I reply to my friend: “What are you talking about?” We are on WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform, a kind of Facebook-Whats-App hybrid. A message I had received referred to “the above photo.” There was no photo.
My friend responds with a screenshot from his phone—and there it is, the missing picture. It had seemingly been plucked out, somewhere en route. But there was no error message. This is the new age of Chinese online censorship: automated and sneaky.
WeChat has over 768m daily users, and just like Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter) it self-censors. As well as automated content filtering, company censors remove sensitive material in line with government rules. The same friend often sends me articles, saying, semi-jokingly, “open quickly, this link will self-destruct in 60 mins.” Sometimes, they’re blocked when the message arrives.
The surest route to censorship is via the “three Ts”: Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen. Sensitive words or photos get the chop. After the death of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize winner who campaigned against Communist rule, pictures of him on WeChat just disappeared. But it isn’t just politics that can cause material to go missing, or a social media account to be closed down. Topics like pollution and even entertainment news don’t always comply with the government’s aim of cultivating a “healthy, uplifting environment for mainstream opinion,” and as such are prone to censorship or choreographed social media responses.
The Chinese internet is bound by the “The Great Firewall” that blocks Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and a huge chunk of the web. Western news sites are also blocked. Sometimes the actions reflect the naked self-interest of the authorities. People lost access to the New York Times’s Chinese and English websites after a 2012 article on the wealth of China’s political elites. Sometimes there are wider policy issues.
Along with WordPress and Gmail, Instagram found itself an outsider too in 2014, as the pro-democracy “Occupy Central” protests gripped Hong Kong and pictures flooded the mainland. During last September’s Communist Party Conference, WhatsApp also found itself shut out.
One reason Beijing can get away with it is that most Chinese people don’t access foreign sites or care if they’re blocked—there’s plenty of Chinese social media. A small minority, including expats, do use a VPN (Virtual Portable Network) which re-routes their connection to a server in a place with uncontrolled access, like Hong Kong.
Beijing could block all of these loopholes tomorrow, but chooses not to, perhaps happy with this modest degree of subversion. It tightens access when needed, usually ahead of big events or when controversial stories emerge. In the lead-up to the Second World War commemorations in 2015, VPN access became so restricted that Gmail shut off entirely.
The worry for users, and champions of internet freedom, is that heavier restrictions are becoming the norm in Xi Jinping’s China. Even the biggest western tech giants are feeling the effect. A new Cyber Security Law requires companies to store their data on the mainland. For Apple, this means their iCloud servers will be co-managed by a firm in southern China.
Yes, this should give faster access to iCloud, but—of course—it also casts the gravest doubts over data security, although the majority of Chinese iPhone users aren’t worried either way. Meanwhile, sites that host unlicensed software have become subject to criminal penalties, which is why Apple removed nearly all VPN apps from its Chinese store.
Restrictions on information cause businesses all sorts of problems, but such is the size of the Chinese market they will continue to play by the rules. In light of the country’s rising influence, even the academic world is trying to win state brownie points. In 2017, Cambridge University Press caused an uproar when it retracted 315 articles from China Quarterly’s Chinese site. The backlash caused a reversal, and the reinstatement of some articles. But the episode revealed that even the independence of scholarship is under threat.
In future, social media users will have to use real name authentication to track their activity, which will dampen online criticism. Even so, loopholes will reopen. New code names for banned words will reappear. So people will continue to jump the Firewall—but many more will remain content with the more simple life behind it.
