Private chats are only censored if you are using weechat to talk to someone since they just suspend you if you break their rules

If you’re using other ways to communicate, say through matrix or most other things, a firewall can’t do shit, and this is ignoring the fact that many people in China use vpns (they aren’t illegal to use) to bypass all blocks on western services (whatsapp or whatever)

and keep in mind that things are blocked with a denylist, not an allowlist, so if for example I hosted a small irc server (oreven something like a lemmy instance) anyone in China could easily connect to it and exchange messages, unless it gets reported somehow and then blocked, which is unlikely if we’re talking about something relatively obscure like irc or lemmy

Basically, practice good opsec, I don’t like the NSA having my messages in the same way that I don’t like any government having them.