Decoding China’s censorship: How does its Internet panopticon work?

I talked about how we should be aware of a lopsided view on China’s Internet in my last post, but it seems that the issue the audience is most concerned of is still about censorship. In this post, I’ll share how censorship actually works in China’s context.

It’s now clear that under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule, China has become a country where overt emphasis has been placed on the “purity” of communist ideology and increasingly strict control has been implemented over the supposed-to-be-liberating Internet. Riven by contradictions, China has some of the world’s most vibrant Internet-based business, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. $770 million was poured into the Great Firewall project in 2001-2002 alone, its first year of operation. This expenditure is separate from other spending on Internet technology and manpower required to keep the “disorderly Internet” under control.

What remains murky to most of us is what exactly is being censored on China’s Internet, especially on social media platforms. This is one of the issues well addressed by panellists at the 13th Chinese Internet Research Conference. From a first-hand account of experience with censorship on WeChat to a systematic research on WeChat’s public posts, the censorship process and different censored terms were explore. But what’s more subtle than the “Party supremacy” rule is China’s increasingly sophisticated censorship mechanism that plays around with the ambiguity of censorship messages.

Yawei Liu and Ying Zhu from the China Program at the Cater Centre, for instance, shared their experience of opening an publicly-accessible individual account on WeChat, the fastest growing social media platform in China, and how they danced with the censorship mechanism on this platform. Not surprisingly, the monitoring system starts from the very beginning.

Unlike Twitter, WhatsApp and many other social media applications where users could open an account with an email address or a phone number, China has launched various crusades to enforce a real-name registration system to manage its Internet. Dated to as early as in 2009 when all bloggers and reporters posting on news portals are required to log in with their true identities (though the actual enforcement was met with mixed results), the real-name registration system has been applied to WeChat as well. Since April 2013, a real-name verification process has to be completed when setting up new public accounts.

For Liu and Zhu, this was the first obstacle they had to conquer to register their US-China Perception Monitor (zhongmei guancha 中美印象) account. With the help of a Chinese volunteer, who was required to submit a picture of herself holding her residential identity card and to provide her registered cellphone number, they were able to set up the account in November 2014.

But there were more challenges to come. The notorious Document 9 has warn universities and media groups against the seven “speak-nots,” or taboo topics such as neo-liberalism, civil society, and universal values. On August 7, 2014, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued Ten Rules of WeChat.

“On December 12, 2014, we tried everything we could to post an article translated from English to Chinese based on Dr. Christopher Ford’s remarks at the Hudson Institute on November 20, 2014. Several times we attempted to post the article, but were repeatedly informed that its content had something sensitive that needed to be revised or deleted.”

Liu and Zhu then tactically changed the sensitive term “Tiananmen Square” to “one famous event in the year previous to 1990 in Beijing” and “one well-known Beijing event in the year previous to 1990”, which finally helped them bypass the censorship.

Even if an user gets away with the blocking mechanism of sensitive words, the Internet is still a panopticon for Chinese users. According to Liu and Zhu, many of their posted articles were taken down later because some of the WeChat users had allegedly “informed on” the “abusive” or “harmful” content.

A systematic analysis of which public posts have been “reported” and thus taken down on WeChat by Jason Q. Ng, a research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and author of Blocked on Weibo, further proves both the ambiguity and consistency in the censorship message.

What is consistent is that the discussion on social and political subjects are often the target of censorship. In nearly 34,000 posts Jason collected, Tibetan separation (zang du, 藏独), princeling (tai zi dang, 太子党）, Tiananmen (天安门), Wen Jiabao （温家宝), strike (ba gong, 罢工）, June 4 (liu si，六四), Falun (falun，法轮) were almost absolute taboos on China’s Internet. Meanwhile, perhaps to echo the ongoing “anti-rumour campaign” began in 2013 across Chinese social media, posts relating to political news and rumours, including those involving superstition and corruption, are targeted more often than usual. In fact, compared to the previous censorship model which focuses on articles related to collective action, discussing censorship, and pornography, the censorship against discussion on political news rumours can be seen as a shift in official censorship mandates (In one case, an article titled “Bra=curse” (x胸罩＝凶兆) saying bras with pads hurt breasts because the padding hinders ‘breast breading’ was censored.)