‘Patriotic traffic business’: when China’s cyber nationalists cross Beijing’s red line
Anti-West blogger Sima Nan’s tax scandal exposes lucrative hustle of patriotic fury that dodges political risk – until it doesn’t
He began to gather attention in the 1990s, appearing on national television to attack qigong masters including Falun Gong, a spiritual group Beijing later outlawed as an “evil cult”.
Along the way, Sima Nan, whose real name is Yu Li, exposed the tricks of many so-called masters – performers who appeared to swallow fire, bend spoons, or break bricks with their heads – by staging the same tricks on state broadcaster CCTV to show that they did not have the superpowers they had claimed.
A decade later, he turned his attention to a new target – the United States and what he saw as American surrogates in China.
Sima Nan would frequently accuse groups or individuals of betraying China’s interests and colluding with the US, an approach that earned him the nickname “the anti-US fighter”.