PRC China Government's Censorship Examples

More, new WSJ article: Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups

Key quotes include:

auto mechanic Yang Qingsong used an expletive in a WeChat post to question the intelligence of police for doing checks in the rain. Police detained Mr. Yang for five days, saying his post to a group with 241 people “created negative social effects,” according to an account of the incident the police posted on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.

Software employed by WeChat appears to automatically scrub posts containing words on a blacklist, which is continually amended by human censors, according to Citizen Lab. The technology has now advanced to identify images deemed sensitive, which are then removed during transmission without the sender being alerted to the disruption.

After he called President Xi Jinping a “baozi”—a steamed dumpling—in one WeChat post, and Chairman Mao a “bandit” in another, Mr. Wang was arrested, court records say. A local court in April sentenced him to two years in prison, a term that was reduced to 22 months after a retrial last month.

Two take-aways:

• Criticize China and face a serious risk of going to jail
• Government-owned companies like Hikvision come from an environment, therefore, were criticism is simply not tolerated and can easily be stopped

The Economist article: How China’s “sharp power” is muting criticism abroad:

Sharp power wraps all that up in something altogether more sinister. It seeks to penetrate and subvert politics, media and academia, surreptitiously promoting a positive image of the country, and misrepresenting and distorting information to suppress dissent and debate.

Hikvision's tactics with the security media are right out of the Chinese government's playbook.

The HBO website has been banned in China after a John Oliver episode last week:

China is banning the new Winnie the Pooh movie because Winnie the Pooh is used in China to make fun of their Supreme Leader Xi Jinping, e.g.:

China is now censoring business news, specifically negative reports about the Chinese economy, per the FT:

Chinese propaganda officials over the past few months have handed down instructions not to changshuai — bad mouth — the economy, according to a dozen journalists and editors at influential Chinese publications who spoke anonymously to the FT.

Topics such as consumers cutting back on spending, local governments struggling with debt repayments, lay-offs by bankrupt private companies and inefficiency at state-owned companies are increasingly off-limits, according to media staff. 

NY Times: Twitter Users in China Face Detention and Threats in New Beijing Crackdown:

One man spent 15 days in a detention center. The police threatened another’s family. A third was chained to a chair for eight hours of interrogation.

Their offense: posting on Twitter.

The Chinese police, in a sharp escalation of the country’s online censorship efforts, are questioning and detaining a growing number of Twitter users even though the social media platform is blocked in China and the vast majority of people in the country cannot see it.

Fascinating new example, even 'private' Chinese companies are now censoring articles:

In the article, Shih is critical of the concentration camps:

One particular fascinating / troubling aspect is that this is ban is global in nature, not just inside of China.

Reuters: China's robot censors crank up as Tiananmen anniversary nears.

An interesting example of false positives with computer vision:

Despite advances in AI censorship, current-day tourist snaps in the square are sometimes unintentionally blocked, one of the censors said.

And how news reporting is suppressed:

“When it comes to news, the rule is simple... If it is not from state media first, it is not authorized, especially regarding the leaders and political items,” said one Baidu staffer.

A pretty wild example of real-time censorship:

An interesting new example of China censoring China netizens criticizing giving in to protestors demands:

After weeks of Chinese media describing the Hong Kong protesters as rioters and terrorists, mainland commentators reacted poorly to news that Lam had withdrawn the bill. Thousands of comments criticizing her decision have been deleted from Chinese social media, in line with the common practice of censoring dissent. Other commenters are already asking what could be a threatening question for the Chinese Communist Party: “If Hong Kongers can get what they want by protesting, why can’t we?”

Two new topics this weekend:

'South Park' Banned From Chinese Internet After Critical Episode | Hollywood Reporter

NBA at centre of controversy after Daryl Morey Hong Kong statement differs from English to Chinese; US politicians call foul | South China Morning Post

Arsenal's Ozil deleted from Chinese computer game following criticism of Uighur treatment:

"The German player Ozil posted an extreme statement about China on social media," [Game maker] NetEase said on Chinese social media site Weibo. "The speech hurt the feelings of Chinese fans and violated the sports spirit of love and peace. We do not understand, accept or forgive this!"

A strange confrontation between Swedish media and the PRC's Ambassador to Sweden:

China’s ambassador to Sweden summoned after he hit out at ‘smears’ in latest outburst against Beijing critics:

Interesting new example:

China Censors ‘Nomadland’ Director Chloe Zhao’s Oscar Win: Ms. Zhao is first Chinese woman to win best director, yet search engines erased the news

Two state media reporters told the Journal they had received orders from China’s propaganda ministry not to report on her victory, despite what they described as her status as a Chinese national, because of “previous public opinion.”...

Ms. Zhao experienced a Chinese social-media assault of her own earlier this year after her win at the Golden Globes in March. Initially jubilant about her success on the world stage, Chinese social-media sentiment turned bitter after users circulated a 2013 interview with Filmmaker magazine in which Ms. Zhao made a reference to China, calling it a place she had grown up in “where there are lies everywhere.”

Newest and one of the most bizarre examples of censorship, this pop music video of a dancing pink bear has been banned:

PRC state media The Global Times wrote an article condemning it, explaining that:

In the music video of "Fragile," a panda figure keeps dancing in the background and the whole set is pink-colored. These are symbols considered to be related to China and targeted at the "Little Pink," a term used by the media to refer to young people who are fired up with patriotic zeal and try to guard China against any criticism online. At the beginning of the video, a caption reads, "Please be cautious if you are fragile pink."

Many other offensive elements are found in the lyrics and the video. The singers mention the Chinese people's love for "dog, cats, bats and civets" as the clip shows the panda cooking a pot of bat soup. The singers also referred to "forced labor and detention camps in Xinjiang," something that has been repeatedly refuted by local citizens.

The end of The Global Times article reads like the Onion:

Although Namewee's management company has since responded that the song "just wants to express love for small animals," netizens reject this because of the sophistication of the messages.

The CPC censoring pop songs and dancing pink bears? This does not evoke strength.

NBA Celtics game pulled in the PRC after a Celtics player calls to Free Tibet while wearing a Dalai Lama shirt:

China's Peng Shuai Makes #MeToo Claim Against Zhang Gaoli - The New York Times

Ms. Peng made the allegation in a post on Tuesday night on her verified account on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. In it, she described an assault that began an on-and-off consensual relationship with Zhang Gaoli, who from 2012 to 2017 served on the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, the top ruling body in China.

The post was removed within minutes, but the allegations swirled through the country’s heavily controlled internet, fueled by the fame of the accuser and the accused. That kept the censors inside China’s Great Firewall scrambling.

Searches of her name and even the word “tennis” appeared to be blocked, reflecting the extraordinary sensitivity within China of discussing misconduct by party leaders.

This is an extremely bizarre and bullying example of censorship, PRC police contacted a PRC citizen outside of the PRC, getting the woman's dad on the phone, threatening her about a Twitter parody account they claim she operates:

From a posting of a Tsinghua Law Professor talking about the problem in the PRC of punishing those who bring bad news, of course ironically now censored:

When I was a student, I read the story of the messenger of Khorezm in Wang Xiaobo‘s book and found it incredible. How could there be such an institutional arrangement? Any messenger bringing good news to the king got promoted while those bringing bad news to the king got fed to the tigers. Would the bad news disappear because the messenger did not deliver it? However, such fables repeatedly play out in reality.

Under the system of social governance we have today, regardless of what level we are talking about, what matters is often not the problem, but whether that problem has drawn the attention of public opinion. Thus, instead of solving the problem, only the person who raised the problem is “solved”. This becomes the usual tactic in governance. Treating any influential event simply as an opinion issue leads to not only failure to resolve problems but also to growing problems. What started out as a trivial matter ended up being a matter of great importance.

SCMP: China’s censors scrub multiple scenes of lesbian character in US sitcom Friends, sparking outrage among fans on mainland

“Friends censored” immediately became the No 1 trending topic on microblogging platform Weibo on Friday. The hashtag, however, was apparently also censored, as search of the topic hashtag on Weibo yielded no results early on Saturday.

NY Times: American Self-censorship, U.S. institutions are increasingly silencing themselves to win access to China.

The consequences are asymmetrical. Chinese movies proudly showcase their country’s values while American movies remain silent about China — skewing the messages people hear not just in the U.S. and China but across the globe.

American movies can even give the impression that China is better. In the 2014 movie “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” U.S. officials were portrayed “in unflattering tones,” according to PEN America. The Chinese characters in the film, which was made with the Chinese government’s support, were more often selfless and heroic. Variety called the movie “a splendidly patriotic film, if you happen to be Chinese.”

I disagree about describing this as "increasingly" as the article's examples show, this has been going on for years and is likely to be decreasing going forward as awareness of the PRC's problems become more widely known amongst the general public.

From the President of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China:

A cat-and-mouse game is going on in social media, censors almost can’t keep up with deleting everything. But it is very difficult to determine how the population really thinks, because the censors mercilessly clear everything. I can say, however, that people are genuinely afraid of the virus. The authorities do not inform that the Omicron variant is milder, they do not inform that other countries have learned to live with the virus. The authorities have spent a year bad-mouthing Western mRNA vaccines, with the result that people in China don’t trust the vaccination. That’s the problem: The political leadership can’t admit, so close to the Party Congress, that there is another way in dealing with Covid. They can’t admit that people in Europe can fly on vacation again and live largely a normal life. And they can’t admit that it would make sense to use mRNA vaccines in addition to the Chinese vaccines.