Last month, a former contributor to the Beijing Normal University student media outlet 京师学人 (Jīngshī Xuérén, “Capital Scholar”) noted that its WeChat public account had been deregistered. Although updates had halted in 2023, the account and its content—more than 600 existing articles—had remained online, and “The Snowman” (雪人 Xuěrén, a pun on 学人 Xuérén) was warmly remembered as an eccentric campus institution and a training ground for emerging journalism students. News of its final demise prompted reflection and criticism online. The essay, whose first half is translated below (part two will follow shortly), was posted on the WeChat public account “Swimming Across by Moonlight,” and subsequently censored, but is archived at CDT Chinese. It describes the decade-long erosion of Jingshi Xueren in the context of broader factors such as the decline of journalism as a profession in the face of political and commercial pressures, the rise of short video and algorithmic content recommendations, and changes to campus life that were sharply accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay names no individuals, calls Beijing Normal University “N University,” and never refers to Jingshi Xueren by its full name. This first half details the events leading up to the deregistration, and ends immediately before its discovery.
Late one night in April 2026, someone posted online: “That campus journal’s Weibo and WeChat accounts both got deregistered.”
More than 600 articles spanning 20 years were wiped out with one keystroke. The post got more than 300 comments: “Who’s going to give me back my lost youth?” “That was the first place that made me want to become a journalist.” “All that news the students worked so hard at, gone. What will we show new students now?”
From “hotpot” to “deregistered” in ten years. This isn’t just the story of a single campus media outlet; it’s part of a journey that many of us shared.
2016-2018: Hotpot
It’s 2016. We’re in the offices of Xueren, at N University.
The 48-page glossy full-color print edition is fresh from the presses, and still smells of ink. Its opening message is just six characters long: “To enduring insight.” That year, WeChat public accounts were still exploding. At an editorial meeting, they decided to turn it into a digital, new-media publication. Z, the editor-in-chief, said to his fellow students, “This place is a hotpot. Anyone who dips themselves in it will carry its flavor away with them.”
That year, the Chinese University Media Union published its Campus Media Development Report. Their data showed that more than 80% of campus media outlets had already begun the process of convergence. Traditional formats were contracting, while new media was expanding. This change wasn’t just happening at N University, it was the challenge facing a whole generation of those in campus media.
At pitch meetings, the students would argue over what to cover. Some of them focused on conditions for delivery workers—that piece “Squat, Wait, Ride, Return: The Daily Routines of Two Delivery Drivers” was later picked up by some bigger platforms. Some tracked the fates of retired athletes; some dug through archives looking to unearth the story of why an unpopular field of study got axed; others discussed the problem of inadequate on-campus first-aid facilities.
“No one gave us assignments, there were no KPIs,” a former staffer recalled. “If we found something interesting and meaningful, we’d go cover it.”
Back then, the campus still had newsstands. According to a survey, more than 80% of students supported having newsstands on campus. But things had already begun to change: some of the campus newsstands had been replaced with snack kiosks or fruit stalls.
In those days, idealism still burned bright. Students still believed in the power of words, and in “striving to capture complex truth in elegant prose.” Campus media outlets weren’t just publicity channels, they were more like training grounds for observing the world and recording its details.
Graffiti on the wall of Xueren’s former office. These include the slogan, “To enduring insight”; the comment “turn off all the lights, eternity can’t knock us down”; and the name Jingshi Xueren in large characters with a large red 拆 chāi character in a red circle, signifying imminent demolition
2019-2022: Closure
In 2019, the Shengshiqing Bookstore received an eviction notice.
This more than twenty-year-old academic bookstore had once been one of the most important cultural landmarks in N University’s neighborhood. Scholars and professors alike admired the owner’s tasteful selection. If you told him about your academic focus, he could give you a more detailed reading list than your own academic advisor. Regular customers included professors of film and literature, linguistics scholars, and a film director who’d often come to browse the shelves.
The store officially closed its doors in March 2021. The owner posted a handwritten note on the glass door: “The bookstore may fade, but the memory remains. May culture flourish, and life be peaceful.”
Then came the clean-up of the East Gate’s Snack Street. After summer break in 2019, returning students realized that the whole street was sealed off. Next to say farewell was Moxiang [Ink-scent] Bookstore, a used bookstore hidden in a hutong by the North Gate that specialized in literary and historical classics and lasted for nine years before finally closing its doors.
Space always disappears from the edges inward.
In 2020, a certain well-known disaster [the start of the COVID pandemic] accelerated this process. The campus installed a system of turnstiles, and entry and exit became subject to approval. The Beijing Municipal Education Commission advanced a policy of “semi-closed campuses” for colleges and universities, with “no leaving campus unless necessary,” and no one from off-campus was allowed to enter. Many campuses adopted strict entrance-control measures, requiring students and faculty to show ID to enter or exit, and it became almost impossible to conduct newsgathering off-campus.
Newsgathering grew increasingly difficult for that campus outlet. Outsiders couldn’t come onto the campus, and moving from one campus to another required prior approval. Their office space was repurposed, and regular meetings drifted from place to place like an unmoored boat. The poems, quotes, and headlines of celebrated articles that had adorned the walls disappeared under a new coat of paint.
As physical spaces were being sealed off, layer by layer, the boundaries of speech were silently closing in as well. Pitch approval and interviews were increasingly hard to obtain, and one after another, the corners in which raising questions had once been possible disappeared.
From the bedside of his dying mother, a former editor-in-chief wrote an article reminiscing about his time at the university. Its title contained the word “Neverland,” the home of Peter Pan, a place where you never grow up. He recalled his experience, as editor-in-chief, of having to personally delete a newly published article, then rushing off the campus on his bicycle and sobbing uncontrollably. By then, the changes had already begun.
But at least the account was still there, and its archived articles still online.
You could still dig out an old piece late at night and send it to a friend, saying: “Look! Here’s something I wrote back then.”
“We are all part of a ‘manufactured’ generation. Many of the bitter details in the human lives we document are really extreme versions of what we’re all experiencing. The facts and feelings we’ve recorded are all more meaningful with hindsight than we realized at the time. We have limited influence, but if we’re willing to give our all to keep creating and sharing sincere work, this must be the greatest support and honesty we can offer the world. Jingshi Xueren, we look forward to all your contributions.”
2023-2025: Suffocation
2023 brought a structural overhaul. That campus media outlet, previously an independent operation, was folded into the school’s official new media matrix. The WeChat public account was no longer updated, but the archive was still there.
The “Three Reviews, Three Proofs” system also landed heavily at major universities that year. A succession of universities including Shanxi University, Fuzhou University, and the Minzu University of China issued notices requiring that all work units strictly implement “Three Reviews, Three Proofs” on published information, adopt a workflow of “tiered review before publishing,” and employ unified management of all campus media based on “one standard, one yardstick, one bottom line” to further standardize newsgathering, editing, and publishing processes. Guizhou Normal University, Hubei Second Normal University, and others issued measures for managing new media outlets on campus, requiring close attention to online public sentiment and prompt reports to work unit leaders and Party committee propaganda departments of any major incidents, urgent information, or information that could prove harmful to the school’s reputation.
At the same time, fundamental shifts were also taking place in the WeChat public accounts ecosystem. The average “open rate” for public account posts in 2016 was around 8%; by 2025, this had fallen to about 1%. Pushing content to subscribers became less effective, algorithmic recommendations carried growing weight, and the relationship between authors and subscribers was steadily being eroded. The impact of short video was even more direct: the average Douyin user was getting through 200 clips a day, and WeChat’s own founder admitted in an internal meeting that short video had bitten a large chunk out of other online products, and would eat into the time spent on longer videos, games, and other online content.
One former staffer recalled this process: “The moment the account was closed, I already felt inwardly that that quirky little organization was dead and gone.”
“Quirky” … that’s exactly the right word. It evokes a kind of temperament: not playing by the normal rules, staying curious about the world, and remaining patient in the face of complexity. An increasingly standardized management system had less space for this kind of temperament.
In 2022, the LAKER’S bar outside N University’s West Gate had relocated for the second time. The first time had been because of climbing rent; the second was because of “business restructuring.” Its new site was further from the university, and students went there less often. The bar owner said: “Students these days don’t even drink anymore, they just scroll through short videos.”
Indeed, short video had already displaced deep reading as the primary means of consuming information. The open rate on that campus media outlet’s posts kept falling. The editorial department talked about a “pivot,” but nothing ever came of it.
The demise of campus media wasn’t just about problems within campus media itself. It was the product of combined factors in general public discourse, macro-level policy, and media technology. With ever-tighter review and censorship processes, algorithmic recommendations supplanting subscriber relationships, and short video cutting attention spans to mere seconds, how can an in-depth report with weeks of work behind it compete with a fifteen-second wardrobe-switch video in the flood of information?
At the same time, the appeal of the journalism and communications major itself was waning. Its overall graduate employment rate for 2023 ranked in the bottom quartile of all majors; the proportion of graduates finding jobs in that particular field was 19.42% in 2021, falling to 11.01% by 2025.
The death of campus media is the result of this logic, pushed to its natural conclusion.
In the spring of 2024, Xueren held its final event: its “Closing Down Exhibition.” On the empty space south of the school gymnasium, tables were set up to display printed back-issues, reporting notes, and photos. Not many people came to see them; most who did were former staffers who’d already graduated.
Controversy over the journalism and communications major drew broader attention that year. A famous graduate-admissions advisor, now sadly departed, said that “If my kid insisted on studying journalism, I’d punch his lights out.” This remark went viral on social media. A survey showed that only 40% of journalism and communications graduates would pick the same major again, given the chance. The declines of professional journalism and campus media are two points on the same trajectory.
Quite a few student clubs ceased operations that year. The space for diversity was contracting—not just physical space, but discursive and practical space, as well.
But let’s step back for a moment.
At least the ruins were still standing. The archive was still there.
You could still pass by, point it out to those who’d come later, and say: “This used to be ….” [Chinese]
Part two will follow shortly.
