It’s been a whirlwind year for China’s internet culture — from trade wars and a huge vaccine scare, to a rise in feminist activism through social media. All along the way, authoritarianism has also been on the rise there, as the nation’s internet regulator imposes new rules on what’s banned, from Twitch getting shut down, to removing parodies and even ASMR videos.
Yet 2018 is most notable for being the year that Chinese internet users got away with significantly more than they ever have in the past, however small or short-lived those victories might be. Thanks to the blockchain, this year users managed to preserve censored information in ways that thwarted the government’s fast-growing censorship efforts. In April, student activists...