> Consequences can be steep. When a Chinese student living in Taiwan criticized China this year, he said, both of his parents disappeared for 10 days. His social media accounts within China were also immediately shut down.

>The student, who declined to be named out of fear of further reprisals, said he still did not know what had happened to his parents. He doesn’t dare to ask because they told him that local security forces were monitoring them.

Scary stuff.

To be honest, my experience is that criticizing the Chinese Government on platforms such as Twitter or YouTube will quickly cause you to be "shadow banned". It would seem to make this "hunt for critics" unnecessary.