China’s WPS Cloud Editor Blocks Draft Novel Due to ‘Illegal Information’

Cloud text editor WPS (Chinese analogue of Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365), in which the Chinese writer worked, blocked her access to the draft of the novel, as it allegedly contained “illegal information”. Chinese users are actively discussing the situation in which the writer and WPS user, working under the pseudonym Mitu, found herself.

Reference: WPS Office (formerly Kingsoft Office) appeared back in 1989 and was created by the Chinese company Kingsoft. To date, the editor is monthly used by about 310 million people. It can be said that WPS has been actively growing thanks to government subsidies and contracts, since the Chinese government has long sought to support its own companies (rather than foreign competitors) for security reasons.

Mitu spoke about what happened on the Lkong literature forum and accused WPS of spying on her work and blocking access to the draft when it found some illegal content in it.

Last week, the news exploded on Chinese social media, became the most popular topic on Weibo, and users wondered if WPS violated their privacy and how far government censorship extended. Moreover, according to the Chinese edition of The Economic Observer, several other authors have also faced blocking of their texts in the past for unclear reasons.

Although Mitu’s document was saved online and she shared it with her editor in 2021, she says she was the only person who edited the text that year.

The developers of WPS have already issued two statements emphasizing that their software does not censor locally stored files. At the same time, the company is very evasive about how WPS works with files hosted on the Internet.

Although the creators of WPS have not officially confirmed that collaborating on text or providing someone with a link to a document can provoke censorship algorithms, it seems that this is the case. The comment left by WPS support on Weibo on July 13 supports this theory: “Synchronising and storing [a document] in the cloud will not validate it. Only creating a link to share the document will trigger the verification mechanism.”

It is worth noting that document collaboration platforms are becoming more popular in the Middle Kingdom, but documents are usually censored after they have been widely distributed.

For example, in 2020, Chinese artist Jianguo Xiongdi conducted an experiment and invited everyone to contribute to a document that listed all the words considered “problematic” in China. It took nearly 10 hours for document management platform Shimo to notice what was going on and censor the document. For this reason, until recently, most Chinese users believed that their personal files, distributed only among friends and family, were hardly of interest to anyone.