What Does China's Censor Censor?
Funny you should ask
A decade ago, many prominent Chinese hoped that Xi Jinping would usher in openness and reform. Today, some of them say he has created a totalitarian state. Moving Backward: In Xi’s China, Some See an Era of Total Control. New York Times, October 18, 2022.
Total Control?
China has had Chief Censors for 2000 years, usually leading public intellectuals with a sense of humor and a thick skin. Their rules apply to media and anyone with more than five thousand social media followers:
No infringing, fake accounts, libel, disclosing trade secrets, or invading privacy;
No sending porn to attract users;
No torture, violence, killing of people or animals;
No selling lethal weapons, gambling, phishing, scamming, or spreading viruses;
No organizing crime, counterfeiting, false advertising or bullying;
No lotteries, rumor-mongering, promoting superstitions;
No content opposing the basic principles of the Constitution, national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity;
No divulging State secrets or endangering national security.
When people complain, the Censor explains
In 2018, he yanked a viral essay about the capital’s migrant workers, Beijing Has 20 Million People Pretending to Live Here. When the indignant author complained, the Censor replied, “Your essay polarizes relations between prosperous Beijingers and the immigrants who sweep your streets, inflaming contempt for these vulnerable people”. In 2019, netizens blamed him for not censoring enough when a female doctor committed suicide after being targeted by social media.
Nor is there any scarcity of information, Says Alice L. Miller:
Virtually every topic of conceivable interest to Chinese politics and policy students now has specialist periodicals devoted to it. This diversity includes publications on previously sensitive issues like foreign affairs and military issues. Since the early 1980s, previously-restricted specialist publications dealing with various aspects of international affairs–journals such as American Studies and Taiwan Studies–and new publications such as Chinese Diplomacy became openly available. In military affairs, the Academy of Military Science’s premier journal, Chinese Military Science, became available for home delivery to Western students of the PLA. In the 1990s, PRC media began routinely to carry opinion pieces by the growing community of foreign policy. National security specialists in China frequently offered competing–even clashing–perspectives on international issues, raising fundamental questions among Western analysts about what political authority to attach to them in Beijing’s policy process… The proliferation of websites hosted by news agencies such as Xinhua has given immediate access to streams of information and commentary far surpassing anything easily accessible by traditional means.
The acid test
Do we trust our privately censored media more than they trust their publicly censored media? Sadly, no. Public censorship wins hands down.
The Censor reprimanded Global Times for publishing surveys about reunifying Taiwan by force and President Trump’s election chances: “Such surveys are serious violations of news discipline, sensitive issues likely to cause offense to foreign nations. They have created political fallout and publishers should learn from this and refrain from polls”. The unchastened publisher grumbled, “The Global Times is pro-government but it’s also market-based, not just State-controlled”.
In 2018, censors yanked a viral essay, Beijing Has 20 Million People Pretending to Live Here, explaining, “This essay polarizes relations between prosperous Beijingers and the immigrants who sweep our streets and may thus inflame bad feelings towards these vulnerable people”.
The Censor’s biggest headache, however, is not international relations but rumors. A story about RYB Kindergartens torturing children went viral, and the censor intervened, “Please prevent malicious hyping of the RYB Kindergarten matter. Social media accounts that exaggerate the situation should be closed on sight or have content deleted”. Investigators heard that a teacher had pricked children with a sewing needle and detained her, but they found that the accusations had been fabricated by parents who confessed and apologized. Wearily, the Censor concluded, “Public security organs will always thoroughly investigate and punish real illegal and criminal harms to minors in accordance with the law and also strictly handle intentional fabrication and dissemination of rumors. At the same time, we appeal to everyone to approach information on the Internet rationally and cautiously”. Too late. RYB Kindergartens’ NYSE valuation fell forty percent.
Today, twenty-five-thousand independent outlets publish romances, pornography, intellectual, political, and financial journals and tomes on Swiss democracy. Orwells’ 1984 sells steadily. Seven-thousand periodicals, three-thousand cable channels, a thousand radio stations and seven-hundred TV stations struggle to distinguish themselves in a cutthroat market where niches are worth billions. Says Alice L. Miller,
Virtually every topic of conceivable interest to Chinese politics and policy students now has specialist periodicals devoted to it. This diversity includes publications on previously sensitive issues like foreign affairs and military issues. Since the early 1980s, previously-restricted specialist publications dealing with various aspects of international affairs–journals such as American Studies and Taiwan Studies–and new publications such as Chinese Diplomacy became openly available. In military affairs, the Academy of Military Science’s premier journal, Chinese Military Science, became available for home delivery to Western students of the PLA. In the 1990s, PRC media began routinely to carry opinion pieces by the growing community of foreign policy. National security specialists in China frequently offered competing–even clashing–perspectives on international issues, raising fundamental questions among Western analysts about what political authority to attach to them in Beijing’s policy process… The proliferation of websites hosted by news agencies such as Xinhua has given immediate access to streams of information and commentary far surpassing anything easily accessible by traditional means.
Investigative Journalism
Media scholar Maria Repnikova says journalism there is alive and well:
Whereas the majority of Chinese reporting still adheres to the propaganda model, in the past three decades an exceptional practice of what I term ‘critical journalism,’ including investigative, in-depth, editorial, and human-interest coverage of contentious societal issues, has emerged in China amid the restrictive environment. What unites these journalists is their pursuit of social justice and their quest to push the envelope of permissible reporting.
Fearless journos exposed the 2002 AIDS epidemic in Henan province, the 2003 Sun Zhigang case of a migrant worker illegally detained and beaten to death in Guangzhou, the 2008 milk-poisoning scandal, widespread environmental protests, and food safety crises – among other contentious issues. In most cases, their stories raised a wide public outcry, as manifested in active discussions online. In some cases, they also produced a moderate policy shift ... demonstrated in the courageous investigative reporting of Tianjin’s chemical explosion.
Cui Yongyuan, whose talk show, Tell It Like It Is, has twenty-million Weibo followers, catalyzes national debate. By vehemently opposing the Government’s plan to introduce genetically modified food and making heated, personal attacks on GM food supporters, he helped defeat the legislation. Next, he charged China’s highest-paid actress, Fan Bingbing, with cheating on her taxes, triggering a tax audit that cost the entertainment industry two-billion dollars in taxes and fines. Then he publicly accused Shanghai police of taking bribes while investigating Fan Bingbing, and of ignoring death threats to himself and his daughter. He publicly ridiculed their excuse that they had been unable to reach him and, after an investigation, Beijing charged Shanghai’s police chief, Gong Daoan, with corruption.
Cui then turned his sights on the Supreme Court. His obscenity-laden Weibo post accused the President of the Supreme Court of malfeasance, demanding to know why critical case files were missing, and why CCTV cameras had been sabotaged when the documents were stolen. This was accompanied by an image of the case file’s cover page showed a judge’s directive to keep it secret. After a denial, the Court buckled, admitting Cui’s allegations were valid. So great was the public uproar that President Xi intervened personally on Cui’s side. Cui said that he challenged the Court to uphold justice and to educate people about the law, “In China these days there are too many damn people afraid of getting into trouble and too few with the guts to speak the truth”.
The Censor is remarkably tolerant of contrary points of view. For thirty years, Beijing funded a monthly journal, China Through the Ages, whose 100,000 subscribers enjoyed its attacks on ‘the Party’s self-serving narrative about the Cultural Revolution,’ its advocacy of constitutional, multi-party democracy, and its championing total privatization of State assets. Only after the journal praised a former Cabinet Minister who collaborated with the CIA, did Beijing lose patience and cancel its subsidy. Even then, the editor went down fighting, “This magazine will stop publication due to policy changes reflecting the establishment’s intolerance of reformers and liberals”. (Imagine the US Government funding America Through the Ages while it advocated one-party rule, workers’ ownership of the means of production, and the abolition of competitive, multi-party elections.
Public Acceptance
Deborah Fallows found that eighty percent of citizens want the media controlled and want the Government doing it. Students say the censorship is too strict, adults think it strikes the right balance, and older folk criticize its laxness, but few find it repressive. One graduate student even praised it, “Our Internet is already in chaos and the Chinese Government is not the only one having paid commentators, for sure. Western governments and others also hire people to create and circulate opinions about democratizing China or colonizing China again. They probably want a Chinese version of the Arab Spring. I believe censorship is necessary to resist some of these influences”.
We have different priorities and sensitivities in the West, but we also have censorship. What to we have to lose by making it transparent?
There appears to be a discrepancy between the two graphs shown regarding US levels of trust in their media. I assume that this is Substack's graphic media manipulation algorithm kicking in after the abysmal levels of trust displayed in the first graph.