Censorship in China

Reading and Writing under Censorship in China
 
David Ownby
 
I few weeks ago I was contacted by the folks who run GreatFire, an anonymous and award-winning China-based organization that works to bring transparency to online censorship and to help Chinese people freely access information.  A visit to their site will acquaint you with their many useful apps and sub-sites.
 
GreatFire got in touch with me because they have several sites that rescue suppressed information and posts from platforms such as WeChat, Zhihu, and others.  They reasoned that as someone who pays attention to intellectual life in China, this might be of interest to me, and they were right.  This update thus marks the beginning of a collaboration between me and GreatFire in which I will translate a number of posts taken down in China and liberated by GreatFire – particularly on WeChat, the platform I use most often – as a way of exploring issues of censorship in China, particularly in the context of intellectuals for whom publishing their work is central to their purpose and their identity.  We anticipate that the collaboration will last through much of the summer.
 
Censorship in China is already a much explored topic, and I make no claim to break new ground here.  The best single-volume study of censorship in China is probably Margaret E. Roberts, Censorship :  Distraction and Diversion inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton, 2018), which paints a comprehensive picture of how censorship works in today’s wired China, where online life is pervasive.  Roberts describes China’s reality as one of “porous censorship,” because China’s government can no longer control information as it did under Mao.  Information comes in from abroad, despite China’s “great firewall,” and online posts and commentary within China rocket across the Chinese Internet on any number of competing platforms.  In addition, Chinese authorities like to pretend that the information flow is basically free, or at least they attempt to avoid incidents when heavy-handed censorship is obvious, because no one likes censorship, even in authoritarian regimes, and visible, noisy censorship provokes its own backlash.
 
Consequently, China’s censorship works largely via “information friction” and “information flooding.”  Information friction means slowing the flow of information the regime does not want to circulate; Google used to work in China, for example, but it was haphazard and incredibly slow because it was “throttled” by the regime, so most users gave up after a few minutes.  The authorities generate friction in other ways now, including those described below.  Information flooding means amplifying the flow of information the regime deems positive, for instance by taking over hashtags originally meant to be critical and injecting positive information on the same subject.  Obviously, this is not something that can be done at the touch of a single button in Beijing, and other studies refers to the Chinese system as one of “delegated censorship,” in which many people and many platforms make hundreds or thousands of such decisions about such issues over the course of every day. 
 
Of course, this brief description in no way captures the totality of the censorship experience in China (or even adequately sums up Roberts’s excellent book).  Self-censorship is a huge thing in China for example, doing much of the government’s work for it  Almost everyone in China knows what not to talk about in public, even if they talk about all those things in private (and until recently in friend groups on WeChat and other platforms).  Intellectuals of course deal with a broader range of censorship actors, including faculty minders (for those who teach at universities), Party secretaries, book and magazine editors, and even the Public Security Bureau, if they are persistent and/or unlucky.
 
For the purposes of the present collaboration, I am looking solely at what happens after publication, when a post or a longer text penned by an intellectual is taken down – sometimes by the author, more often by a platform.  There is no way to tell from the GreatFire site the frequency with which posts are taken down, nor can you enter the name of a particular intellectual and get the whole history of their posts over their career, including those that have been suppressed.  I nonetheless found it very interesting to spend a couple of days with the freewechat.com site, since again WeChat is the platform I use the most.   
 
I was of course aware the posts were taken down on the Chinese Internet prior to being being contacted by GreatFire.  Liberal intellectuals like the sociologist Guo Yuhua and the legal activist He Weifang have both written about being driven offline by official harassment (see here for Guo’s experience, here for He’s). 

Another example I had run across in my work is the case of Sun Liping.  Sun is a retired sociologist (and a colleague and friend of Guo Yuhua) and blogger who posts frequently about current events and government policy, posing as the sort of truth-teller who will say things like “I was watching the World Cup this past weekend and it sure looked to me like someone is turning the page on Covid, hint hint.”  Since I was following his blog, I noticed that on occasion his posts would be removed – strangely if helpfully, the platforms put up a message saying that a post has been taken down, a gesture toward transparency, I guess – and reposted by someone else elsewhere online.  
 
Over the course of the spring and summer of 2022, I noticed that Sun was no longer publishing on his WeChat feed and began to wonder if he was perhaps in trouble.  Sure enough, on July 23, Sun posted a message to his WeChat feed that began:  “I would like to thank my online friends for their concern and patience over the past three months and more, and I am particularly touched by those who continued to send in regular messages checking up on me.  I can publish again now, which is what is important, even if I don’t know what I want to write about.  Maybe we’ll start with confusing trends in the world economy brought about by the war in Ukraine.”  Of course, Sun might have taken three months off because he was traveling, or because he broke his arm, but in context, the message surely seemed to say:  “They told me not to write for a while, so I didn’t but now I’m back.”
 
The following month, Sun published a lovely little thought piece titled “If Sheep Don’t Like To Be Tied Up, It Is Not Necessarily Because They Want To Do Something Bad,” clearly a commentary on his recent experience of being told not to publish on his personal blog site.  Sun’s title basically conveys his meaning, but the first part of his essay is eloquent and moving:
 
“Recently, I've been thinking about why sheep don't want to be tied up. The sheep we see are often tied up. We should note that the sheep that are raised by humans are animals that have been domesticated to a relatively high degree. Generally speaking, this kind of sheep do not resist even when they are tied up. This gives people the wrong idea that sheep in general don’t mind it, which in fact is not true.  All it takes is to see how happy a sheep is when it’s untied, how it runs away, and you will understand just how much sheep do not like being tied up.  
 
That sheep do not want to be tied up is not necessarily because they want to do something bad, or we might go so far as to say that they have no purpose in mind at all. Some people may say that sheep want to be free in order to have a larger area in which to find grass to eat. This may seem correct, but in fact it is not the whole truth, because even when they have eaten their full, sheep still like to roam around freely. In the final analysis, it is the nature of animals to want to roam freely, without restraint. Nature is nature, and there is no purpose attached, necessarily. 
 
Of course, the degree to which this nature is felt differs with different animals.
 
Domesticated sheep, or birds that have lived in cages for a long time, may be more or less used to such constraints.  Other animals are not. For example, if you try to hold insects and spiders in your hands, they will desperately try to break free. Some studies have shown that some animals will even commit suicide when they are trapped. For example, dolphins and whales can become suicidal after being captured and trapped in one place for too long a time. The same is true for certain bird species. If you've ever seen a dog chained up for the first time, you'll understand what I’m talking about. It is excruciating to watch how they struggle and suffer. 
 
Some studies have also found that the higher the IQ of a particular animal, the stronger this instinct becomes.”
 
When I was in China in May of 2023, several of the intellectuals I met with complained to me about their posts being taken down, and from the perspective of the state, the system looks logical:  if someone persists in publishing things that push the limits or contest the norms of official discourse, these posts are taken down, and if the authors continue, they are warned and their accounts finally shuttered.  From an author’s perspective, this process appears to take a certain amount of time, and to involve considerable give and take with state authorities, by which I do not of course mean that censorship or harassment is justified.  Still, up to a point, it appears that there is some room for a cagy intellectual to maneuver.  Sun Liping is still publishing online while Guo Yuhua and He Weifang are not (to my knowledge).
 
After spending a day or two with the GreatFire tools, the system looks less logical.  My way of using GreatFire was simply to enter the names of intellectuals and journals that I already know from my work onto freewechat.com, in order to see what had been taken down.  Unsurprisingly, the work of liberal intellectuals is often removed; among many, many predictable examples, I found Rong Jian criticizing China’s New Left, Qin Hui explaining why China’s villages have failed, a Zhou Lian essay on why “good Chinese people” do not make good citizens, and a Ge Zhaoguang piece criticizing Zhang Weiwei’s theories of China’s “civilizational state.”  All of these are of a piece with Sun Liping’s experience and could be multiplied many times over – intellectuals daring to question something about China’s current order and being slapped down.
 
At the same time, I was surprised by the number of texts taken down which were not penned by whiny liberals, and which in fact looked perfectly regime-friendly to me.  An excellent example is the New Left intellectual Jiang Shigong’s long review of the Chinese translation of After Tamerlane:  The Global History of Empire, by the British historian John Darwin (translation available here).  This is part of Jiang’s exploration of the concept of empire, in which he implies that a Chinese empire for the 21st century might not be a bad thing, which perhaps ran afoul of the proper presentation of Chinese foreign policy in the eyes of some censor somewhere.  But it is still a dense, obscure discussion of a foreign book on Tamerlane, hardly a smoking gun…More of Jiang’s posts of have been taken down as well:  see here for his 2020 review of the Chinese translation of Frederic Pierucci’s The American Trap; here for his 2020 piece on globalization and global governance;  here for a 2019 piece on Hong Kong (Jiang was one of the architects of China’s Hong Kong policy).
 
A similar example is Zhang Yongle, another New Left writer and colleague of Jiang Shigong at the Peking University law school until the latter moved to Minzu University earlier this year.  A piece Zhang published in 2019 reinterpreting Wilsonianism and the Monroe Doctrine was taken down.  Wang Shaoguang, another New Left intellectual, had his 2019 piece on the CIA suppressed (the piece was not pro-CIA…).  A 2017 piece in the Maoist journal Utopia on the phenomenon of “looking back on Marxism” was taken down.   This might be more understandable, as Utopia has been to the left of the current regime and critical of Chinese capitalism – I believe their website was even suppressed for a while – but in any event, it is clear that ideas of the left are suppressed along with ideas from the right. 
 
The middle seems no safer than the left or the right.  Huang Qifan is a hands-on economist associated with the rise of Shanghai in the 1980s and 1990s, and with Bo Xilai and the “Chongqing model” in the 2000s; has served in various posts at the national level since the 2010s.  He writes as a mainstream economist, signaling problems but above all championing China’s potential.  Yet his work is taken down as well:  among others, see here for a 2023 piece on China’s manufacturing and here for a 2022 piece on Chinese-style modernization.
 
When you look at journals instead of particular intellectuals, the picture is no clearer.  I typed in Beijing Cultural Review, since it is an ambitious, highly rated review that tries to make a difference, and was surprised to see how many of their pieces have been taken down over the past little while.  The list for 2022-2023 includes:
 
A piece on problems with the Chinese medical establishment (health care in general, not Chinese traditional medicine in particular);
 
A piece on youth suicide (translated here on my site);
 
A piece questioning China’s most recent economic stimulus (to be translated on this site as part of this series);
 
A piece on South Korea’s new president and his attitude toward China;
 
A piece on the geopolitics of the Russo-Vietnamese relationship in the context of the war in Ukraine;
 
A piece on problems with China’s educational system;
 
A piece debating the issue of whether Chinese young people should work for delivery platforms or instead work in factories;
 
And a piece on “China's Poverty Alleviation and Ecological Transformation.”
 
All of these texts look as if they could be controversial, which might explain why they caught the censor’s eye.  At the same, the very goal of the Beijing Cultural Review is to be controversial in a way that moves China forward, and I am surprised that the editors of the review do not have a better sense of what will fly and what will be shot down – unless of course everything is more or less random.
 
Another piece of the puzzle is the fact that most of the texts that are taken down are reposted somewhere else on the Chinese Internet.  How this happens is a mystery to me.  I don’t know if the authors, or the journals, give their consent or if the Internet is just China’s Wild West.  A priori, it makes no sense to me that a piece taken down by one platform would be reposted by another, but it is obvious that this happens all the time, probably many times, perhaps many hundreds of times, every day.
 
Looking at the totality of this “system,” it is hard to believe that it is the product of conscious design.  Yes, I can imagine delegated censorship producing something like this, although why state authorities allow the reposting of suppressed texts is beyond me.  In any event, for readers and especially for writers in China, the lived reality of this system must be an extreme frustration that the idea of “information friction” barely captures.  When I was in China last May, I was struck by the number of intellectuals who could not be bothered to read any more.  I now understand at least part of the reason.
 
To further explore these issues and to allow readers to immerse themselves in the kind of material that is regularly taken down on the Chinese Internet, the editors of GreatFire and I worked together to choose five texts that I will translate.  These texts include:
 
Liu Qing, “Factionalism in the Intellectual World is a Fact of Life,” March 2022.
 
Yao Yang,  “There is Room for both Optimism and Concern On the Subject of China’s Future Economic Growth,” May 2023.

Xu Zhun, “Can We Really Do Another Four Trillion RMB Stimulus?  Sorting out China’s Internal Challenge,” June 2022.

Zhao Tingyang, “What Is It That Makes Chinese People Illogical?” November 2022.

Gao Quanxi, “Liberalism and the Question of Human Nature,” August 2022.
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The links will go live as I finish and post the translations.  I do not believe that I will unlock the secrets of what gets taken down and why on China’s Internet, but the translations will provide food for thought.