In one essay, she spoke out on behalf of a webmaster jailed because of the political messages posted on his site, and suggested that Internet users turn themselves in to the police en masse. To ensure a "splendid triumph" for the authorities, she added, "those who have not yet posted subversive writings on the Internet should be persuaded to post them."
Liu said she was nervous about being punished for her writing but was also encouraged by the warm reception it received online. She spent hours in the campus computer lab, talking to fans and making new friends in Internet chat rooms. She hung out with her Web friends in the real world, too.
Liu Di, known as the Stainless Steel Rat in cyberspace, still does not know the true identity of the man who presented himself as a fan and friend but who she now suspects was a police spy.
(Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post)
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"Relatively speaking, I had more friends from the Internet" than college, she said. "Of course, I also knew people from school, but there weren't many I could have deep conversations with."
In April 2002, during her junior year at Beijing Normal University, where she studied psychology, Liu received a message from an Internet user who called himself Spring Snow. He said he knew one of her Web friends, a heating company employee in the northeast whose name was Jiang Lijun, and Liu recalled that Jiang had mentioned him once.
Over the following weeks, Liu chatted regularly with Spring Snow, who told her his name was Li Yibing and claimed to work for an investment firm in Beijing. He said he admired Liu's essays, and they discussed politics and traded jokes. Several times, he said he wanted to meet Liu in person. Eventually, she agreed.
An Oddly Insistent Friend With Some Dangerous Ideas
They met outside Liu's university on a cool morning in May. He arrived first, carrying a newspaper as they had agreed online, and she spotted him right away: a tall, skinny fellow in his late twenties or early thirties, with relatively long hair and a face marked with acne.
"I thought with a name like Spring Snow, he should have been a handsome guy," Liu recalled. "But actually, he wasn't anything special. He was like a bamboo pole."
They talked over Coke and fries at a KFC, then had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Li mentioned that he enjoyed hiking and brought up his friendship with Jiang again. But Liu said she did most of the talking because he was so quiet.
Li did say he wanted to meet some of her other Internet friends. He seemed nice enough, Liu recalled, so she introduced him to several of them in the following weeks. Over time, she came to consider him a friend, too.
He seemed to share her views about the need for political change in China; if anything, he presented himself as more of a radical, she said. Once, he suggested trying to blow something up. Another time he spoke of starting an underground political party.
Liu said she considered his ideas dangerous, and told him so, but didn't take him too seriously. He seemed like someone who talked big but could never get anything done. "He came across as a person with wild ambitions but without any abilities," she recalled. "He may have been serious, but I thought it was stupid and laughable, and I told him several times."
When he showed her a party platform he had drafted, she dismissed it as poorly written. But then Li began pestering her to help him edit it. Liu was reluctant, but he kept asking and she felt it would be impolite to continue refusing a friend. Twice that summer, she recalled, she visited Li in his office on the weekend and helped edit the document on his computer.
Then one rainy night in September, Li took Liu and another of her Internet friends, Wu Yiran, to his apartment. He talked about starting an underground political party again, Liu recalled, mentioning that their mutual friend Jiang supported the idea. He also proposed issuing a prank bomb threat during an upcoming meeting of the Communist leadership. Liu said she and Wu laughed about it, but warned Li not to do it.
She had nearly forgotten about the conversation when two months later an official at her school summoned her to the campus security office. About a dozen plainclothes agents were waiting for her.
