy sentence,” she said, referring to the 7-year jail sentence. As he was led away, he looked back at her and his demeanor changed. With most of his face covered in a mask, “he pleaded for help with his eyes,” she said.

At this point, she still didn’t know the exact nature of her husband’s alleged crimes, and with the ambiguous court judgment raising more questions than answers, she finally scaled the firewall herself to look for news about missing bloggers. It didn’t take long before she came upon Program Think’s blog and finally connected the dots. The tone of the writing was familiar. It covered the same niche interest and expertise in cybersecurity. The number and dates of the entries cited in Ruan’s judgment matched that of Program Think.

During some days in 2017 and 2018, when Ruan was confined to bed due to erythroderma, Program Think apologized to its followers for not posting as frequently. Program Think often cited from Ruan’s favorite films—V for Vendetta and The Matrix—and they even used the same quotes, Bei said. 

Finally understanding the sensitivity of his case, Bei immediately looked for human rights lawyers to act as his defense attorneys in the appeal trial. But like her husband, she finds herself up against the long tentacles of China’s security apparatus. 

When, in February, she set out to meet Mo Shaoping and Shang Baojun, two well-known human rights lawyers she hired for the appeal, police officers cornered her at her apartment building and lectured her for hours in a bid to make her drop the case. 

Mo and Shang have been blocked from representing Ruan, and in their place authorities have appointed two lawyers, claiming Ruan has requested legal aid. And late last month, the lawyer’s phones began acting up. They were unable to take calls from outside of China and messages they sent on the encrypted messaging platform Signal would not go through, Shang confirmed to VICE World News. 

“This is our second appeal and the results will be final,” Bei said, explaining why she decided to speak up. “We will do what we can to make sure the second trial is fair and supervision by public opinion is one of the ways.” 

On Chinese social media platforms, Ruan’s name and even subtle references to Program Think have been scrubbed by censors. But outside China, there has been an outpouring of concern, with many users flocking to his blog to leave comments and finding ways to archive his content. “A true hero,” one wrote. “May you live till the day they all go up in smoke.”

Xiao, of China Digital Times, stressed the need to keep a spotlight on Ruan. 

“The more people know about him, what he did and what he signifies, the safer it is for him,” he said.

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