Bored, and unsupervised by his barely literate grandparents, 16-year-old Yang Hui started hanging out with other dropouts in the dusty streets of Zhangjiachuan in Gansu, northwest China. His posts on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, became laced with profanity and street talk. Police questioned him as a witness to a motorbike theft. His grades fell.

And then, in September, Yang became the first person detained under China’s “rumour-mongering” regulations, for a posting in support of a demonstration that turned into a confrontation with police. After a national uproar, the scared but defiant teenager walked out of his cell a week later.

He narrowly escaped three years in jail, but still suffers under the hukou household registration system, which forced his parents to send him 1,000 miles away to attend high school.