Weibo’s Free-Speech Failure

At the start of the 2010s, few things better symbolized China’s changing fortunes and new prosperity than the country’s high-speed rail system. Beginning in 2007, Chinese trains, previously a “symbol of backwardness,” were replaced by sleek, gleaming white carriages capable of traveling upwards of 200 kilometers an hour. In the decade that followed, the government spent hundreds of billions of dollars to crisscross the country with high-speed lines, building the largest such network globally. In 2017, more than 20,000 kilometers of track were in service, more than the rest of the world’s high-speed rail systems combined.

On July 23, 2011, this symbol of the new China received a devastating blow. At 8:30 p.m. that Saturday, the driver Pan Yiheng was guiding a train full of tourists headed from Beijing to the southern coastal