Was looking for people to follow on substack and Vicky Xu came up mentioning they're a political prisoner from China. I haven't heard of them but this peaked my interest because nothing beyond "political prisoner from China" was mentioned. Turns out they have a Wikipedia page (camera side eye). Here's an excerpt:

During a 2014 gap year, Xu taught Mandarin at a high school in Perth, Australia. While there, she encountered Mike Chinoy's documentary on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a subject censored in China. This revelation prompted her to reevaluate her previous views on Chinese politics.

Instead of returning to Beijing, Xu pursued a degree in political science at the University of Melbourne. She also completed a six-month exchange semester at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she interned at the Truman Institute. Her academic and journalistic experiences, including interviews with Chinese dissidents such as Wu Lebao, shaped her perspectives.

She learned her journalism from the best /s

Bonus persecution fetish post in why she left Twitter:

Right after Elon Musk took over Twitter, someone from the recently-fired human rights team leaked to Rolling Stone that they’d been working on an investigation into the trolling of me, and sadly found most of the hate towards me on Twitter to be “organic”.

To be clear, separate investigations found that China did send their bot armies after me, and continues to.

What the Twitter internal investigation meant was that the number of people who actually hated/hate me was greater than the number of bots the Chinese government allocated to my case. Government propaganda worked that well, making people who didn’t even know me hate my guts.

"Most of the people that hate me were real but that's propaganda at work."

Extra Bonus restack on the China never invading another country question. The time period? Ancient China. Checkmate tankies:

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Substack CW: meantion of SA and Sex

Wikipedia