Teacher Li’s Threats Expose China’s Long Reach Online

Teacher Li threats have turned a Chinese exile’s X account into a test of how far digital repression can travel. Li Ying, the Italy-based artist and commentator known online as Teacher Li, keeps publishing censored Chinese news to roughly 2.2 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, while reporting smear campaigns, death threats and pressure on people who follow him.

The exposed group includes followers inside China, relatives who can be reached by police and diaspora readers who use foreign platforms to watch events that Chinese censors scrub at home. That is where a story about one account becomes a case file on transnational repression, platform safety and Europe’s still-forming response.

Teacher Li’s Reach Became a Target List

Li’s influence grew during the White Paper protests in 2022, when people inside China sent footage and accounts of demonstrations to a feed outside the country’s censorship controls. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China annual report recorded the escalation in official U.S. terms, saying the People’s Republic of China’s censorship apparatus had reached beyond China’s borders through the targeting of Li and his followers.

The commission, known as CECC and created by the U.S. Congress to monitor human rights and rule of law in China, said Li was based in Italy and had gained attention for sharing censored news, including White Paper protest footage on X. Its account of the February 2024 episode gives the follower list a concrete shape.

Those figures came before the latest descriptions of Li’s audience as larger than 2 million. The commission placed the episode in its chapter on freedom of expression.

How the Pressure Moves Offline

Pressure on an exiled account often runs through people who share a name, a home town or a family tie with the person posting. In Li’s case, the reported pressure reached followers. In other documented cases, the pressure reaches parents, siblings and classmates first.

Amnesty International’s report on Chinese students overseas, published on 13 May 2024, found that Chinese and Hong Kong students studying in Europe and North America described intimidation, harassment and surveillance tied to sensitive political activity. The group said affected students reported loneliness, isolation and self-censorship in academic and social settings.

Family pressure is the part that turns a foreign platform into a domestic risk. A person abroad can ignore an anonymous smear account. A relative inside China may receive a visit, a call or a warning. Rights groups call this coercion by proxy, and it is one reason a follower count can become a security issue.

China’s Foreign Ministry told the Associated Press in February 2024 that it did not understand the situation around the reported questioning of followers and did not view it as a diplomatic matter. Li and other exiled Chinese commentators continued to warn readers about account visibility, usernames and identifiable personal details.

The Record Beyond One Account

Li’s case sits inside a wider set of public records. Some count direct physical incidents. Others document digital pressure, family intimidation or platform duties. The records use different methods, so they should be read as overlapping files rather than a single ledger.

Freedom House’s latest transnational repression tracker said at least 54 governments had tried to silence dissidents abroad by 2025. It also said the forced return of 40 Uyghur men from Thailand to China in February 2025 cemented China’s status as the world’s leading perpetrator.

X Policy Meets State Pressure

X’s violent content policy says the platform prohibits high-severity violent speech, including threats to kill, torture, sexually assault or physically harm someone. It also says some lower-severity content may have its reach restricted after context is reviewed.

State-linked harassment brings a harder moderation file. A direct death threat can be removed from a platform. A family warning may happen off-platform and appear later as a screenshot, direct message or public testimony. A smear campaign may move through new accounts faster than a single abuse report can be processed.

In Europe, the Digital Services Act (DSA, the European Union’s platform-safety law) gives regulators a separate route into platform systems. The European Commission’s DSA guidance for very large online platforms says services with more than 45 million monthly users in the EU must assess systemic risks linked to illegal content, fundamental rights, public security and wellbeing.

Those are systemic risk duties, which means the question is larger than whether one post broke one rule. Police questioning in China sits outside a platform’s enforcement queue, while coordinated harassment aimed at European users can enter the risk files regulators request.

Europe Has Begun to Write the Rules

The European Union (EU) has moved faster on platform law than on a single legal treatment for transnational repression. That is starting to change. A European Parliament document summary says lawmakers adopted a resolution on 13 November 2025 by 512 votes to 76, with 52 abstentions, addressing transnational repression of human rights defenders.

The resolution defined the practice as attacks, threats and pressure by states or proxies against dissidents, journalists, human rights defenders and diaspora members beyond their borders. It included digital surveillance, intimidation, blackmail, smear campaigns, spyware, malicious disclosure of personal data and pressure on family members.

Parliament asked EU bodies and member states to build reporting mechanisms, improve data collection, support targeted defenders and consider sanctions. Those demands matter for someone like Li because he is based in Italy, while many of the people reading him may be spread across Europe, North America and China. A threat can cross legal systems faster than a police file can be opened.

For now, first contact still depends on the country where the target lives, the platform where the abuse appears and the evidence the target can preserve. That leaves a gap for exiles who face a mixed campaign of online threats, anonymous smears and pressure on relatives abroad or at home.

A Safety Routine for Followers

Followers of high-risk exile accounts cannot control state behavior, platform staffing or local police priorities. They can reduce the personal data that attackers can harvest. For readers who follow Li or similar accounts, digital hygiene starts before a threat arrives.

• Keep political follows separate from accounts tied to a legal name, employer, school or family business.
• Remove phone numbers, family names, exact locations and workplace details from public profiles.
• Use app-based two-step verification or a hardware security key, then store backup codes offline.
• Save screenshots, URLs, account handles and timestamps before reporting threats or deleting messages.
• Move direct threats naming a person, home, workplace or school into platform reports and local police reports, then alert a trusted contact.

This routine reduces the personal data attackers can use and gives police or platform teams a cleaner record to review, while the state pressure described in public reports remains outside any single user’s control. As of publication, Li’s account remains active on X, and the protection problem sits with the people around the feed.