Censorship: How Does It Work?

So the reason I wanted to write this essay is because I’ve seen a lot of people say lately that Chinese censorship seems to be failing rather hard these last three years. A lot of theories have been proposed as to why Chinese people are more and more brave when it comes to speaking out on the internet, and I’ve obviously got my own ideas. Before we can get into why traditional censorship methods are no longer working, though, first, I need to cover what traditional censorship methods are to begin with.

For the most part, censorship comes down to three main aspects—making China look good, hiding anything that makes China look bad, and if it gets out anyways, then painting the picture that everywhere else is actually just as bad.

Although the Great Firewall is very infamous, I personally don’t think it’s particularly effective at all at accomplishing anything. I don’t think it’s ever really worked, because VPNs exist. Now, not a lot of people in America uses VPNs. In fact, the average person might not even know what it is, but that’s only because it’s not actually necessary in America. In China, there are entire industries that you cannot work in if you do not have a VPN. Academics and postgrads, for example, need a VPN in order to read papers from western publications. To some extent, even normal undergrads often pick up a VPN just for access to Wikipedia to do research. GitHub isn’t allowed inside the Great Firewall, so if you’re in programming, you need a VPN to do any kind of work. And if your company has any clients or partners or suppliers from overseas, they’re probably not going to download WeChat just to talk to you, so you need a VPN to download Zoom, or Skype, or whatever it is people are using these days.

All of this means that the government can’t really ban VPNs outright, and chances are, if you’ve gone to university at all, you’ve figured out how to use it, because Chinese search engines are so bad it’s practically useless.

Not to mention, porn.

Because the entirety of the Chinese internet must be NSFW.

Although smaller websites exist inside the Wall that host porn, they’re not exactly search-engine optimised, don’t have a whole lot of content, and tends to disappear regularly and need to be rediscovered again. So it’s just easier all around to hop over to the outside internet to get your porn. And never underestimate the lengths people will go to for porn when it’s not freely available everywhere. Every single person I know who has a VPN has it for the explicit purpose of getting porn.

I think the Great Firewall might not have ever really worked as real censorship, and all it has ever been was a distraction. It’s the big obvious barrier the government put up so that when you hop over it, you think to yourself, “Okay, I’ve overcome the propaganda and the censorship now! I’m free now!” And you think that now, you’re getting all the information. When the most effective methods of Chinese censorship (or maybe censorship in general?) has always been the more subtle methods that nobody notices.

For example, the main way the CCP actually stops western media from having much influence in China and from people finding out too much information through talking to people from other countries has always been by not properly teaching English.

And yes, English is absolutely a part of the curriculum in China. But the way it’s taught makes it precisely useless for actually using in daily life. Instead of actually teaching you the language in any kind of context that’ll enable you to have conversations and understand things, instead, it’s nothing but vast amounts of rote memorisation. And I don’t mean just memorising vocabulary. I’m talking about memorising entire essays and responses, where the only acceptable reply to, “How are you?” is “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” And any other response won’t get you the points.

So despite English being a mandatory subject all through China’s mandatory education, people on the internet regularly don’t seem to know much English at all, and go about learning English is absolutely mind-bogglingly bizarre ways. For example, the latest trend of forcing English vocabulary into people’s brains by writing a particularly riveting short story in Chinese about having incest with your brother to teach the word “heritage” (he = he, ri (日) = fucks, ta (他) = his, ge (哥) = brother). It doesn’t teach the definition of heritage at all, or how to use it in a sentence, or how it’s different from similar words like “tradition” or “legacy”.

And for a country that’s well-known for not giving a single fuck about copyright issues, China does, in fact, go out of its way to shut down fan importation and translations of western TV shows and movies. That means that there’s no environment to learn or use English to China at all. And when all school’s taught you is memorising a bunch of vocabulary out of context, then you’ll forget almost everything you’ve learned within a couple months of graduating.

Obviously, students in relevant majors or in top-ranked universities have no problems reading English, and they tend to be the most likely to decide to flee China too. But for the average person, the Great Firewall has never stopped them from hopping over to Japan’s internet and watching their porn. The fact that they can’t read much English is what stops them from escaping the echo chamber they’ve been forced in.

This is important because the first step of propaganda—making China look good—has been eroding the fastest in late years. Even literally illiterate dirt farmers like my grandma understands now that the Chinese news is full of lies. No matter what’s happening, they’re always making it look like rainbows and sunshine and like everything is going great. I think that’s been an instinct that was honed all the way back in the day when the newspapers were talking about harvest yields of tons of grain per mu (666 square metres), literally in the middle of the famines. And it’s an instinct that’s never went away. Every Chinese person I know seems to have a lot of skill in reading the news between the lines to figure out what’s actually happening through the bullshit.

I still remember when the first news report about the “new strain of SARS spreading in Wuhan” back in December of 2019, where the newscaster talks about the doctor who first started spreading word about it has been arrested for fear-mongering, and encouraging people to not believe in rumours and not spread rumours and to trust in the government. This news report is why my dad firmly believes that covid was leaked from a government lab.

I asked him why, and he was like, “Because if this new strain of SARS thing wasn’t actually a big deal, they’d never bother to talk about it on the news. Like, imagine just a normal, routine new strain of the flu that seems pretty bad, so a doctor is talking in his group chat about how to deal with it. Why would anybody care enough to arrest him? At this stage, there’s only, like, 30 known cases. When has the Chinese government reacted that fast to anything? Who would even be concerned about just 30 cases of a particularly bad case of SARS, even if it was killing people, to the point that they need to dedicate evening news time to tell people that talking about this gets you arrested? Like, how many cancer villages are there that the news never talks about? So why this?” The only way he could figure is that before any of the doctors even realised what was happening, the government already knew this was a disease that was worthy of being terrified of, because they knew what it could do.

And to some extent, the Chinese government also knows that they don’t have much credibility with the people anymore, so in a lot of cases, when it comes to singing their own praises, they’ll try to get westerners to do it. Sometimes, it’s pushing videos of random American vloggers coming to vacation in China and being like, “Wow, it’s so great here, you guys! This is so much better than America!” Sometimes, it’s getting western news reports that are like, “China is taking over the world as a super power! They’re so scary!” They’ve even been caught faking news reports where they don’t exist, by writing articles like, “Famous scientist Edward Hughes says China leads the west in scientific development by 50 years!” Except if you look into it, this Edward Hughes is actually a Chinese-born, Chinese-raised CCP member who just changed his name to sound western.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever covered any content like this, but I also regularly see screenshot compilations of twitter or youtube comments in English, talking about things like, “China really is the eternal God, they respond to natural disasters so quickly! If America was this way, it would be better!” and “It must be so happy to marry Chinese man, they care about family and are focused on one!” Where if you translate the sentence directly into Chinese, it makes perfect sense and fits into Chinese internet slang. And they’re all posted by accounts that have only existed for 3-4 hours.

As for how much people buy into this, to be honest, I think not really. It works a little better when it’s a random influencer doing it, and there’s quite a bit of a market out there on the Chinese internet for patriotic influencers. But if it’s coming from an official media source, then once people are in the habit of questioning everything they read and trying to read between the lines, it’s hard to get them to shut it off.

But you might have noticed in my description of the sort of thing my dad does, that it sounds very much like how a crazy conspiracy theorist might look at the news. And I think it’s true that a strong distrust in the government, distrust in official news sources and statistics, and an assumption of ulterior motives and malice means that Chinese people seem a lot more prone to believing in crazy conspiracy theories. And a big part of that is because the government outright encourages it.

Every time the CCP actually ends up caught with its pants down, the default strategy is always to blame it on an American conspiracy. Why are so many local governments going bankrupt? It’s obviously because America’s screwing over our economy by refusing to sell us steppers! Where did covid come from? It was obviously designed in an American bioweapons lab to target Chinese people! Why are so many people angry about this gymnasium collapsing and killing a whole bunch of kids? They’re obviously American spies here to incite discontent against the CCP!

No, not all the government-sponsored conspiracies are about America. America just happens to be a very convenient target, because all the releases on stuff that the CIA has been doing in the past decades means that it seems very plausible when you say that all the people angry about their lives on the internet are CIA bots, because it’s not like they haven’t done ridiculous stuff like that before.

But when it comes to smaller issues, like young couples angry that the presold house they bought was never delivered, or students finding rat heads in their school cafeteria food, the go-to conspiracy seems to be, “It was all staged to get likes and subscribes to boost their influencer career! Just watch, they’ll start getting for patreon bucks or doing sponsorship reads any day now!” In the cases where it blows up enough on the internet, police will literally track people down and force them to make a video where they admit to staging everything for a dramatic video and that none of it actually happened in real life. And since there’s plenty of staged videos trending on tiktok, that’s plenty believable to people too.

Add in the fact that there’s always newer, fresher gossip coming out on the internet every day, once someone’s dismissed a news story for probably being an influencer’s hungry grab for attention, they’ll probably stop paying attention to any follow ups, and everyone’ll have moved on in two weeks.

This is mostly how the CCP goes about accomplishing “hiding everything bad about China”. Back in the day, when it was just TV news, it was easy. You simply never reported on areas of poverty. And when most people who can afford a TV lives in urban areas and will never visit the countryside, it’s easy to hide how wide the income gap has become in China. But as smartphones got cheaper and cheaper, and internet plans got cheaper and cheaper, poor people can still go on the internet now. Even worse, for a while back in the day, there were a lot of influencers making it big by putting on ridiculous charity events, sort of like Mr. Beast. There was a lot of content of influencers going to remote, poverty-stricken villages and, say, carrying a bunch of gifts and pretending like they’re a distant cousin of someone’s coming over to visit, and seeing how long they can get away with it. In fact, that’s how the chained woman case got notice to begin with too.

All of this culminated with a tiktok uploader who made videos of, “How much food can I buy with X amount of money” kind of videos, who tried to see how much food you could get on one day’s worth of social security money, and learned that Chengdu old people only get 107 RMB a month. There was a heartrending video of him interviewing a grandma saying that she’d never had meat her entire life. And he bought 107 RMB’s worth of groceries for her, because I guess there’s just nothing you can really buy for $3.50.

And with that, he was cancelled, and the government came out with the official policy that, “It’s illegal to exploit poor people for internet traffic.” And with that, police have justification now to arrest anyone showing how the other half lives in China. In preparation for writing this article, I literally spent the last month searching weibo for any video at all of rural villages in China similar to where my family lives, to try to show you how different it looks from normal videos set in big cities. And in all that time, I found one. An advertisement by a charity asking for donations. And even in that case, in the video itself, you can’t see what the village looks like. It’s easy to imagine that it’s just this one girl, and not an entire county that lives like this.

In the early stages of the Gansu earthquake, a couple of videos apparently leaked out of the damage that was done, and the whole internet was shocked by the condition of housing that people lived in. A lot of people were questioning in the comments, “I thought China had ended poverty years ago? What the hell is this?” Unfortunately, I didn’t get there early enough to see any of the video, only the aftermath. Which is that there were a lot fewer videos coming out about relief efforts. There are closeup shots of soup kitchens and emergency schools that they’d built out of tents, and so on and so forth. But next to no footage of any damage or even many of the victims involved, because a lot of them didn’t have proper clothing. And of course, no charitable organisations were allowed in Gansu. The government explicitly said that they’ll take donations of money and resources but absolutely refuse to let anyone who isn’t a government employee in.

And that’s how they paint the picture that they’re far more competent than, say, the Japanese government at dealing with an earthquake. Because in Japan, you can see the ruined buildings, you can see the cracked streets, you can see the people standing in a massive line to get water and food, and you can see the number of casualties. But how many people died in Gansu? Technically, that information is available if you go searching for it. But it’s not in any of the trending news reports. In fact, there’s hardly any news reports at all.

And when it’s illegal for poor people to document their every day life, that’s how you get the utter shock and disbelief when Li Keqiang points out that if you make 5000 RMB a month, you’re already in the top 10% of earners. To this day, there are a lot of people who think it’s American lies and propaganda that over 600 million people in China don’t make more than 2000 RMB a month. That 50% of the labour force does not make enough money to even qualify for paying taxes.

Of course, it doesn’t help that basically all Chinese statistics are fake as shit. A big reason why Li Keqiang was so popular with the people was that he came up with the Keqiang Index, an attempt to get a better reading on the accurate state of the Chinese economy by looking at associated statistics that people forget to fake. For example, the number of vaccines used per year on newborns doesn’t actually match up to the number of newborns, leading a lot of experts to think that China’s birth rate may actually be significantly lower than it seems (and I know it already seems very low). For example, no matter how much they claim that China had 5.2% GDP growth for 2023, the number of packages that go through the mail (a big indicator for online shopping) shows a lot less consumption than they claimed.

And that’s the reality of the conspiracy method—you can try to smear everyone speaking out as liars and spies all you want, but so long as the problems you’re trying to hide is society wide (such as customary government corruption or the dismal economy), then people know what’s going on in their own lives. They presumably have friends and talk to them, so they know they’re not the only one. There’s a reason videos talking about having to gift government workers expensive cigarettes or alcohol to get anything done get a lot of traffic and popularity, because it resonates with people.

The conspiracy method works well enough for smaller cases that only affects a family or two at a time, or even a village or two at a time, that you can paint them as liars and people might believe it. But the more you try to use it to cover up problems that affect tens of millions of people around the country, like presold houses never being delivered, the more you just look out-of-touch with the people, or outright malicious.

So we come to the final evolution of propaganda, “But it’s just as bad everywhere else!”

Look, it’s really hard to get an accurate grasp of what life is like in another country—especially when you don’t share a language. I mean, I grew up in China and I have tons of family and friends in China, and I still get blindsided by aspects of Chinese life all the time! I just learned at the beginning of this year, that there’s a position in Chinese companies called 出纳 (chu na), which Google tells me translates to cashier, but it’s not. But a lot of unskilled, uneducated workers in China demand to be paid in cash, because a lot of smaller rural villages just don’t have banks. So the chu na is the person who goes to the bank to pull out literal bags of cash to transport to the work site or factory, so people can get paid. I only learned about this because the factory my dad works at lost 2 million RMB when a chu na just hopped on a car and ran away with the money. This is, like, cartoon shit to me.

And this is the sort of detail that movies and TV shows will never go into—how pay checks are handled at a company, how student loans are applied for and granted, how much sales tax you actually pay. And it’s precisely the sort of thing where people tend to assume that the whole world works the same way. And you can use those blindspots to paint a picture that other places are just as bad, if not worse, than China.

For example, it’s a very popular narrative in China to post pictures of homeless people lining the streets or tent cities in San Francisco, and say, “Look how many homeless people there are in one of the richest cities in America! Meanwhile, you can’t see a single homeless person hanging out in Shanghai!”

And it’s true. You won’t find any homeless people hanging out in urban centres in China. Because they get chased off to the rural countryside, where they can live in mud huts or natural caves and get by robbing food from other people’s land and trying to not get beaten to death. The reason that homeless people tend to gather in urban centres in America is because America actually provides more services for homeless people there. Things are actually within walking distance there. There’s more pedestrian traffic so maybe you can get by with begging there. Whereas in the small town I live in, in America, you don’t see as many homeless people because it takes an hour to walk from my house to the nearest street light. Things are an impossible distance apart if you don’t own a car. There’s precisely one homeless shelter in town and it’s pretty much always full. And there’s no pedestrian traffic, only miles and miles of forest and parking lots.

But this sort of propaganda is incredibly easy to push for the CCP, because America media really likes to talk about America’s problems, because anxiety-mongering works here for getting eyes on the news. There’s an endless bombardment of, “The income gap is getting wider!” “Bipartisanship is getting worse!” “Racial tensions are a big problem!” “Social security’s going bankrupt!” “People marching on the streets to demand whatever!” “Hundreds of signatures on a petition for this or that!” “Look at this one guy on twitter calling Biden an idiot!”

And a lot of Chinese people tend to assume that just like in China, something doesn’t make it onto the news to begin with unless the problem has already gotten so bad that there’s no possible way of hiding it. China’s not even talking about its own income gap! If America’s devoting this much news time to it, it must be a lot worse there than what China’s dealing with. People wouldn’t go marching in protest or sign petitions unless they’re ready to throw their life away. How bad do things have to be for you to get on the internet and call your President an idiot??

And this method has the additional bonus of maybe preventing a lot of your best people from emigrating? I do notice that although China barely has any true crime shows covering what happens in China itself, there’s definitely a lot of fairly popular influencers who make a career out of covering western true crime. And even official CCP media itself likes to cover every major murder and shooting in America that it can find. To the point that I’ve had a lot of friends ask me whether it’s safe in America, because they’ve heard that no one dares to go out at night there. I’ve literally seen a Chinese school DARE talk, where they gather up all the kids who intend to take the SAT instead of the Chinese college entrance exam, and have a police officer come in and teach them what to do in a shooting, like that’s more likely to happen to them than not. They also especially like to cover police brutality, because it really makes Chinese cops look better.

I’ve had a lot of family and friends ask me if I’m safe in America, because the impression they get is that Americans live in fear every day. And I can’t even really blame them, because how would they know? It’s not like they can come over and see for themselves, when the government is incredibly slow and reluctant to issue a passport to anyone who doesn’t strictly need to leave for work purposes. And even after that, it’s another huge ordeal to try to get a visa. I haven’t even went back to China for a couple of years now because I don’t want to deal with the process of getting a visa myself.

And so far at least, this method is probably holding out the strongest, only in so much as there’s still quite a lot of people who don’t know anyone who lives overseas, who can tell them what things are actually like. And honestly, a lot of Chinese people who come overseas tends to slowly drop off contact with their friends back in China. I know that I’ve only got a handful of friends that I actually put sincere effort into keeping up with, because it’s just too stressful to try to travel back and forth. And friendships where you never see each other except once every three years tends to just slowly slip away.

But the propaganda is failing, though, right? People are speaking out more and more on the internet? What’s the change? To be, the answer is obvious. Because speaking out has been working.

Chinese people have made more progress is bringing about change through protest in the last two years than they have in the last two decades. They successfully ended covid lockdowns with the White Paper Revolution. They made the government back down on instituting both digital RMB and screwing around with medicare reform. The government’s even backed down on reforming the gaming industry, even though there weren’t even any protests! Just a drop in the stock market was enough to scare them off!

You’ve got to understand that things certainly weren’t always this way. There were plenty of people deeply upset about forced abortions during the one child policy. But you don’t see the government backing down on that. So, I think all the speculation about, “What’s changed the Chinese people to make them so much braver?” isn’t getting to the core of what’s going on. I think the question that should be asked is, “What’s changed the Chinese government to make it so afraid?”

And I think the answer is very simple. The times have changed. When a problem affects millions of people, then shutting them up online is only a surefire way to transfer the conversation offline. And right now, at least, we don’t have a lot of technology that censors those. And once people start talking offline, that’s exactly how protests get organised. And the more people gather for a protest, the more other people realise, “Oh wow, there are a lot of people like me. I should join them.”

And if things get out of hand, this is no longer an age where China can just roll tanks out to shoot people anymore. It has to maintain some face and legitimacy as a real country. China isn’t quite ready yet to completely embrace being North Korea. Nor does it want too—too much of the Chinese economy is tied to the world. Even with Xi’s best efforts to push an isolationist policy hasn’t really worked out. China’s still dependent on doing business with the rest of the world. And there’s simply too much attention on China, that no one would miss an absolute massacre. And there’s bound to be sanctions on the way.

The White Paper Revolution opened the gates. People really did go marching into the streets because they were going to starve to death in their apartments anyways. They were, in fact, prepared to die. And when it worked, that was the spark that gave people the confidence to go marching in the streets again and again, over medicare reform, over getting public holidays, over all kinds of government decisions.

So it’s easier to let people vent it out online, let them mourn the primary school kids burnt in a fire, let them hurl accusations at the government for not caring about human lives. Then arrest a few local officials, write a news article condemning them, and follow it up with a memorial article about Sandy Hook or something.

This might still seem totalitarian as fuck to my American readers, but as a Chinese person, I’ve got to say, that although the situation isn’t exactly great, I can see why Chinese people are excited and hopeful about this. It’s a step in the right direction. If you can come up with the sort of language that gets your post published, and you can get enough people together to overcome the algorithm drawing attention away from your posts, and you can resonate with enough people that it doesn’t matter if they say you’re spy or not, then you can actually bring about a certain amount of justice. At least, the people responsible will have to lose some useful peons or something. This is, in fact, progress. I’ve seen a lot of people say that they think this is the first baby step towards freedom of speech, or even democracy.

Do I agree? Well, I certainly don’t like to rain on anyone’s parade. In fact, I think hope and excitement at the possibility of freedom of speech is probably the most important factor in whether or not China will ever achieve it. It’s certainly a much more productive mindset than giving up in despair because you assume that the audience will only ever see what the censors allow them to see. It’s certainly better than cautiously self-censoring everything you say.

One of my commenters in the past has brought up concerns that the AI revolution might allow the government far more control in censorship than what they can achieve with human moderators. I’ve since looked into this a lot more (but I still don’t really understand anything about AIs, forgive me, I’m dumb), and at least in the short term, I don’t think it’ll be much of an issue, because the Chinese government seems much more scared of AIs than they are of their own people. A lot of the best (“best”? Is there a best when it comes to AIs?) AIs are straight up not allowed in China, because when they first introduced ChatGPT to China, it almost immediately started tearing government censorship apart and telling people about Tiananmen Square. So the CCP kind of freaked out and completely banned any AI that can’t promise to conform to “socialist values”. I don’t know exactly what this means, but so far, they seem pretty wary of letting another AI loose on the internet.

The Chinese government’s just as filled with confused boomers as everywhere else, so for the foreseeable future, I think they’re going to stick to human moderators. And human moderators not only means that they can only get around to censoring so much content per day, but it also presents the problem, that you have to educate them on what they’re supposed to censor. In order for them to correctly identify dogwhistles that people use on the internet to talk to each other about censored content, you have to actually sit down a room of college graduates, and tell them about precisely what happened on the 4th of June, 1989, on Tiananmen Square. In fact, here’s an interview with a Chinese internet moderator for those of my readers who can understand Chinese that goes into a lot of interesting details about the industry:

Notably, it’s a job with an incredibly high turnover rate, just like moderators who work for Facebook. You have to look at a lot of traumatising shit every day, because Chinese censors also have to deal with cat torture videos or whatever. So they can’t afford the time or energy to draft up any kind of propaganda to ease these moderators into the truth. So for their training program, they just sit in a room and get blasted with several BBC documentaries in a row about exactly what went down in China, no dressing it up, no official government narrative, just raw truth right into their brain. And in a couple of weeks, when they can’t take the job and quit, the next batch of young people get blasted by the truth again.

A lot of ex-moderators joke that being an internet moderator in China is basically like a rush course in how to become a rebel.

That’s about all I have to say on the subject. To finish out, I think I’ll tell a very interesting story, of the only case I’m aware of where someone was cancelled by the public and explicitly not by the government in China.

He is Xiao Zhan, the lead actor of the TV show The Untamed, playing Wei Wuxian. The story starts in February of 2020, when one of his fangirls found a Real Person Fanfic of him on AO3 which portrayed him as a mentally-ill trans FTM. For some reason, she found this deeply insulting, and reported the fanfic to the Chinese censors and demanded they do something about this degenerate content.

And that’s how all of AO3 got banned in China.

A lot of people proceeded to get absolutely furious online, because you do not fuck with people’s porn. And AO3 was what a lot of people relied on for their porn. They began a massive campaign cyber bullying any fans of Xiao Zhan that they could find. A lot of innocent fangirls who had no idea what was even going on woke up to tens of thousands of messages telling them to go die, so they began to fight back by tracking the bullies down, figuring out which porn writers they were paying attention to, and reporting them too, starting an official fandom war.

At its worst, one fanfic writer was arrested and sentenced to ten years in jail.

Xiao Zhan himself basically tried to stay out of this as much as he could, but it didn’t stop a lot of people from being very mad at him for not reining his fans in and telling them to stop. Since he has millions of fangirls, and it’s harder to hate an amorphous group than it is to hate one symbolic figure, a lot of people ended up blaming this war and the fallout of all the cancelled and arrested porn writers on Xiao Zhan himself.

And now, calling someone a Xiao Zhan fangirl is a common slang insult. A lot of uploaders who make their content on entertainment industry drama and celebrity news will go out of their way to never mention him (despite him still being one of the most popular actors in China). There’s almost never any promotions for the TV shows and movies he takes part in nowadays, because the comment section is inevitably filled with angry mobs. All the tabloids so universally avoid mentioning him that even among all the celebrity news that end up pushed to me, I almost forget he exists sometimes.

Even though legally speaking, he did literally nothing wrong, and the CCP has never taken any action against him. He still acts in CCP-funded historical TV shows and everything.

So you know, cancel culture really is everywhere.