Astonishing things happened over those years. Isolating your subjects is one of the oldest power techniques in authoritarian systems. ‘No fraternization’ was Aristotle’s imperative for tyrants. As he argues in his Politics, the tyrant must ‘stifle everything that might give rise to two things, self-assurance and trust.’ Citizens must remain estranged from each other, ‘for if they become properly acquainted, they begin to trust one another.’ In China, this isolation suddenly broke down. It was something the traditional internet had never succeeded in doing: an army of censors ensured that the Party had always had a good grip on it. The Weibo headquarters, and the offices of the other new social media firms – all of which had come from the private sector, and not from the old propaganda apparatus – had been staffed with thousands of censors from the outset, on the authorities’ instructions.
At first, though, the Party didn’t understand what was fundamentally new about social networks. People were no longer sitting at home in front of their computers; gadget-mad China was even ahead of Europe when it came to buying smartphones. Everyone had one, and they were using them to access the internet. You could now send a message or a photo from your phone, and it would reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in seconds. A censor who took just twenty minutes to find and delete something was twenty minutes too late. And so in those four years, Weibo became a realm of unprecedented freedom, especially for China’s young, urban generation.
At that point, Weibo officially had 350 million users, 50 million of them active on a daily basis. Food scandals, pollution, police violence – all at once, Chinese people had access to information they had previously been denied. Users forced the city of Beijing to publish its air pollution levels. They shared jokes, Hello Kitty cartoons and conspiracy theories, just the same as people all over the world, but they also debated China’s constitution, the tirades of Maoists, and essays by liberal celebrity bloggers like Murong Xuecun or Han Han, who at the height of his fame had 50 million followers, before growing steadily more cautious in tone.
‘With Weibo, people started thinking about things,’ says Murong Xuecun. ‘There was an awakening: individual, political, aesthetic, cultural.’ Once you were allowed to speak and think freely, the author believed, you would quickly dig up the treasure that had been buried deep under the Party’s garbage thoughts and garbage words: common sense. ‘Like all authoritarian systems, this one depends on the fact that you are a lone person faced with an overpowering organisation, and you capitulate. Since Weibo arrived, that no longer works. People are forming networks.’ Suddenly, China was a different country. For the first time since the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, there was a public space that belonged to citizens, where their language was spoken. The germ of a civil society began to grow.
This alone would have been enough to unsettle the Party. But there was a more immediate challenge: one of the most spectacular phenomena of the new net was the ‘human-flesh search engines’ (renrou sousuo). Users cooperated in their hundreds of thousands to gather information and data about particular people and their alleged misdemeanours. This wasn’t always a blessing; it frequently degenerated into smear campaigns against innocent people and into anonymous trolling of ‘traitors to the motherland’ and other ideologically unpopular people. But in 2012, with the entire country’s approval, the online swarm blew the horn to start the hunt for corrupt officials and Party cadres.
The most prominent case was 56-year-old Yang Dacai, a functionary from Shaanxi Province. There were photos of him circulating online that at first glance looked like standard-issue propaganda: a well-fed Party cadre on a tour of inspection, serving the people, posing for photographers on building sites and in conference rooms. But perceptive netizens had noticed an interesting detail: Mr Yang’s watches were of the finest Swiss manufacture. They identified a Rado, a Rolex, two Omegas and a Vecheron Constantin – total value: around 100,000 US dollars. Far beyond what a provincial functionary could afford on his regular salary. From then on, Yang was the ‘Watch Uncle’, and the Party had another scandal on its hands, reinforcing the impression among the Chinese people of a CCP that was now ravaged by legendary levels of corruption.
More importantly, the citizens had discovered their own power, and the Party was unnerved by it. Would all those prophecies that the new media would help empower the people, bring freedom and subvert the authoritarian regime be proved correct after all?
The new man at the helm gave the answer to that, starting in late 2012. And it all happened very fast. Party newspapers identified the internet as an ‘ideological battlefield’ where ‘the hostile forces of the West’ were running riot: ‘He who wins the battle of the internet will win the war’, wrote the Shanghai CCP paper Liberation. In August 2012, Xi Jinping gave the order to ‘win back the commanding heights of the internet’. And in November a deputy propaganda minister reported that the mission had been accomplished: ‘Our internet is clean again.’ The scare was over. Observers on the perimeter of the battlefield rubbed their eyes: was it really that easy?
It was that easy. The Party had brought out its old weapons: intimidation, censorship, propaganda. Polished up and cleverly adapted to the times. The initial offensive was led by intimidation: first, the Party deleted the accounts of bloggers that were making it feel uncomfortable; Murong Xuecun was the first. When his accounts were deleted, and four million readers were wiped out at the click of a button, he felt as if he were ‘being pushed back into isolation’. The spreading of fear is the autocrat’s core competency. Faced with a machine that can squash an individual – and his family – with a snap of the fingers, only a few people will ever possess the heroic courage required to fight back. The reconquering of the internet in the summer of 2013 – and beyond that, the successful exploitation of the internet to promote the aims of the regime – demonstrated how efficient the system was once it had identified the enemy. It might be uncharted territory, but the state apparatus still worked.
Murong Xuecun’s account was deleted in May 2013. The real campaign began on 10 August. On that day, China’s foremost opinion-leaders on the net, the so-called ‘Big Vs’ (the V stands for ‘verified account’) were invited to a conference in a Beijing hotel. Many of the Big Vs were prominent entrepreneurs; others were film stars or singers; most had made a name for themselves as liberal voices. The conference was hosted by the head of a new organisation currently in its start-up phase, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). At the event, these prominent bloggers were reminded of their ‘social responsibility’, and that each of them had a duty to promote the ‘interests of the state’ and ‘core socialist values’. The conference proceeded in a more or less friendly atmosphere; the first painful blow came two weeks later, on 23 August.
On that day the people of China learned that one of the Big Vs, the venture capital investor Charles Xue, had been arrested. Xue had 12 million followers on Weibo, and he had used this platform, among other things, to call on the government to devote more attention to clean air, healthy food and the problem of child abduction. TV viewers were able to watch the police raiding his apartment late at night, complete with flashing blue lights and a lot of shouting, before taking him and several women away. The state media accused him of ‘encouraging prostitution’ and ‘pimping’ – not forgetting to mention in the same breath that Charles Xue was a notorious ‘agitator’ and ‘spreader of rumours’ on Weibo. And then Charles Xue disappeared – only to turn up again a short while later on state television, behind bars and wearing prison garb.
It was one of CCTV’s first ‘interviews’ with repentant sinners, of the kind that have since become a regular feature of the viewing schedule. With tears in his eyes, Xue confessed how ‘irresponsible’ he and other bloggers had been to express their opinions freely on Weibo without guidance from the Party, simply ‘to satisfy my vanity,’ and how right the Party was to put a stop to this irresponsible behaviour.
Blow number three finally came
from the Supreme Court. In September 2013 it issued a new ruling: from then on, anyone who spread a ‘rumour’ that was shared more than 500 times or received more than 5,000 clicks and thus ‘upset social order’ would risk up to three years in prison.
500 shares? 5,000 readers? Prison? You can imagine the shudder that ran through the celebrity bloggers with their two, five or ten million followers when they read this ruling. They fell silent. All of them. Ever since, Weibo has been dead as a politically relevant medium. Once, debate had raged there: sometimes wild, often polemical, clever if you were lucky – but always lively. Today, it’s as silent as the grave.
But wait – Weibo still exists. It’s more commercially successful than ever. Commerce and entertainment are its stock in trade; you’ll find glamour and glitz, celebrity gossip and propaganda, and the site is peppered with posts by various CCP organs and people writing covertly for the Party, who are known as the ‘fifty-cent’ (wu mao) troop, because once they were supposedly paid half a Yuan for every online comment.
Shortly after Charles Xue’s enforced TV appearance, I visited Huang Chuxin in Beijing. He is one of the authors of a Blue Book on Development of New Media, which the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) had just brought out. Huang was working as a researcher for CASS, and at the same time as a social media consultant for various government publications. In the week that I met him, he had already been to Hunan, Shandong and Inner Mongolia to tutor local government officials in how to deal with Weibo and other sites.
Huang spoke in euphoric terms about the potential of the new medium: ‘The opportunities for the government here are huge,’ he said, ‘and certainly greater than the dangers.’ The central government, said Huang, had finally realised that – with a few skilful modifications – social media could provide new channels through which to gauge the mood of the nation. At the same time, the Party was now encouraging civil servants and government agencies to open their own Weibo accounts en masse. ‘They need to have conversations with the people. It makes politics more transparent and the apparatus of government more effective.’ Of course, these functionaries now had to learn to react quickly and use ordinary language. ‘The People’s Daily already does that very well,’ said Huang. Unfortunately, among the civil servants on the ground, his overriding impression was that they were ‘afraid of Weibo.’ When he was teaching his courses, he told me, the first question people asked was always about crisis management. ‘How do we get a crisis of public opinion under control?’ By which they meant criticism from the people.
The first test of strength for the world’s greatest censorship and propaganda machine came just a few months after it had reconquered the ‘commanding heights of the internet’. In summer 2014, protests by citizens in Hong Kong brought the city to a standstill. The demonstrators put up umbrellas to combat the tear gas used by the police, and the movement soon came to be known as the Umbrella Revolution. The citizens of Hong Kong were protesting against increasing interference from Beijing and the creeping erosion of democratic freedoms in their city. They were calling for their head of government to be directly elected.
Right at the start of the protests, the censors shut down the photo and video platform Instagram. Hong Kong users of the popular messaging service WeChat noticed that although they were still able to send messages, the intended recipients in mainland China weren’t getting them. The Hong-Kong-based anti-censorship project Weiboscope reported that the day after the police used tear gas on the demonstrators, a record number of messages on Weibo were deleted and blocked – more than on any other day that year. The news blockade was effective from day one. Hardly anyone in China found out what was really happening in Hong Kong. The machine had performed splendidly.
Bao Pu is a publisher in Hong Kong, but he grew up in Beijing, as the son of a senior Party official at the heart of power. He is familiar both with the CCP and with the new technologies. For that reason, he says, he’s a pessimist. ‘Technology,’ says Bao Pu, ‘always benefits the side with the greater resources. So the internet will always serve the CCP more than its opponents.’ The all-powerful secret police now just have to read Weibo and WeChat, he explains, ‘and they know who to arrest next.’
In the wake of the censorship of Weibo, the newer WeChat quickly overtook the older service in popularity. But WeChat is fundamentally different. Weibo was a megaphone: you could reach thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people with it. On WeChat, people connect in small friendship groups. The maximum number of people allowed in a group is 500. People just talk to their friends. The exodus from Weibo to WeChat was a retreat into the semi-private sphere. The censors appear to be more tolerant on WeChat, but the feeling of relative safety that many users have there is deceptive: after planning on WeChat to attend a poetry reading in support of the Hong Kong demonstrators, a group of Beijing residents found themselves arrested as they met up in the Songzhuang artists’ quarter. The state security service reads your messages.
The protests in Hong Kong were an object lesson in the new style of internet management, in which the aim is not only to block information. The Party immediately provided its own counter-narrative. Propaganda has become more sophisticated. Yes, the old-school rabble-rousers were still there, foaming at the mouth, fulminating in the state press that the demonstrators had left behind ‘a stink that would last ten thousand years’. Yet far more effective were the other pieces, the professionally produced infographics, the anonymous blogs disguised as contributions to the debate from concerned citizens, explaining the situation to their countrymen: Hong Kong is descending into chaos. The demonstrators want to split Hong Kong off from China. They’re spoiled children, who only care about their own economic advantage. They’re backed by shadowy foreign powers, who don’t want China to become strong.
It was also an exemplary demonstration from the Chinese propaganda machine of how to hijack the terminology of the West. The People’s Daily even wrote that the problem with the demonstrators in Hong Kong was their ‘anti-democratic’ attitude. This ‘hostility to democracy’ had been sown in their minds, so the Party propaganda said, by British colonial rule. Now the first priority was to re-establish the ‘rule of law’ in the city – which is to say, crush the demonstrators once and for all.
At the same time, all words that might serve the regime’s opponents were blocked online. You couldn’t talk about ‘umbrellas’ on Weibo any more. Users were creative, of course, and took a mischievous delight in sneaking the characters for ‘Pearl of the Orient’ past the censors once ‘Hong Kong’ had been blocked – but Beijing had no need to worry about these little triumphs. The language that was central to the discourse of the demonstrators and their sympathisers had been taken from them, and with it the prospect of having any substantial impact. The word, the gun and the pen came together online to form an invincible weapon for the Party.
This episode showed what an ingenious move it is to steal your opponents’ core terminology and give it the opposite meaning. In the end, the astonishing thing was not the show put on by the propaganda machine, but how obediently the people played along. While the mighty army of state-sponsored ‘fifty-cent’ trolls castigated the citizens of Hong Kong online as ungrateful so-and-sos with no love for their great nation, you could hear the echo of this propaganda in the real world, in everyday conversations on Beijing’s streets, in exchanges with acquaintances.
‘Hardly any of my friends know what’s really going on here,’ said Murong Xuecun, whom I bumped into on the periphery of the demonstrations in Hong Kong. ‘And of those who do know, 70 per cent are complaining about the Hong Kongers. They just can’t imagine anyone standing up for an ideal these days, because in China all idealism, all principles, all morality has been wiped out. People only work for their own self-interest and their own profit, so they always see the lowest motive in everyone else, too.’ In China, there is a saying for that: ‘To look at humans with the eyes of a pig’.
A vast apparatus takes
care of the day-to-day business of censorship. In 2017, the censors blocked 128,000 websites for containing ‘pornographic and vulgar information’ and exerting ‘a negative influence on public opinion online’. The security apparatus regularly practises an ‘instant switch-off’ – in August 2017, for example, two months before the last CCP Party congress. Over the course of an exercise lasting several hours, internet hub administrators have to prove to the Ministry for Public Safety that they are capable of taking down a series of specific websites in a matter of minutes. Following an outbreak of unrest in 2009, technicians took large parts of the Uighur province of Xinjiang offline completely for a considerable time. Since the Party ordered China’s internet engineers to build a ‘Golden Shield’ in 2003 – an ‘internet with Chinese characteristics’ – they have achieved incredible things. China has built a net using hardware and software completely independent from the rest of the world. Today, China’s net is more intranet than internet. If the censors were to cut off all links to the outside world overnight, most people wouldn’t even notice.
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