Regular updates of the list of words banned on Weibo and other platforms have become part of everyday online reality. At the start of 2018, when the change to the constitution that allowed Xi Jinping to be president for life became public knowledge, that list was particularly long. There was no place on Weibo for obvious words like ‘accession’, ‘my emperor’, ‘all hail the emperor’ – nor could you make reference to ‘Animal Farm’, George Orwell’s parable of totalitarianism. Winnie the Pooh was banned in both text and image; in recent years, China’s online satirists have turned the Disney version of the tubby bear into a doppel-ganger for the Party leader and head of state. For a while, people weren’t even allowed to post the name Xi Jinping. More remarkable still was the block on the three characters bu tongyi. They mean ‘don’t agree’. Anyone trying to type the words received an error message and was informed that unfortunately, the statement ‘I do not agree’ ‘violated laws and regulations’.
The change in the constitution was seen as an historic moment by many people, and as a break with the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, under whose rule the limits to terms of office had been introduced in 1982 in response to the tyranny of Mao Zedong. Many intellectuals and members of the urban middle classes were shocked by Xi Jinping’s move. During the meeting of the National People’s Congress, which passed the amendment in March 2018 with just two votes against and three abstentions, the altered constitution was the number one topic for many Chinese citizens, and for the foreign media. But on the day of the vote, the news didn’t even make the list of most-read and most-discussed topics in China’s sanitised social media world. Instead, in the hours after the decision, Weibo’s top ten included an article entitled ‘When your girlfriend has loads of money.’ Also near the top of the list was the crucial debate: ‘Is it okay to eat instant noodles on the high-speed trains?’
An acquaintance who had moved to Berlin wrote on Facebook about one of her Beijing friends, an editor so frustrated by the automated online censorship that he’d spent the whole night dreaming that he was desperately changing every potentially sensitive word in an article over and over again in an attempt to get past the censor. ‘It reminded me of a cat who smells fish in a dream and starts running, even though she’s lying on her side, fast asleep,’ wrote my acquaintance, who had once been a journalist in Beijing herself. ‘A great deal of trauma, every day.’
The internet has changed the form that censorship takes. The state apparatus no longer has to worry about the traditional Party media; it has turned its attention to the start-ups and the internet giants, almost all of which are private-sector companies. Of course, every private company in China knows that it exists only by the grace of the Party, and of course they all praise the CCP and pledge their faithful allegiance to its leader, and of course they have voluntarily placed hundreds if not thousands of censors in their editorial teams from the start. And yet their business model was new to China: fierce competition among countless competitors, the unrestrained desire for profit, boundless commercialisation, and the breathless rhythm of continual renewal characteristic of the global online sector. Disagreeable things inevitably slip through the fast-moving net, undetected by the censors, who must therefore constantly refine their methods.
One example that particularly delighted the online community was a pair of chatbots named BabyQ and Xiaobing. Chatbots are systems with which you can converse via text or speech. Their communication is fully automated, with no human input required. These AI-powered creations were designed to chat with users on the ‘QQ’ messaging platform owned by the company Tencent. People soon began to circulate screenshots showing BabyQ answering the question: ‘Do you love the CCP?’ with a simple ‘No’. The bot responded to a cry of ‘Long live the Communist Party!’ with a tirade about the ‘corrupt and incompetent’ system. And if you asked them about the ‘China dream’, one of the bots replied that it would like to emigrate to the USA, while the other said: ‘The China dream is a daydream and a nightmare.’
Tencent’s experience with the uncontrollable nature of self-teaching systems was similar to that of Microsoft, whose Twitter chatbot Tay quickly descended into spewing racist and sexist bile. At the same time, there was a flash of realisation that the ‘mainstream’ in China might, in reality, be different to the image stubbornly propagated by the Party. The subversive bots were instantly switched off, but those learning algorithms must have absorbed their resentment of the Party from somewhere.
China has a whole set of censorship authorities devoted to the task of giving the country a ‘civilised net’ and making ‘the Party’s positions into the strongest voices on the internet.’ The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has made it its mission to ‘synchronise the opinion ecology of the internet with the reality of Party and nation’, according to the People’s Daily. The year after it was founded, the CAC even brought out an anthem for the 2015 Spring Festival (Chinese New Year, as it’s known in the West). In a video posted online, a choir of festively-dressed CAC employees celebrated the work of the net censor in song: ‘Day after day with devotion we watch over this place / An internet power: where the net is, there too is the glorious dream.’ After the glorious net replied to the song with a shower of ridicule, the censors swiftly censored their own hymn of praise to censorship, and the video disappeared.
Recently, one wave of censorship after another has rolled over the big social media firms and platforms, which are repeatedly accused of spreading ‘vulgar’ and ‘damaging’ content and ‘rumours’. The largest Chinese social media channels, Weibo, WeChat and Baidu Tieba, have all regularly been placed under supervision for short periods. Each time, these firms are instructed to ‘clean up their act and correct their mistakes immediately’; they respond with gestures of submission and avowals of their ‘core socialist values’. Sina Weibo, Baidu and Tencent vie with one another to employ the greatest number of new censors. Tencent has come up with the cute name ‘Penguin Patrol’ for its army of censors (the firm’s mascot is a penguin), and enlists not only trained editors but also normal internet users, who are rewarded for hunting down disagreeable content with vouchers and gadgets. New censors are in such demand that the companies have long been forced to advertise publicly to fill the positions.
With 120 million active users every day, Toutiao is probably the most successful news app in the world. In September 2017, the People’s Daily mounted a fierce attack on the company, accusing it of spreading ‘uncivilised content’ and ‘sensationalised news’. The app was suffering from an ‘incurable disease’, the paper said.40 The Party’s discomfort had been caused by an algorithm deployed by users to filter out political propaganda in favour of more sport or celebrities or scantily-clad women. Toutiao immediately reinforced its team of 4,000 news moderators with another 2,000 staff. The job advert requested applicants with ‘political sensibilities’, who must be capable of scanning up to 1000 posts a day for illegal content.
Shortly afterwards, the company announced that it was extending its censorship team to 10,000 people. And at the start of 2018, after fresh criticism by the censorship authorities, Toutiao blocked 1,100 bloggers, and even briefly replaced the ‘society’ category on its homepage with one labelled ‘new era’, featuring articles singing the praises of Xi Jinping’s policies. (This, after all, is the most pressing task of ‘society’ in the Party state.) All this, though, still wasn’t enough for the censors.
In April 2018, the pressure on the company – then valued at 20 billion US dollars – was so great that the founder and CEO, Zhang Yiming, made a public apology. His letter stood out from a crowd of similar declarations for its potent mixture of breath-taking obsequiousness and evident fear for the company’s survival, and illustrated just how fine the line is that China’s new companies have to walk.
‘I earnestly apologise to regulatory authorities, and to our users and colleagues. Since receiving the notice yesterday from regulatory authorities, I have been filled with remorse and guilt, entirely u
nable to sleep,’ it begins.41 Zhang goes on to confess that the quick development of his company has only been possible thanks to the ‘great era’ ushered in by Party leader Xi Jinping: ‘I thank this era.’ And finally, he confesses his sins: ‘I profoundly reflect on the fact that a deep-level cause of the recent problems in my company is: a weak [understanding and implementation of] the “four consciousnesses” [of Xi Jinping]; deficiencies in education on the socialist core values; and deviation from public opinion guidance. All along, we have placed excessive emphasis on the role of technology, and we have not acknowledged that technology must be led by the socialist core value system, broadcasting positive energy, suiting the demands of the era.’
The Party has no fundamental objection to algorithms; in themselves, they are the miracle weapon of the future. A comment piece in the People’s Daily, however, hoped for a ‘melding of man and machine’ in the interests of a politically correct solution. What the writer really meant was the melding of man, machine and Party: the red algorithm.
The Party dams the river, but it takes care not to stop it completely. It serves its purposes to give different voices a little room, though never enough for them to become dangerous. In the decades of reform and opening-up, Chinese society fanned out to create a universe of diverse interests and voices. Voices upon which the Party wants to eavesdrop. Even now, debates on social issues sometimes manage to become nationally relevant (if only partially, or briefly), as long as they don’t appear to pose an existential threat to the system. The #MeToo debate is one such example.
In spring 2018, millions of people – especially students – were discussing a story from twenty years previously, of a young female student at Peking University who committed suicide, allegedly after being raped by her professor. The more commercially-oriented Party media often draw from social media debates of this kind for their own articles, and sometimes these actually have consequences: Peking University published a statement pledging to do more to combat sexual harassment, and other universities followed suit. But all the while, you could sense the system’s usual nervousness about any debate it isn’t steering itself – and a movement in which women demand accountability from teachers, professors, managers and senior officials is bound to cause a backlash in a system like China’s, dominated by powerful patriarchs. Here, it is the custom for unassailable men to cover for each other.
Alongside the recent feminist awakening within society at large, a reactionary counter-movement has arisen. This is often backed by the CCP’s women’s organisations, whose aim sometimes seems to be to cajole women back into submissiveness and other classical feminine virtues.42 The hand of the censors is never far away. Feminist activists at Peking University were warned in a university WeChat group that their struggle had been identified as a ‘political movement’. If they carried on making a fuss, then before long they might be exposed as traitors who were colluding with foreign powers.43
A student named Yue Xin, who had written an open letter about what had happened on WeChat, was taken from her dorm room in the middle of the night and locked up in her mother’s house for several days. The incident caused so much outrage among her fellow students that a few anonymous people pinned a wall poster§ up on campus and called for Yue Xin’s release – there had not been wall posters at the university since 1989. The US-based China Digital Times published an instruction from the censors banning all media and platforms from sharing ‘content expressing so-called solidarity’.44 It is the autocrat’s most deep-seated fear: solidarity and cooperation among his subjects. These things have to be nipped in the bud. Activists at other universities in Beijing were warned that their campaigns were unacceptable because they were ‘planned’ and ‘organised’. In China, planning and organising anything at all are activities reserved for the Party.
The idea of the internet and social media as a feedback loop and a kind of early-warning system for the Party and the government has led to the creation of data-gathering organisations in practically every branch of government and the Party. The Beijing communications researcher Hu Yong, who knows the internet in China better than most, calls it an ‘industry of public intelligence services’. According to Hu, this industry is constantly frustrating its own primary purpose: to sound out the current mood among the population. Its work automatically ‘results in the contamination of public opinion’: in other words, as soon as it detects a deviation from the mainstream, the old reflexes kick in and the authorities ‘intervene at once to suppress any negative opinion.’ What begins as an objective data-gathering exercise rapidly becomes ‘the manipulation of public opinion’, says Hu Yong. The security apparatus often stymies itself.
In 2017 joint investigation by Harvard, Stanford and San Diego universities, based on leaked documents from Jiangxi Province, claimed it could prove the existence of a ‘huge secret operation’ serving the Chinese government.45 According to the authors, in this year alone 488 million government-sponsored comments were posted on China’s social media platforms by ‘fifty-cent’ troops. The study revealed that these paid trolls were not just hobbyists, but civil servants specifically assigned to the task. Another revelation was that these trolls generally avoided crowbarring the official government position into controversial debates. Instead, their main techniques were ‘cheer-leading’ for the Party in general (‘[If] everyone can live good lives, then the China Dream will be realised!’46) and simple distraction:.When a sensitive debate had reached critical levels of intensity, they would flood the forums and comment threads with posts that all had a single aim: to change the subject.
A wide range of competing ideologies continues to circulate on the Chinese internet, despite the blows struck by the censors: Maoists, the new Left, patriots, fanatical nationalists, traditionalists, humanists, liberals, democrats, neoliberals, fans of the USA and various others are launching debates on forums like Tianya, Maoyan, Tiexue and Guancha. ‘The CCP’s attempts to build a unifying ideology are challenged by highly fragmented public opinion in China’s online space,’ wrote the Berlin think tank MERICS (Mercator Institute for China Studies) in a study looking at online discussions.47 But in contrast to the pre-2013 years, these debates no longer reach a mass audience – and they therefore ‘do not represent an immediate threat to party rule,’ conclude the authors, though they also note that ‘most participants belong to the urban middle class, whose support is crucial for maintaining the stability of CCP rule.’
The authors had managed to stay under the radar of the censors while conducting their survey of 1,600 forum users, yielding some surprising results. A significant 62 per cent said they wanted an internationally strong China – but at the same time, despite an ongoing campaign by the CCP against ‘Western values’, 75 per cent nevertheless welcomed these values. When they were asked which values they regarded as ‘mainstream’, they gave the top four places to freedom, democracy, equality and individualism. It wasn’t clear from the survey exactly what the respondents understood by ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Some might have fallen for the Party’s Newspeak, though the fact that socialism only came in at number seven and patriotism at 14 suggests otherwise.
It must be noted, though, that this survey was carried out in the summer of 2016, since when the barrage of propaganda around Xi Jinping’s projects – patriotism, China’s superpower status, one-upmanship with the West – has increased in both firepower and intensity. ‘The Chinese government has not (yet) succeeded in gaining broad-based societal acceptance, nor has it eliminated competing ideologies from the online public sphere,’ the study reports, before warning that, ‘the hardware for the ideological dominance of the Party state has been set up.’ Xi Jinping’s ideological offensive was on the starting blocks, and the strategy would be the same as ever: the use of overwhelming power.
Another of the forums featured in the report, Gongshiwang, where liberal intellectuals and leftists used to meet, was shut down by the censors shortly after the MERICS survey. But deleting accounts
and forums is a crude tool, which makes the repressive nature of the system all too obvious. The Party now prefers to stay a few steps ahead, by working on the subjects themselves. A few years ago the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid sister-paper to the People’s Daily, printed a description of the ‘good Chinese netizen’. The ideal internet user, according to the article, should regulate himself to ensure that online ‘the sky is sunny and clear’ and buzzes with ‘positive energy’.
The individual citizen, to the extent that the internet has turned him into a creator, sender and distributor of news, has also caught the attention of the censors. Every person in China, said the People’s Daily in 2012 (in an article headlined ‘The internet is not a land outside the law’) is ‘responsible for his words and deeds.’ And because today, these words have the potential to travel much further, the Party is keen to ensure that its subjects feel this extra weight of responsibility. All of a sudden, rules and laws of censorship that once only applied to the country’s newspaper offices have ordinary citizens in their sights. Take the rules for administrating group chats issued in 2017, for example, which among other things prescribe ‘the spreading of core socialist values’. They were aimed not only at the providers of chat services, but also at ‘those who initiate, administrate and participate in chat groups.’ In other words, at every individual user. The state has a direct channel into people’s most private conversations. It is watching in real time, and it wants to get into your head. Watching what you write and what you do is only the first step; its real aim is for you to internalise its rules. ‘We need to build a “firewall” in our brains,’ said the People’s Daily; ‘only then can we really start talking about a foundation for national internet safety.’48
The most widely used metaphor for China’s internet controls is still the ‘Great Firewall’, sealing off the country from the harmful influences of the outside world. And at one time, that was the aim, when China’s ministry for policing launched the mother of all digital information control projects (the ‘Great Firewall’, incidentally, would never have become so impenetrable so quickly without the lucrative – for them – assistance of Western IT and telecoms companies like Cisco, Motorola and Nortel). Today, though, the term ‘Great Firewall’ no longer really describes what’s going on in China. It’s more accurate to talk about a ‘Great Hive of firewalls around the individual’, as David Bandurski writes in the Hong Kong Free Press. He sees Chinese internet surfers in the midst of a ‘buzzing nest of connections from which they may be insulated at will.’ Together, these are part of a grand illusion; people imagine ‘that they are part of a thriving, humming space, but all are joined to the Party’s re-engineered project of guidance and managed cohesion – and all are buzzing more or less at the same frequency.’49
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