29. The Making of an Enemy: Inside an Ideological Dragnet

An enemy does not have to exist before a political campaign begins. Sometimes one has to be made.

I did not understand this when Liu Boyang’s article first appeared. I thought I was facing distortion, defamation, perhaps an ugly dispute conducted in the name of science. Only later did I see how quickly a private accusation could become a political label, and how efficiently that label could teach others to retreat.

What followed was larger than the destruction of one person’s reputation. I was being made visible so that others would learn the value of silence.

The storm arrived before I could even announce the episode.

I had just returned to Australia from Brazil, still carrying the dust and heat of Abadiânia with me and trying to gather what I had seen into language. I planned to record a special programme that weekend: the truth and aftermath of the John of God scandal, the uncertain future of the healing town, and the strange way faith changes shape when fear and hope begin to press against it. Before I could sit down at the microphone, a message appeared on my phone.

“Shao, something’s happened. You’re in trouble. Look at this link.”

The message came from Lin, an acquaintance in the UFO community. Even through the clipped urgency of her words, I could feel her alarm — the disbelief of someone watching a private danger turn public.

I opened the link.

For a moment, the light from the phone seemed to go cold in my hand. Across the screen was the headline: The Government Has Hidden the Truth of the Universe from You… A Real-Name Report Against an “Alien Cult Leader.” The author was Liu Boyang, a Chinese PhD student in astrophysics.

My heart sank.

I read the article from beginning to end. It was several thousand words long and, at first glance, appeared to quote from my I Met Aliens series and refer to the Interstellar Civilisation Conference. Yet almost immediately I saw what had been done. Sentences had been lifted from their context. Meanings had been reversed. My words had been cut apart and reassembled until they seemed to speak in a voice I no longer recognised, carrying a meaning almost severed from my own.

By the end of the article, I had been cast as the leader of an “alien cult.” Yet the attack did not stop with me. Attached to Liu Boyang’s accusation was a blacklist of sorts: my name, more than seventy UFO researchers in China, and over a hundred public accounts and independent media platforms, all gathered beneath the same dark vocabulary of “pseudoscience,” “cult-like activity,” and ideological danger.

That was the moment I understood the scale of what I was looking at. The article might have used me as its face, but its reach was far wider. It was marking a whole field of civilian exploration — UFO research, spiritual inquiry, consciousness studies, and every form of searching that had begun to move beyond the state’s authorised language of reality.

I sat with the phone in my hand and read the article again, more slowly this time. Disappointment came first, then anger, then something stranger: a calm so settled it almost frightened me. For years I had sensed the boundary of the Party’s political tolerance in the distance — the invisible perimeter around what one was allowed to ask, say, and imagine in public. Now that boundary had moved toward me. It had reached my door.

When the language of reason is recruited for a political operation, truth rarely disappears all at once. It is first displaced, then discredited, and finally made dangerous to speak. What looked, on the surface, like a piece of “scientific criticism” was already carrying another force inside it. The vocabulary was rational; the structure was punitive. The article did not seek to argue with me. It sought to mark me.

Years later, I still feel compelled to set down what happened as clearly as I can — to understand the machinery behind the storm, and the silence it was designed to produce.

By then, I had spent enough time inside China’s UFO community to recognise a familiar pattern. When certain forms of knowledge or public curiosity approached the boundary of what the Party was prepared to tolerate, suppression did not always begin with a formal order. Often it arrived first through outsourced public opinion.

The first voices were usually civilian. They called themselves defenders of science, rational critics, patriotic citizens, or guardians against superstition. Some were professional science popularisers. Others were ordinary online nationalists shaped by the Party’s vast propaganda ecosystem. Their language appeared secular and reasonable. Their function was political.

They did not need to wear uniforms or issue commands. They only needed to attach the right words to the right person at the right moment: “cult,” “fraud,” “pseudoscience,” “foreign influence,” “social danger.” Once those words had been fixed in public view, the target’s legitimacy began to collapse before any official punishment was announced.

That was what made Liu Boyang’s article feel so precise. It had the cold efficiency of something rehearsed. While I was still living in the afterglow of a conference that had survived against the odds, the first bullet had already been fired.

Within forty-eight hours, the article had moved far beyond Liu Boyang himself. It travelled through mainstream media, WeChat groups, public accounts, and WeChat Moments with the force of something already released into the bloodstream. Reposts appeared everywhere. Comments multiplied. Warnings, mockery, concern, and malice arrived almost at once, often from directions I could not predict.

Some people reached out in genuine worry. Some watched from a careful distance, saying nothing, leaving no trace. Some seemed almost energised by the spectacle. Others, sensing that I had been marked, were quick to add their own little stones to the pile.

What had begun as an article was becoming an atmosphere.

Several friends from the community tried to comfort me. Their words were kind, though the fear beneath them was unmistakable.

“The tallest trees catch the strongest wind, Shao,” one of them said. “You’ve been made the target this time. Once the storm passes, things will calm down.”

I wanted to believe that this was only a passing storm of public opinion, a wave of ugliness that would rise, exhaust itself, and then retreat. But other friends — those who knew the inner grammar of the Party system — read the situation differently. They were quieter, more cautious, and far less hopeful.

Those friends did not describe it as an ordinary report, or even as a personal attack. To them, its shape was immediately recognisable. It was a signal operation: one person publicly marked so that an entire community would understand the cost of continuing to speak.

“The purpose is not only you,” one of them told me. “By attacking and discrediting you, they want everyone else to lower their voice. Stop talking about aliens. Stop organising conferences. Stop building spaces where people can gather around these questions.”

I remember the flatness in his tone. There was no drama in it, no attempt to frighten me. He was simply naming the mechanism as he understood it. In China, political warnings often arrive this way: through one visible punishment, intended for many invisible witnesses.

At the time, part of me still resisted that conclusion. I wanted the matter to remain in the realm of evidence, argument, and law. If Liu Boyang had distorted my words, I could correct the record. If he had defamed me, I could answer through proper channels. I still believed, perhaps out of habit, that truth had some procedural path back into daylight.

Within days, that belief began to weaken.

***

Within days, the matter was no longer travelling on its own.

Ziguangge, a Party media outlet closely linked to the centre of CCP power, published several pieces naming and criticising me.

“Science China” released what it presented as an authoritative commentary under the familiar banners of “guarding against alien cults” and “opposing superstition.” Then Global Times, a Party-run nationalist outlet, gave Liu Boyang an exclusive interview. The sequence was impossible to miss. A private accusation had entered the official arena. The language of science had been absorbed into the language of political warning.

The interview did not read to me like journalism. It read like assignment work — the kind in which the conclusion has already been written, and the facts are invited to attend only if they behave themselves. Its purpose was to define the incident before the public could examine it: who was rational, who was dangerous, who belonged safely on the side of the state, and who should be treated as a threat.

Once that frame had been imposed, evidence became almost decorative. The label did most of the work. “Alien cult leader” was not an argument. It was a container. Once placed inside it, a person no longer had to be read, answered, or understood. She could simply be handled.

Soon afterwards, the CCP’s official anti-cult websites placed me under the category of an “alien cult leader.” China’s provincial and municipal platforms began echoing the accusation with striking speed. The wording changed only at the edges. One headline warned against an “alien cult”; another urged the public to guard against “pseudoscience.” The sameness was almost comic, in a bleak way, as though a tray of approved phrases had been passed around and everyone had been told to choose one.

That sameness mattered. By then, Liu Boyang’s article no longer belonged to him alone. It had been taken up by a larger system, one skilled at teaching the public how to recognise enemies before asking whether the accusation was true. Once the phrase “alien cult leader” had appeared often enough across official and semi-official channels, many people no longer felt any need to read what I had actually said.

The accusation had hardened into a frame. Inside that frame, context became irrelevant. I was no longer a woman whose words, work, and intentions could be examined in good faith. I had become a category.

Then the atmosphere around us changed.

Around the same period, as the “Clean Net 2019” campaign began to unfold, the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, the Cyberspace Administration of China, and the Ministry of Public Security moved against a wide range of online speech. Its official language was dry enough to sound almost harmless, as official language often does before it begins removing things from people’s lives. The stated targets included “spiritual pseudoscience,” online religious activity, spiritual cultivation groups, and emerging consciousness communities.

For those of us inside the storm, these were no longer distant bureaucratic phrases. They were instructions moving through the platforms we used every day. WeChat accounts vanished. Zhihu posts disappeared. Douban discussions were cleared. Public accounts that had once carried quiet conversations about UFOs, healing, meditation, consciousness, or the unseen dimensions of life went dark without ceremony.

A strange silence began to spread. It did not arrive as one dramatic act of censorship. It came through missing pages, broken links, deleted groups, emptied search results, and sudden caution in people’s voices. One day a conversation was still there; the next day it had dissolved, leaving only the aftertaste of something forbidden.

By February, the National Conference of the Publicity, Ideology and Culture System had repeated the directive that the Party’s voice must become the strongest voice in cyberspace. The slogan sounded grand, almost theatrical. In practice, it meant something painfully simple: all other voices had to become smaller.

The effects soon became visible in smaller, more intimate ways.

UFO Exploration, the magazine that had accompanied countless children through their adolescence and taught a generation to look at the night sky with wonder, abruptly ceased publication. Public accounts that had spent years translating, collecting, or discussing material on UFOs and consciousness disappeared almost overnight. The Awakener Subtitle Group, then one of the most influential platforms of its kind in China, was named in Liu Boyang’s writings and soon found itself under pressure. Even a well-known singer who performed at our Beijing conference, and later released music centred on spiritual awakening, saw those works quietly removed.

The pressure reached places that had nothing to do with politics in any ordinary sense. Small pages about meditation, healing, Reiki, and inner practice went silent. Religious and spiritual books became harder to publish. An official book registration number, once difficult enough, now seemed to require not only approval but ideological innocence. Certain words had become dangerous before they had even formed a sentence: spirituality, consciousness, awakening, energy, higher dimensions.

I heard, too, that a Reiki master known to researcher Zhang Jingping had been taken away by the police for questioning. Later, the story came back to me with one of those absurd twists that only authoritarian reality can produce. After the police apparently concluded that he did possess some genuine ability, their attitude softened, and the matter was handled with relative leniency. Even in a crackdown against superstition, it seemed, the system preferred to keep a cautious respect for what it could not entirely explain.

By then, I could no longer see these incidents as separate misfortunes. A magazine closed here, an account vanished there; a spiritual singer’s work was removed without announcement; a healer was detained by police; UFO and spiritual related books were denied an official registration number for publication. Each case looked small on its own. Together, they formed the outline of a wider net, drawn across every civilian space where people had begun to ask unauthorised questions about consciousness, healing, the cosmos, and the unseen dimensions of life.

The organisers of the Interstellar Civilisation Conference, along with several partner platforms, were soon pulled into the same pressure field. Anonymous threats began to arrive. Personal information was exposed. Some accounts were shut down; others were warned through employers or work units. Everyone understood the message, even when it was never spoken plainly: no civilian group was to gather around “extraterrestrial civilisation,” “consciousness awakening,” or any language that suggested a reality larger than the one approved by the state.

For the safety of the participants, the conference groups were dissolved one by one.

The final message in one of them was brief: “Take care, everyone. From now on, let’s not talk about the conference anymore. Let’s stay low.”

No one in the group chat asked what it meant. The silence had already explained itself.

***

The human cost appeared first in small gestures.

People stopped writing. Some removed me from their contacts. Others still cared, I think, but no longer dared to leave any visible trace of concern. In China, fear rarely needs to announce itself. It becomes a change in behaviour: a message left unanswered, a name no longer mentioned, a friendship quietly moved into the shadows.

I did not blame them. In a country where a careless word can be saved, forwarded, searched, and one day treated as evidence, distance is not always betrayal. Sometimes it is simply survival. Still, understanding that did not make it painless. Each small disappearance carried its own little chill.

One of the few people who tried to reassure me was Xiao Chen, a bright, open-hearted young man in the UFO community who also worked as a police detective inside China’s public security system. He spoke gently, as though careful not to add more fear to what I was already carrying.

“It’s all right, Shao,” he told me. “I checked for you. There is no file under your name in the police system. For now, you should be safe.”

For a moment, I let myself breathe.

Then another acquaintance in the group, who worked in the narcotics division, answered with a colder kind of clarity.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “The police system and the state security system use separate databases. The fact that Shao has not been flagged by the police does not mean she doesn’t have a file there, or isn’t already being monitored by state security.”

He paused before adding, “A case like this usually belongs to state security. And because you’re in Australia now, you need to be careful. Their hands don’t always stop at the border. Australia is not some safe exception.”

The room around me seemed to narrow. Xiao Chen had tried to open a window; this man had quietly closed it again.

In the end, the narcotics officer cut off contact with me to protect his job. I understood that too. Inside such a system, self-preservation is not merely a personal habit. It is a survival skill trained in the body. People learn when to speak, when to lower their eyes, and when to disappear before the political weather reaches them.

After that warning, the situation changed shape in my mind. I could no longer treat it as a dispute over evidence, reputation, or the meaning of a few distorted quotations. The argument had left the realm of argument. A political label had been activated, and labels of that kind travel faster than truth. They enter workplaces, chat groups, family conversations, databases, and private fears. They make people behave as though an instruction has already been given.

That was the function of the spectacle. The system did not have to punish everyone. It only had to make one person visible enough for others to understand what might happen if they continued speaking. A public accusation, once amplified by official channels, becomes a lesson with an audience far larger than the accused.

I began to understand, with a heaviness I could feel in my body, that I had become that lesson.

Whether I was, in fact, the so-called leader of an “alien cult” had almost ceased to matter. Accuracy was never the centre of the operation. Deterrence was. One person had to be struck hard enough for a whole field to lower its voice.

And I had become the one placed on that altar.

The public smear campaign continued with a lurid inventiveness that might have been impressive had it not been so malicious.

All of my programmes and online sharing had been offered free. I had never charged for the I Met Aliens series. Yet CCP propaganda outlets claimed that I had made more than one hundred million yuan from followers’ donations and used the money to buy several properties in Sydney. I was unmarried and had no children, which did not prevent them from generously furnishing me with a husband and three children as well. The smear campaign had an odd largesse. It gave me wealth, real estate, and an entire domestic life with the confidence of people who had never considered evidence a necessary part of storytelling.

Reading these accounts of myself produced an almost out-of-body sensation. Somewhere online there existed a far more prosperous stranger who had borrowed my name: a woman who owned properties I had never seen, raised children I had never had, and apparently ran an alien cult with a business model more efficient than most start-ups. If only she had been real, I might at least have asked her for financial advice.

Liu Boyang contributed his own smaller inventions. Behind the scenes, he spread the claim that I was not a real lawyer, only pretending to be one. The facts were easy enough to verify. I had worked for years in a large Australian law firm, later served as senior in-house counsel for international corporations, and had twice been named a finalist for Australian legal and corporate counsel awards. In the economy of smear, however, verification is almost bad manners. “Fake lawyer” was shorter, dirtier, and far more useful.

Soon screenshots began arriving from different corners of the community. People tagged me in group chats. They asked whether the rumours were true, half true, or “perhaps exaggerated.” Some sounded concerned. Others had the unmistakable brightness of people pleased to be near the flames without being burned.

There is a particular excitement that enters a crowd when another person’s misfortune becomes available for public consumption. Sympathy may make a brief appearance, usually looking respectable and slightly uncomfortable. Curiosity arrives with much better stamina. In Chinese internet slang, these spectators are called “chi gua qun zhong” — the melon-eating crowd. The phrase is comic on the surface: people gathered at the edge of a public drama, imaginary snacks in hand, waiting to see what happens next. But the comedy fades when the drama is someone’s life. They do not need to believe the rumours. Belief would require effort. They only need to circulate near them, close enough to enjoy the heat, far enough away to avoid being burned.

That was the part I found most chilling. Their bystander posture looked harmless, even cheerful, yet beneath it was a small surrender of conscience. Truth would have interrupted the entertainment. Compassion would have spoiled the snack.

At last, half amused and half exhausted, I wrote back to one group: “Wait until I return to China. Let me spread my own “rumours”, will you? Please stop doing volunteer work for the CCP Propaganda machine and Liu Boyang for free.”

It was a joke, though only barely. By then, I had learned that propaganda does not travel only through official channels. It also moves through boredom, envy, cowardice, and the small human pleasure of watching someone else become unsafe.

***

Yet Liu Boyang did not stop after the article was published. If anything, the attention seemed to excite him. He first asked around for my WeChat account and tried to add me as a contact. I ignored the request. When that failed, he found his way into a group where I was also a member and began calling me out by name.

His tone carried the confidence of someone who believed power had already chosen his side.

“She should soften her stance sooner rather than later,” he wrote. “I really don’t want Lawyer Ma to end up in prison.”

Then came another message.

“Lawyer Ma is already on the target list,” he wrote. “Whether she can return to China freely, without the risk of detention, depends on whether she is willing to issue a public statement withdrawing completely from the UFO community and returning solely to legal work. Does she understand that she is already within range?”

I did not answer. Any reply would have been useful to him. Silence, at that moment, was the only poor little weapon I had left.

But he kept going. Soon afterwards, through means I still do not fully understand, he reached someone close to me and began sending messages through him. The language shifted between warning, bargaining, and threat, as if he had appointed himself a minor clerk at the entrance to a punishment office.

“The outcome of Lawyer Ma’s case can be light or severe,” he said. “Whether it is treated as minor depends on whether she is willing to soften her stance. Even if it is treated as serious, she can still reduce her culpability by actively reporting others.”

Then he revealed what he really wanted.

“I don’t feel like looking into the Cobra case myself,” he wrote, referring to a separate thread of UFO and spiritual material circulating in the community. “I’ll give her a chance to redeem herself by handing over the evidence. If she doesn’t want the opportunity, I’ll investigate it myself, and the credit will be mine.”

There it was: the small, hungry word beneath the grand language of science and public duty.

Credit.

He was no longer pretending to argue. He was bargaining in the old language of denunciation: confess, implicate others, and perhaps the authority will punish you less. He dressed this as an “opportunity,” as though informing on others were a form of moral rehabilitation. If I softened, compromised and helped him implicate people in the community, he might present himself to the system as useful. If I refused, he could still claim the reward of pursuit.

For a PHD student who claimed to defend reason, he had developed a remarkable enthusiasm for methods that required very little of it. In the less charitable corner of my mind, he was beginning to resemble the self-appointed Chairman of the Department of Correct Reality, issuing permits for what others were allowed to believe under the reassuring shelter of Party orthodoxy.

Liu Boyang’s pursuit did not stop there. He kept appearing in the group chat, calling me out as if barking loudly enough might force me to step into the ring. For a while, most people stayed silent. No one wanted to be dragged into a quarrel that had already acquired the smell of politics.

Then his language grew cruder.

When someone mocked him as “Fang Zhouzi 2.0,” he bristled. He praised Fang as a positive figure and dismissed the idea that freedom of belief or intellectual innovation deserved any real protection. “Innovation, my ass,” he wrote. “Freedom of belief, my ass.”

The group went still.

There are moments when a person explains himself far more efficiently than his enemies ever could. Liu Boyang had arrived dressed as a defender of science, carrying the moral posture of a public-spirited rationalist. Yet under the slightest pressure, the costume slipped. What appeared beneath it was not intellectual discipline, but contempt: contempt for spiritual inquiry, contempt for civil freedom, contempt for anyone who did not kneel before his narrow little altar of certainty.

Someone asked him about a famous Chinese scientist - Qian Xuesen’s later interest in qigong and what was then called “human body science.” Qian was one of modern China’s most revered scientists, a man whose intellectual range and openness had long made him larger than any single discipline. Liu Boyang dismissed the question at once, saying Qian had ruined his reputation in his later years. The casualness of it startled me. Whatever one thinks of qigong or frontier consciousness research, Qian Xuesen was no disposable name in modern Chinese science. Yet Liu brushed him aside with the ease of a young man eager to prove that no inheritance, no courage, no complexity could survive his little stamp of contempt.

By then, his arrogance had become almost theatrical. With the official narrative behind him, he attacked anyone who questioned him, as though membership in the chorus had made him untouchable. His talk of “softening one’s stance,” “reducing culpability,” and “earning credit” revealed more than any scientific argument he tried to make.

At last, someone in the group wrote the sentence that ended the exchange.

“Liu Boyang, you really are a man without a heart.”

I stared at those words for a long time.

What Liu Boyang seemed to lack was the moral imagination to grasp the human cost of what he was doing. Denunciation had become, in his mind, a form of achievement; obedience could pass for courage. He seemed convinced that he was defending science, yet the role offered him something more seductive: a respectable language for serving power, along with the recognition that came from standing on the politically authorised side of truth. Looking back, I could see that ideology and ambition had shaped him too. The man policing the boundaries of acceptable belief had himself been formed by them.

That was the saddest part. He thought he was becoming important. The machine did not need him to be important. It only needed him to be useful.

I decided to answer him in the only language still available to me: evidence, law, and public record.

A few days after the affair began, I published a response titled Born from the Same Root, Why Burn One Another? I went through Liu Boyang’s accusations carefully, showing where he had taken my words out of context, where he had reversed their meaning, and where his so-called scientific critique had crossed into defamation. I also asked why a doctoral student in astrophysics had chosen the language of real-name denunciation to smear more than seventy UFO and spiritual researchers, along with over a hundred public accounts and independent media platforms.

The article was calm, though not gentle. I had no interest in matching his vulgarity. He had already done enough work in that department for both of us.

At the end of my response, I stated that I had instructed a defamation lawyer to prepare a letter to him, and that I reserved my right to bring legal proceedings. I also began contacting scientists and researchers overseas who had worked seriously in UAP and consciousness studies. If Liu Boyang wished to raise the banner of science, I thought, then let science answer him properly.

One of the people who came forward was Dr Rudolph Schild, a distinguished astrophysicist and retired professor from Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a member of CCRI. In an open letter, he condemned Liu Boyang’s attempt to stigmatise and defame me and challenged his contemptuous dismissal of UAP research and consciousness studies. These were difficult fields, he wrote, and controversial ones, yet serious scientists in the United States were already approaching them with discipline. The scientific spirit required humility before the unknown, not a young man’s eagerness to police the boundaries of thought.

His letter moved quickly through the community. For many researchers, experiencers, and seekers who had been publicly smeared, it restored a small measure of dignity. It reminded them that the Party’s propaganda machinery did not own the meaning of science, and that intellectual seriousness could exist beyond China’s authorised vocabulary.

Soon afterwards, my lawyer’s letter was sent to Liu Boyang at the University of Western Australia, where he was then studying as an exchange student. Since he was in Australia, he was also subject to Australian law. I filed a report with the local police as well.

The effect was almost immediate.

The same man who had spoken so confidently about prison, culpability, and political credit suddenly discovered the softer virtues of private settlement. He replied to my lawyer by email, saying he was willing to resolve the matter privately and revise the article. Removing it completely, he explained, would be difficult. The piece had already been published, and the people above him would not agree to taking it down. As a compromise, he hoped at least to delete my name.

Through an acquaintance, he also asked whether, since he was “poor,” I might agree to seek less compensation.

I remember reading that and feeling an unexpected laugh rise in me. Only days earlier, he had been speaking as though he held the keys to prison doors and national borders. Now, under the plain light of legal liability, he had become a poor student hoping for a discount.

Power, I saw, lends courage very generously. It also takes it back with impressive speed.

For a brief moment, I thought the matter might be pulled back into the ordinary world, where people were still answerable for what they wrote and where facts, however battered, might find some procedural path back toward daylight.

That hope did not last.

Soon after Liu Boyang softened his tone, stranger messages began to arrive. Voice recordings and warnings appeared on my phone, telling me I was being monitored, watched, and placed on file. The language was never entirely direct. It rarely is. Threats of this kind prefer the theatre of suggestion: enough detail to enter the nervous system, enough vagueness to remain deniable.

Then men I believed to be connected to state security appeared near me in a black SUV and made their presence known in an unmistakably intimidating way. Their purpose seemed less to do anything at that moment than to be seen. A vehicle, a few faces, a lingering presence — no paperwork required. The message was carried by proximity.

Voicemails followed, saying that “they” had opened a file under my name. Warnings also reached my parents. When they happened to be visiting Australia, the pressure extended to them as well, through methods that felt deliberately humiliating and coercive. I will not describe those methods in detail here. It is enough to say that something in me changed then. Until that point, I had been able to carry much of the fear as my own burden. Once my family safety was pulled into it, the matter moved into a different chamber of the heart.

By then, I could no longer treat this as a defamation dispute, or even as a propaganda campaign. The public smear and the private intimidation belonged to the same hand. One worked to destroy credibility; the other worked to exhaust the will, unsettle the body, and make ordinary life feel unsafe. Together, they made the message plain: I could answer Liu Boyang, but I could not answer the system behind him in any ordinary court.

***

After the rumours had made their rounds, I wrote to the three overseas speakers who had joined the conference. I wanted them to understand what had happened after they left: the political label now attached to the event, the risk surrounding anyone publicly associated with it, and the atmosphere of warning that had settled over China’s UFO community.

Laura Eisenhower responded with immediate concern. She contacted a well-known researcher overseas and asked whether the video of my earlier interview with him could be taken down for the time being. It was a small, practical act of protection, the kind that does not announce itself grandly yet understands the moment. Visibility had become double-edged. What once helped a voice travel could now help a target be found.

Michael Salla offered another form of shelter. He invited me to formally join his Exopolitics Institute and offered me an honorary title. In ordinary circumstances, a title might have seemed ceremonial. In that grey zone of international pressure, it carried another meaning. It gave a person visibility, affiliation, and a small institutional outline around her name. It made erasure slightly less convenient.

I understood the generosity behind the offer, though in the end I declined. Part of me was grateful; another part knew that no title, however kindly offered, could change the deeper nature of what I was facing. The pressure had not come because I lacked credentials. It had come because I had spoken outside the boundary assigned to me.

John DeSouza, with his years in the FBI, heard the story with a calm that was almost unsettling. He had the manner of someone who had spent too long studying intimidation to be easily impressed by it.

“Try not to worry too much,” he told me. “Most of this is psychological warfare. The CCP is very good at creating fear. Fear is cheaper, cleaner, and often more effective than open violence.”

He explained that, in more serious cases, intimidation could be outsourced through people linked to intelligence networks: a damaged car, a dead pet, a small violation designed less to cause immediate physical harm than to lodge fear in the nervous system.

Then, with the blunt kindness of a former federal agent, he added, “At your current level of influence, you are nowhere near the stage of being ‘suicided’ or killed in an accident.”

Strangely, I found this comforting.

There was a dark comedy in being reassured that I was still too insignificant to assassinate. Yet I understood what he meant. Political fear feeds on exaggeration. It wants the imagination to do half the work. John’s assessment brought the threat back down from the realm of nightmare into the uglier, more manageable world of tactics.

Then he said something that stayed with me.

“People like that PHD student are often easy for intelligence services to approach,” he said. “Especially when they are still trying to prove themselves. It does not take much. A small grant. An overseas invitation. A little recognition. A little vanity. Sometimes that is enough to buy a person.”

John held his fingers slightly apart, measuring the size of the bait.

“So Liu Boyang,” he said quietly, “was probably given a few pieces of candy by the CCP and sold his soul for them.”

I did not know whether that was exactly what had happened. What I did know was that vanity is cheap material for power to work with. People can be most useful to a system when they believe they are acting from principle while quietly enjoying the feeling of having been chosen.

The Liu Boyang affair became a mirror. Under its hard light, people in the community began to reveal themselves.

Mr X, from the Chinese UFO Club, was among the first to step forward with visible satisfaction. His resentment had been there long before Liu Boyang’s article appeared. I had sensed it during the preparation for the conference: jealousy, grievance, and a need for control waiting patiently for a more respectable costume.

Liu Boyang’s report gave him that costume.

Almost immediately, Mr X launched into a performance with the stale flavour of an old political struggle session: denunciation, moral posturing, warnings to others, the theatrical drawing of lines. In the less charitable corner of my mind, he had acquired an unofficial title of his own: Director Snake. He urged members of the Club to distance themselves from me, the newly branded “alien cult leader.” The label had arrived from the Party’s propaganda machine, and he received it with the gratitude of a man who had finally been handed an official-looking stick.

By then, I had grown tired of the Club’s internal culture: the seniority games, the petty hierarchies, the little work-unit habits that somehow survived even among people who claimed to study higher intergalactic civilisations. There was something almost comic about it. We spoke of extraterrestrial wisdom, planetary evolution, and expanded consciousness, yet inside one WeChat group, human civilisation seemed to have stalled somewhere between a failing state-owned enterprise and a village committee meeting.

I did not argue. I wrote a few brief lines saying I was withdrawing from the Club, then blocked him.

My departure, however, appeared to injure the most delicate part of Mr Snake’s dignity. Soon afterwards, in full Director Snake mode, he announced in the group chat that he had personally expelled me. It was a small revision, but a revealing one. He could not bear that I had walked out before he had the pleasure of pointing at the door.

After that, he kept naming me, criticising me, and presenting me as a dangerous figure already condemned by CCP official media. He wanted the moral high ground, though in his hands it looked less like a moral position than a small stool he could climb onto in order to look taller.

What truly offended him, I think, was my refusal to remain inside his little structure of allegiance. The political label was useful. My supposed danger was convenient. Yet beneath all that noise lay something smaller and more wounded: the old hunger to be obeyed, even in a community that had once claimed to be searching for the stars.

Yet Mr X’s performance did not go entirely as he seemed to expect. There were still people in the Club who understood what was happening. A few members spoke up, saying plainly that I had been smeared and that this was no time to kick someone already under attack.

The response that moved me most came from Liu, another member of the community. Even now, I remember the force of his words in the group chat.

“Shao had already resigned from the Club before you claimed to expel her,” he wrote. “Mr X, there is no need to hide behind excuses. If there is a real reason, say it plainly.

“I know there may be consequences for speaking up, but someone has to tell the truth. I am leaving the Club as well.

“I never imagined the Chinese UFO Club would sink to this low. It was supposed to be an organisation that looked up at the stars and cared about the universe. Now it feels like a failing old state-owned enterprise, full of factional struggle, flattery, and little rituals of power.

“Many Club members attended the Interstellar Civilisation Conference as individuals. They came because they cared about the subject. People took real risks to make that event happen. In China, that was not a small thing.

“We study extraterrestrial beings because we want to understand higher levels of consciousness and learn from more advanced civilisations. We speak of harmony, awakening, and spiritual development. So why are we still trapped in these human quarrels?”

Then he added one final sentence: “Since we study extraterrestrials, let us put our energy back into the research. Human quarrels are small things.”

His words struck through the stale air of the group. I sat there looking at the screen, feeling something loosen and ache inside me. He had defended me in public, in a political climate where silence had already become the safer, more intelligent option.

There are times when truth appears without drama. No thunder, no grand speech, no heroic lighting. Just a few lines typed into a WeChat group by someone who understands the cost and sends them anyway.

Firefly spoke up too. She reminded the group that hundreds of people had attended the conferences I organised and that many had left with gratitude. Again and again, people had told her that the event had opened their eyes. Those who had actually done the work, she said, should not be punished for having created something meaningful.

Then she sent another message.

“If this is how the Club treats its own members — using people when they are useful, then cutting them off the moment they become inconvenient — then I am leaving too. We came here to raise consciousness, organise meaningful conferences and disclosure series, and bring something of value to more people. We did not come here to be dragged into factional struggles that feel like something out of a state-owned enterprise. Watching the Club treat Shao this way is truly chilling.”

Her message landed like a bell in a room where too many people had grown used to stale air.

Of course, several others remained clustered around Mr X, echoing him with the enthusiasm of people auditioning for a position no one had officially advertised. That, too, was revealing. Even in a community that spoke of cosmic civilisation, some people still bowed instinctively toward the nearest little throne.

Still, Liu and Firefly’s words stayed with me. In that moment, they did more than defend my name. They reminded me that conscience had not vanished entirely. Even under pressure, even in fear, even in a small WeChat group already thick with calculation, someone could still choose to stand upright.

Years later, the Chinese UFO Club collapsed under the weight of its own rivalries. Senior members finally deregistered the UFO Club in Hong Kong, and with that, the organisation lost its legal standing. One might have expected the drama to end there. A normal person, seeing the theatre dismantled, might have taken the hint.

His Excellency Mr Snake did not.

He continued to issue notices, adopt official tones, and insist that the Club “still existed”, with himself still among its old leaders. There was something faintly comic in it: a man presiding over a paper kingdom whose map had already been withdrawn. Yet beneath the comedy was something sadder. The title remained after the substance was gone; the performance continued because without it, the performer no longer knew where to stand.

By then, I understood that his quarrel with me had never belonged only to ideology. Ideology had given him language; the Party’s label had given him a stick; the Club had given him a small stage. Beneath all of it was the old hunger to be obeyed, to be deferred to, to remain necessary inside a hierarchy, however shabby that hierarchy had become.

After that political storm, I often thought about the people who had chosen differently. Those kind-hearted volunteers behind the conferences, and many listeners and attendees who still carried a sense of right and wrong, gave me warmth at a time when warmth had become risky.

They did not all make speeches. A few reached out with gentle messages when they sensed I was sinking. Others defended me quietly in group chats or helped remove defamatory articles before they could travel further and do more damage to my name. Many of these gestures were too small to look heroic from the outside, yet large enough to change the weather around me. In a time when self-protection had become almost a second language, their kindness had weight. It reached me in places where argument, explanation, and public defence could no longer reach.

I have never believed that darkness reveals only darkness. Under pressure, people become easier to see. Fear sends some into retreat. Gossip draws others closer to the flames. A few stand back and watch as though another person’s danger were a passing entertainment. Yet there are always those who, without making themselves grand, still find a way to stand beside another human being.

To pass once through this world is to learn how much malice can gather around a single name. It is also to learn that sincerity, when it appears, has a force no ideology can manufacture. Flowers are easy in spring. What I remember are the people who brought warmth into the snow.

***

Yet warmth could not reverse what had already been set in motion.

Once the shadow of state security fell across the affair, the possibility of resolving it through ordinary civilian channels began to lose substance. I tried to answer Liu Boyang through law, evidence, and public record. For a brief interval, those tools seemed to restore a little weight to reality. Then pressure from China crossed borders, entering private messages, family life, and the quiet theatre of surveillance. The legal path still existed on paper, but paper is a fragile material in political weather.

By then, the Party had achieved much of what such a campaign is designed to achieve. I had been pushed, with considerable precision, toward social death. Inside China, mainstream media and independent platforms sealed off almost everything related to me. My programmes were removed. Search results were cleared. Even brief, incidental appearances in interviews disappeared quickly, as though the internet itself had been instructed to forget that I had once spoken.

On overseas platforms, listeners still reposted my programmes out of goodwill. Many of those videos vanished within days. When someone uploaded them again, the comment sections were often flooded with messages that carried a strange, coordinated sameness: insults, mockery, distortions, fragments of my words pulled loose from context and made to serve meanings opposite to my own. The noise had a purpose. It covered the record, contaminated memory, and made it harder for anyone new to see me clearly.

This, I came to understand, is one of the quieter forms of erasure. A person does not need to be physically removed in order to be made difficult to recognise. It is enough to bury her under labels, rumours, deleted links, and rehearsed contempt until anyone searching for the truth must first dig through layers of manufactured dirt.

The short, intense path of public sharing that had begun when I entered China’s UFO community in 2017 came to a silent end by early 2019. The community itself had changed. That first fragile climate of civilian exploration — imperfect, chaotic, often naïve, yet alive — had been broken. People who had once gathered around questions of consciousness, extraterrestrial life, healing, and the hidden dimensions of existence learned to lower their voices, dissolve their groups, and look over their shoulders before speaking.

The monitoring and shadow around me did not end there. In different forms, they have continued.

For a long time, I understood the Liu Boyang affair as the destruction of my reputation, a campaign of character assassination carried out under the banner of science. Later, I saw it more clearly. My name had served as the visible site of punishment, while the lesson was intended for many others. The real target was the early formation of a civilian spiritual and intellectual space that had not yet learned how dangerous its own existence could become.

What was interrupted was larger than my voice. What was broken was the first fragile climate of a civilian community beginning to form.

And perhaps that is why I still return to this story. I return because erasure is never complete while someone remembers clearly. The storm took away a public space, a season of speech, and the fragile confidence of many people who had begun to gather around forbidden questions. Yet it did not take away the fact that, for a brief time, we had gathered. We had looked up. We had spoken. In our imperfect, human way, we had tried to find our way back to the star families we believed were waiting beyond the authorised borders of reality.

For that alone, the silence never fully belonged to them.