Exiled Chinese bloggers urged people back home to unfollow them, claiming police are checking individuals 'one by one'

• In separate posts, 2 Chinese bloggers in exile asked their social media followers to unfollow them.
• They claimed that Chinese police were checking their accounts.
• One of the dissidents, Li Ying, posted screenshots claiming his followers had been interrogated.

Two Chinese bloggers in exile have urged their followers in China to unfollow them, claiming that police are checking them "one by one" and even interrogating some individuals.

NBC News was one of the first media outlets to report on this.

The dissidents, Wang Zhi'an, a former state broadcaster, and Li Ying, an artist, posted separate warnings on Sunday.

Wang, who at the time of reporting has more than a million followers on X, and over 1.25 million subscribers on YouTube, said in an X post on Sunday that people in China should consider unfollowing him on the platforms.

Wang previously worked as a reporter for China Central Television and later The Beijing News, covering corruption in the country, but fell out of favor with the government and, in 2020, fearing arrest, fled to Japan, according to the Associated Press.

Li, known as Teacher Li, became well-known for his coverage of the White Paper Protests — a series of demonstrations in 2022 against the COVID-19 lockdowns in mainland China.

According to AFP, Li now lives in Italy.

Li issued an "urgent" notice in a post on X on Sunday, calling on anyone who feels scared to unfollow him.

According to a translation by NBC News, Li said: "Currently, the public security bureau is checking my 1.6 million followers and people in the comments, one by one."

Li's account has over 1.4 million followers, down about 200,000 from Sunday.

His post also encouraged followers who engage with his content to avoid using identifiable information in their accounts.

Li shared a series of screenshots of private messages he'd received from his followers in recent months, which NBC News said claimed that police had interrogated individuals and that one person had lost their job.

X and YouTube are blocked in China, along with many other international websites, but the so-called "Great Firewall" of China can often be circumvented with a VPN service.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that leaked hacking documents that appeared to come from a Chinese cybersecurity firm offered insight into how China tries to impose political controls on dissidents both inside and outside its borders.

An analysis of the documents by the Journal suggested that the firm, I-Soon, appeared to have a range of targets, including exiled Chinese dissidents.