Four million students mobilized for internet propaganda

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) criticizes China's Communist Party for a large-scale project in which students are supposed to spread internet propaganda – thus limiting freedom of expression and stepping up internet censorship. Apparently, the youth organization of the Communist Party, the "Communist Youth League", is planning to recruit four million students at China's universities until June 2015. Their job will be to spread online propaganda in favor of the communist party. In February 2015, all universities and departments of the youth organization were informed about fixed quotas to recruit new Internet censors.

"China is trying to gain absolute control. There are targeted actions to prevent attempts to circumvent Internet censorship," said Ulrich Delius, the STP's China-expert, in Göttingen on Friday. In recent weeks, pro-government hackers had carried out a new wave of attempts to spy out the e-mail traffic of Uyghurs and of supporters of the pro-democracy movement. According to computer experts from the US, the hackers managed to infect a lot of VPN services (Virtual Private Network) –which are popular among the Uyghur population and other critical citizens to circumvent Internet censorship – and to gather countless contact data. Since the beginning of the year, the authorities had systematically blocked VPN services, which are also often used by Chinese subsidiaries of foreign companies. Software experts of the security company Alien Vault, which is based in Silicon Valley, had documented these recent hacker attacks and warned against any further use of VPN services in China.

In addition to the tens of thousands of paid commentators who manipulate the opinion-forming on the Internet in accordance with state propaganda, the students are supposed to work towards a "harmonious Internet" and to help consolidate the communist party's power – without pay. Thus, the official guidelines of the youth organization provide that 40,000 new Internet propagandists are to be recruited in the unsettled region of Xinjiang / East Turkestan. At the universities in Beijing, the expected number of helpers is 140,000 – followed by 130,000 in Shanghai. The total numbers for the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu are 290,000 and 260,000 students. "These target figures are insane, and they cannot be met on a voluntary basis," said Delius. "Thus, there will probably be coercive measures – as well as systematic deception of the authorities concerning the true extent of the mobilization campaign."

According to official figures, about 89 million young people aged 14 to 28 are members of the “Communist Youth League" in China.