A power struggle within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently led to a social media crackdown, proving that China’s leadership is not ready to relax its regulations on Internet use.
The problems stemmed from an incident involving Bo Xi Lai, a now-former Communist Party official, and Wang Lijun, the police commissioner for the city of Chongqing. A dispute over the murder of a British national drew the attention of party leadership when Wang sought asylum at a US consulate. Both men appear to have been sacked following the incident, which has been humiliating for the CCP.
All this drama made for an appealing story on social media outlets, particularly microblogging services like Weibo. Users made comments such as “This really is a movie,” and they speculated about espionage. Where the state’s official information sources remained silent (on the whereabouts of Bo and Wang, for example), rumors and speculation filled the void. Reports of tanks and gunfire at party headquarters in Beijing even led to far-fetched talk of a coup. The CCP responded to these rumors by blocking searches for the word “coup.” Sixteen Websites were shut down entirely for posting the rumors.
During the crackdown, users were banned for 72 hours from commenting to one another on microblogging sites. And the ban stirred comments about comments. According to the Wall Street Journal and Sina statistics, the number of posts on the Sina Weibo site relating to the word "comment" soared from 22,000 on Friday to more than 115,000 on Tuesday.
In the attempt to scrub the Web of information related to the conflict, 208,000 “harmful” messages were removed, and 1,065 people were arrested.
It is suspected that Weibo and its closest competitor, Tencent Weibo, each employ hundreds of people to police user content to comply with CCP directives. Further, around 250 million people in China use microblogging services, and the government is attempting to force them to use accounts linked to their real identities. Representatives from the microblogging companies have expressed their frustrations with the restrictions. They say moves like restricting anonymity or comments undermine the appeal (and therefore the financial value) of their products.
"The government certainly doesn't want to shut Weibo, they don't want to kill it -- they want to control it," Bill Bishop, a consultant based in Beijing, told the Telegraph. "If there is another burst of rumors in the next couple of weeks about particularly sensitive things, I don't think the government will have any qualms about taking other steps to rein things in."
This seems to be the consensus of most analysts monitoring the issue. China has long banned Facebook, YouTube, and other Websites owned by Western companies that are unwilling to cooperate with the CCP on content monitoring. Chinese companies often work directly with the CCP to make sure their content is in line with party directives, so there are still Websites with similar functionality to Western social media sites online in the People’s Republic.
Still, this incident has made it clear that the CCP is unwilling to have its traditional control of the news media in China reduced by advancements in technology such as social media.
Hannah Thoreson, a physics student and blogger at Arizona State University, contributed to this blog.
— William Foster is a senior research associate at the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy (CISTP) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Random train of thought. I have a client that has been getting hit pretty hard with SPAM from some networks in China. Could this be Anonymous' doing (botnet, etc)?
Has anyone experienced anything similar within the past month or so?
I always wonder if there is anything like freedom of expression in the constitution of China. If there is, i wonder what it means exactly. For a country doing so well on the economic front, its interesting that on the socio-political front this is the best way to go.
Then again it seems like something a lot of governments would like to do seeing the whole SOPA/PIPA/Other Stories....except in other places democracy seems to have overtaken governments before the coming of social media.
Anonymous' China division is really playing with fire... If they get caught, I doubt there will be much due process in the courts to mitigate their punishment.
you underestimate the CCP. You should take a step back in history to see what it is that drives these people. They understand that the form of comunism they enforce can only work when there is no other form of economy to copare it with. And with 2 billion citizens at their disposal(pun intended) no one is going to wrench power from them in this era. Nothing short of global warfare will put an end to their tyranny. And no one has the fortitude, resolve or resources to take them on...
My Chinese censorship story of the day. The artist Ai Weiwei (who has already served some prison time for being, well, difficult) put himself under surveillance as a piece of satirical performance art.
"Better for everyone involved? You must be living in some utopian planet! Censorship is the 'bread and butter' of the CCP and advising them to relinquish will sound like a teasonable act to them."
Have you ever heard of the phrase "Better to die than to be killed"? When defeat is inevitable, some find it easier to choose the time, place and method of their destruction rather than their enemies.
The other element I'm bringing up is the fact that if it becomes apparent that the CPP will fall due to their censorship, they can either go out violently and fighting, or they can quietly engineer their own dispersment.
Let's say I could show inevitable destiny, and I were to come to you -- let's say you are a person of power -- and I show you that you will lose this power to your enemies.
If you choose to fight it, I show heavy losses on both sides, and perhaps you are eventually captured and publicly executed. It's a horrible blood-bath.
If you choose to do nothing, then you are non-violently removed but because your enemies have no experience in a ruling position, there's a lot of trouble caused by it. You're never restored and there's several rough years of adjustment.
If you choose instead to engineer your own removal from power however, I show that you are seen as a great person of change, there is a minimal period of adjustment, and you actually retain a lesser position of considerable power and influence because you were so valuable in the transition of control.
It's like martial parts. If someone is trying to push, you can either push back, fall over... or step aside and leave your opponent off-balance.
"Still, I think the CCP might want to consider slowly relinquishing their censorship; it would be better for everyone involved to slowly release the reigns in a controlled way than have it torn from their grasp."
Better for everyone involved? You must be living in some utopian planet! Censorship is the 'bread and butter' of the CCP and advising them to relinquish will sound like a treasonable act to them.
How long can they keep it up? Well there are no signs yet that will show me that it can happen within the next three decades.
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