Inside the decades-long fight over Yahoo’s misdeeds in China

When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for a 62-year-old Chinese dissident named Xu Wanping, the company still looms large—and has for nearly two decades. In 2005, Xu was arrested for signing online petitions relating to anti-Japanese protests. He didn’t use his real name, but he did use his Yahoo email address. At the time, Yahoo was among Silicon Valley’s largest and most influential technology companies. And Yahoo China, its Chinese subsidiary, was busy tapping into the country’s nascent but potentially enormous internet market. It didn’t take long for the company to violate its new users’ trust—providing information on certain email accounts to Chinese law enforcement, which in turn allowed the government to identify and arrest a number of Yahoo users. Xu was one of them; he would serve nine years in prison, his third sentence relating to his activism, and emerge with chronic health issues from his time behind bars. Now, Xu and five other Chinese former political prisoners are suing Yahoo and a slate of co-defendants—not because of the company’s information-sharing (which was the focus of an earlier lawsuit filed by other plaintiffs), but because of what came after.