Coinciding with the CPPCC and NPC sessions underway in Beijing and obviously for maximum impact, Zhou Fang, a Xinhua employee who gave his work address as Xinhua News Agency headquarters in Beijing and included his cellphone number and identity card number, on March 11, 2016, published an online denunciation of China's formidable propaganda apparatus. Reporting the incident, New York Times said on March 11, 2016, that the letter was taken down immediately, but not before it had already circulated widely. In the letter Zhou Fang accused the censors of using tactics reminiscent of Maoist times to silence and smear critics. The letter said: “Under the crude rule of the Internet control authorities, online expression has been massively suppressed, and the public’s freedom of expression has been violated to an extreme degree. The recent Internet security incident of ‘surrounding and attacking Ren Zhiqiang’ in a kind of Cultural Revolution-style mass criticism brought the delinquency of responsibilities and abuses of power by the Internet authorities to an extreme. This has triggered tremendous fear and outrage among the public,” and begun to worry people "about another Cultural Revolution.”