Tencent Dajia

» see dajia.qq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

tencent dajia never reached turkey. it was a chinese-language product for a chinese-language audience running on wechat, and both the language wall and the platform wall put it fully outside the internet i was reading in the 2010s. what i know about dajia comes from reading english-language coverage of its 2020 shutdown after the fact.

dajia launched on 15 december 2012 under tencent news. jia jia edited it. the format was long-form opinion from a rotating stable of chinese public intellectuals, most of them writing under names already established in the chinese-language commentariat. the platform ran primarily through wechat, which by the mid-2010s had eaten most of the chinese standalone-blog ecosystem. dajia's position inside tencent gave it distribution the independent liberal blogs of the hu-jintao era had never had.

on 27 january 2020 dajia published an essay titled "the 50 days of wuhan pneumonia: chinese people are all paying the price of the death of media". the piece attacked the state's early handling of the covid-19 outbreak. three weeks later, on 19 february 2020, the account disappeared. the archive of eight years of essays came down with it. an insider told the south china morning post that tencent had shut dajia at the request of the office of the central cyberspace affairs commission.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the dajia model was distinctive inside the chinese internet. most self-media accounts on wechat were single-author personal projects with modest editorial oversight. dajia sat closer to a curated magazine, with an editor-in-chief and a byline stable, using wechat as distribution rather than as a native format. the topics ranged across chinese domestic politics and international affairs, and the writing was intentionally set slightly further to the liberal side of the domestic spectrum than most tencent surfaces.

that liberal position was the point. dajia let tencent host commentary that was harder to publish elsewhere, within limits, while giving the parent company some cover if a specific piece attracted censor attention. the model worked for most of a decade.

~ the day it died ~

the january 27 essay was more direct than most of what dajia had published. within days it was scrubbed off wechat. two weeks after that the entire dajia account and its eight years of archived content disappeared from the platform. tencent declined to comment publicly. scmp's insider source and reporting from the china project both attributed the shutdown to a cyberspace administration of china directive rather than a business decision.

the timing was part of a broader wave. through february and march 2020 dozens of accounts covering the wuhan outbreak from angles the state did not want amplified were removed. dajia's institutional weight inside tencent had protected it for eight years and did not protect it now.

~ what got buried with it ~

eight years of essays disappeared with the account. some of the pieces exist in mirrors on non-chinese platforms and in personal archives. most do not. the writers who had built profiles through dajia had to find other outlets, most of which faced similar pressure over the following two years as the covid-era information environment tightened.

dajia was one of the biggest single losses of the chinese internet's opinion tier during the covid period. the death was clean and total in the way that platform-level shutdowns are when the platform itself owns the archive.

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