China tightens censorship of online media: Communist Party fears social media

After China announced plans to tighten Internet censorship, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has accused the Chinese government of systematical attempts to muzzle and bring all online media into line. “China’s censors are trying to respond to the growing importance of social media and the country’s deteriorating economic sentiment by exerting more control over the online media. As these media allow more diversity of opinion, this is a serious setback for the civil society, which had been gaining influence recently,” said Ulrich Delius, the STP’s China-expert, in Göttingen on Tuesday. On Sunday, China’s responsible media authorities had published a new decree according to which online media are no longer allowed to spread news from social media platforms without reviewing the contents. 

The Chinese censorship authorities are especially concerned about the use of social media in the troubled province of Xinjiang/East Turkestan in the northwest of the country – where four Uyghur webmasters and bloggers were arrested since the end of March 2016, as an attempt to cut down on information flow in the social media before and during the month of Ramadan, which has now ended. The arrests were supposed to gain control over Misranim and Bagdhax, two especially popular websites in the Uyghur language. The webmasters Akbarjan Eset, Tursunjan Memet, Omerjan Hesen and Ababekri Muhtar (who is also the founder of Misranim) were taken into custody. In Xinjiang/East Turkestan, the alleged spreading of “rumors” – news that have not been confirmed by authorities – can result in long prison sentences.

Officially, the censors justified the new regulations as a means to cut down on “false” news. “However, it is mostly the authorities themselves – and their strict censorship-policy – that are responsible for ‘false’ news, because rumors tend to be distributed through social media especially fast if authorized critical reporting is not possible,” said Delius. The ruling Communist Party is trying to gain absolute control of the public opinion, in particular due to the economic crisis and because of the increasing importance of NGOs and the civil society. In recent months, however, there had even been critical reports on China’s economic policies in the business press, often based on information from social media platforms.

The new decree is one of the first actions of the new Head of the censorship bureau, Xu Lin. From 1995 to 1997, the 53-year-old official from Shanghai served as the Deputy Party Secretary of the Tibetan Shigatse region, where he earned a reputation as a hardliner by implementing the “strike hard”-campaign and by carrying out repressive actions against Buddhist monasteries.

Header Photo: STP Archive