On Censorship

Someone on Quora asked: why is censorship in China a good thing.

I have strong feelings about that topic, especially after reading 17 answers in defense of censorship. So this was my own answer, and I’m pretty sure I’ll get skewered, but who the fuck cares.

Why is Censorship in China a good thing?

It is not.

I admit, I am cynical in my assumption of Chinese censors’ motives: they are misguided at best, deliberate and malicious at worst.

I recently had a sinister experience in the sanctuary of my living room. A friend and I were discussing the ongoing Trump-China trade war. Conversation turned from economic to political and from speculative to critical as we chattered about more sensitive topics – Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong. A good thirty minutes went by before I realized that we had started speaking in gestures and hushed tones like conniving children, but in my own home. It has become second nature to me, in a short five years, to talk as if the walls are listening.

I would also somewhat abashedly admit to you here that this very subject matter is one I would not broach in the public domain and certainly not in Chinese. Not out of fear of reprisal (I’m insignificant), but of apathy, to which I too am quickly succumbing.

It is not censorship itself that I find indefensible – all nations, all ideologies weaponize editing to an extent, if at least by omission. But normalization of everyday censorship is far more egregious and its long term impact damaging.

Censorship in China has many layers. It is propaganda, content filtering, moral control, attention manipulation, and appeals to logical fallacies all working in tandem to control what we watch, hear, and read, and what we value, think, and desire.

As a writer, a journalist, an academic, a film maker, a musician, a producer of content of any kind, your first and foremost battle is with not with the “MiniTru” but an “invisible policeman”[1]: yourself. There’s no officially sanctioned, constantly updated list of what is are encouraged, permitted, tolerated, frowned upon, disapproved, and disavowed. There are unofficial guidelines, of course, and you’re probably tapped into the policy zeitgeist enough to know where is the red line. And the first to enforce these is not the powers that be, but ubiquitous filters and website keyword blocking mechanisms that make publishing of any mildly provocative content a nuisance.

Sensitive industries in China require dual licensing: one from the bureau of industry and commerce, one from the industry regulator. An organisation involved in any form of information publishing will require a relevant publishing license, which is notoriously difficult to secure in the first place and is easily revoked. So if you are an online or offline media company that does not wish to lose your license, you will play it safe, and you will demand your editors, producers, and creators to err on the side of caution. At first you may only be responding to the odd directives to purge all mentions of certain topics, but soon you begin to pre-emptively sanitize your opinions. The regulatory environment, therefore, creates a condition where your self-censor is racing with the state-censor to pre-align with what would be an authorized narrative.

And of course it’s never censorship when an individual contributor gets shut down, or a popular Weibo account is shuttered. These people are ‘operating without license’ or in straight violation of regulations.

Each time we see in bold, acrid text: “your search cannot be displayed”, “this article cannot be displayed”, “this message has been deleted”. It has an impact on you. Each time we read the vague and vaguely chilling words: “in violation of relevant regulations”, or “results removed in response to local law enforcement notice”. It has an impact you. You are reminded that in the privacy of your search history and messaging app and email client, there is right and wrong in them, and there are eyes watching.[2]

It is not threat of injury or infamy that silence the masses, it is the inconvenience of unstable VPNs, the twenty minute nightly hunt for triggering words on your blog about veganism, the disappearing WeChat messages, it is the daily nuisance multiplied a thousand times that saps a population of its will to defy.

The frequently invoked defense for censorship is: Chinese people are easily swayed and majority of people are ‘not literate enough’ to discern fact from fiction, dissenting voices from subversive ones. I am not sure that this is a factual assertion, but accepting it to be true for the moment, does it not invert cause and effect? By silencing apocryphal accounts you have also silenced its antidote. It is the absence of a reputable, trusted institution for truth that provides opportunity to rumour.

And the impact of today’s dissenting voice is often felt by posterity. Snowden was inspired by Daniel Ellsberg. Who will Liu Xiaobo inspire? And the thousands of activists and dissenters championing for today’s woes, whose ideas we’ve never heard of and whose names we would not recall, who will they inspire?

This is how discourse is reduced to slogans and deliberation bleeds out from public discussions and ideas die. And vacuous distraction swells to fill their space.

[1] There’s an interesting book called Trickle-Down Censorship by JFK Miller, who was the editor-in-chief of That’s Shanghai magazine between 2005-2011 and a veteran of China’s English language publishing scene. He provides an first hand account of this. It is already out-dated, and if media censorship in China was a lake then he only dipped a toe in it, something he acknowledges. Nevertheless his conclusion still rings true.

[2] This 2016 Intercept article breaks down an Oxford study providing empirical evidence that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity. https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-study-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/