Ever since the Internet came into being, China has attempted and succeeded to monitor and control how its citizens use it. The Chinese government uses technology famously known as ‘The Great Firewall’ which has been engineered to block websites on a variety of sensitive topics such as democracy, human rights, and dissent.
Nearly hundreds and thousands of government servants and monitors keep a check on blogs, email, chat forums, and social media to make sure that there is no sign of dissent against the country’s tightly controlled and enforced ‘harmonious society’. Mainstream Internet websites and mediums such as Google, Facebook and Instagram are completely blocked while others such as Wikipedia are heavily restricted.
Most of the technology that supports the Great Firewall originates from companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. They have faced severe criticism and backlash from many human rights advocates for playing an active role in the country’s censorship.
The late Rep. Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor reportedly said at a 2006 House Hearing “I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.”
In May 2010, the government issued the first White Paper on the internet which focused on the concept of ‘internet sovereignty’ requiring all internet users in China alongside foreigners and foreign organizations to adhere to Chinese rules and regulations regarding the internet.
More recently, Chinese internet companies are compelled to sign the ‘Public Pledge on Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics for China Internet Industry’. The pledge enforces stricter rules than those on the White Paper.
Ever since President Xi Jinping was voted into power, censorship rules have become stricter. In February 2016, the President announced a new media policy for state news and party. The policy states: “All the work by the party’s media must reflect the party’s will, safeguard the party’s authority, and safeguard the party’s unity”.
The policy reinforces the idea that all media must adhere to the central values, thoughts, and actions of the party in power.
China exists under an authoritarian regime. The role of censorship is linked directly to political stability as media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Censorship does this by shutting down all forms of dissent and criticism of the government across all platforms.
News that undermines regime stability threatens the lifespan of the dictatorship, thus it requires tough laws to be put in place to deal with the problem at a grassroots level. For the provincial propaganda apparatus, censorship functions to cloak negative news about Chinese politicians as it could harm their careers and future success.
Having control over what kind of information is fed to the people allows the government to shape their viewpoints in a way that benefits them. Governments can exercise a great degree of control over what people do, say and how they vote.
Silent content takedowns through consistent keyword filtering is a common thing across social media and messaging platforms. Sometimes, even the most mundane words are censored. For example, in June 2013, Citizen Lab found that words like ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ were included in a list for words censored from social media related to anniversaries of protests.
Following this, researchers at the University of Hong Kong developed projects around real-time censorship monitoring. Dr. Fu King-wa, a collaborator on the project released a collection of censored Weibo posts related to the anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre, the 1989 pro-democracy protests that devolved into one of the most horrific crackdowns in Chinese history. The archive contained more than 1200 images that were censored between June 1st and June 4th of the years 2012-2018.
In a similar vein, China censored videos and social media posts centered around the Hong Kong protests demanding that chief executive Carrie Lam abdicate following her push on the controversial extradition law.
The term, ‘Let’s Go Hong Kong’ was censored, and Chinese authorities had ordered the media officials to delete any video related to the protests. The song, ‘Can You Hear the People Sing’, which was the anthem of the marches was also suspended from ‘QQ’, a popular music streaming site in China.
In June of 2019, there was a massive sweep of back to back social media shutdowns a week before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The so-called ‘internet maintenance shutdowns’ entailed the suspension of comments on 5 popular live streaming and video platforms, under the guise of system upgrades and maintenance.
Douban, a Chinese networking service also withheld discussion and locked a few of their large-scale newsgroups till June 29th and cited system maintenance as the reason. Similarly, WeChat suspended the status message, profile and nickname changing feature for the same reason.
In 2017, Apple removed VPNs from its mainland Chinese app store. The ban has exacerbated over time. AppleCensorship.com, a transparency project by GreatFire grants access to applications available in the US but not in China.
The app store has also censored news apps of well-established networks such as the New York Times, Tibetan News, Voice of Tibet and Radio Free Asia and other human rights publications in Chinese. Censorship avoidance tools such as Tor and Psiphon were also taken down.
Moreover, as the Tiananmen anniversary approached, Apple Music removed popular protest songs from its streaming service such as the 1990 song by Jacky Cheung that refers to Tiananmen Square and songs by pro-democracy activists from the Umbrella Movement protest.
Following the annual media shutdown on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, a blogger with the handle ‘V2’ wrote about the censorship, stating: “Some people, including me, were silenced, while the rest were excited to talk about celebrities smoking, getting married, getting divorced or cheating, pretending that all these topics are really worth discussing. The truth is that these are the only topics that are allowed to be discussed.”
He sums up China’s Weibo in the following words: “a crowded place within a tiny snail shell”.
On 31st May, a variety of Twitter accounts related to China were suspended, including those of journalists, dissidents, famous activists, and human rights lawyers. The action was in preparation for the upcoming anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. Some of the accounts remain suspended until today.
The censorship, a large number of false positives and poor timing on account of Twitter has created fear and uncertainty in Chinese activist circles.
Humans Rights Watch, a slew of brave journalists and security researchers have covered the steady and acceleration of digital and social control in Xinjiang over the last two years. The spillover effect is terrifying – as Eid approached in June the mosques remained empty. Uighur students and immigrants abroad dread returning home as many residents have been detained without reason.
China exercises ‘security theatre’, hyping and overstating its surveillance powers to create a ‘chilling effect’ which then shapes behavior on social media. The reliance of China on surveillance technology constitutes a serious human rights violation and the push to create ‘facial recognition for Uighurs’ is “the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling” according to the New York Times.
In 2018, Luo Xixi, a student at Beijing University lead the first #MeToo exposé in China. She stated she had been sexually harassed by Chen Xiaowu 12 years ago. The story included the hashtag ‘#Wo Ye Shi’ (#我也是, “#MeToo”) and went viral in two days. Following the scandal, a series of campaigns and petitions emerged for the establishment of solid and official policies against sexual misconduct.
#MeToo and #Wo Ye Shi were used as campaign hashtags by feminist activists on social media. The tags gained popularity on Weibo and were disabled. The go-around was a term ‘rice bunny’ which sounds like ‘me too’ when spoken in Chinese was used as a replacement hashtag.
Despite not having a political theme, the movement is suppressed as content that challenges the ruling class and supports change threatens regime stability.
The face of social media changes immediately when one enters China. Popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and WhatsApp do not exist in China. WeChat is the Chinese WhatsApp, Renren fills in for Facebook, Weibo is the Chinese Twitter alternative and Youk Tudou is the YouTube of China. These alternatives are easier to control and monitor to maintain the status quo.
Any news that gets out of China is extremely valuable. The flow of information is a trickle and China works hard to maintain it by denying visas to journalists, detaining relatives and arresting activists and journalists. Nevertheless, censorship transparency projects like WeiboScope and AppleCensorship and research by organizations such as GreatFire provide a peek into the methods and the plans of Chinese censorship efforts.
As evidenced by the resistant MeToo campaign, which found ways around the keyword filter by using a replacement hashtag, resistance is persistent. Activists in and outside China such as V2 and Joshua Wong continue to push to have their voices heard.
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