China’s internet censorship

If President Xi Jinping’s team carries out annual job appraisals, China’s overseas propaganda team will surely be found to have performed catastrophically.  Whether it is Hong Kong or Xinjiang, Huawei or the trade war with the United States, the Chinese regime has had a string of notable public relations failures this year. While the regime’s propaganda efforts have worked quite well on the domestic audience, mainly because of the Great Firewall, the overseas propaganda arm has suffered major defeats.  Despite deploying numerous resources via official and unofficial channels, the regime has not only failed to achieve its intended purpose of interacting well with the rest of the world but als

A TikTok video showing a teenager bringing attention to China’s mass detentions of Muslim minorities while curling her eyelashes has gone viral on the Chinese-owned social platform.  “Hi guys. I’m going to teach you guys how to get long lashes,” the creator, who describes herself as a teenage Muslim girl in the US, said in the clip that resembles a beauty tip video.  “The first thing you need to do is to grab your lash curler, curl your lashes obviously, and you are going to put them down, and use your phone that you are using right now, to search about what’s happening in China, how they are getting concentration camps throwing innocent Muslims in there.” i always wondered how girls get the

The US government is planning a major new Mandarin-language initiative in an effort to bolster its global reputation at a time of Chinese ascendancy and eroding American soft power. Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) are joining forces on a new network called Global Mandarin, according to internal memos, job placement advertisements and interviews with people close to Washington’s information arms. Its annual budget would be between $5 million and $10 million, potentially rising in the second year, according to a source who requested anonymity given links to the networks. It would focus on softer content aimed at reaching younger Chinese in the US, China and beyond. The US roll

Having worked for a newspaper in mainland China, Fang Kecheng is no stranger to how Beijing maintains its grip on news and information. Still, the former journalist was perturbed by the online abuse he received after broaching Hong Kong politics.  Seizing on his posts on Facebook and Weibo, Fang’s detractors have accused him of betraying China after he shared stories about the unrest in Hong Kong.  Fang said he has been bombarded with thousands of abusive messages. He quoted one as saying: “Have you not burned to death yet?” The barrage of angry messages highlights the pressure mainland Chinese commentators face to toe the official line when speaking about sensitive topics including the Hong

When a police officer fired bullets at masked protesters in Hong Kong on Monday morning, the scene went viral online across the city and mainland China. What happened was not in dispute, but their perceptions were wildly different. While Hongkongers were outraged and questioned the officer’s use of live ammunition, viewers in the mainland put the blame squarely on the protesters, including the 21-year-old student who was shot. “The police officer was firing to save his life from the cockroach. He did nothing wrong,” said a top comment on the Weibo social media site popular among mainland Chinese users. The divergence highlights the wide divide in public opinion between mainland China and the

“You have been brainwashed since young.” This is the most frequently heard accusation against someone born and raised in mainland China. Of late, especially, it is targeted at those who oppose the protests in Hong Kong that had been triggered by a now-withdrawn extradition bill.  People in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United States and elsewhere who support the months-long anti-government protests are outraged that many mainland Chinese take issue with the protests. They believe China’s “Great Firewall” – its system of online censorship – effectively filters every piece of information deemed detrimental to the ruling regime, thus depriving mainland Chinese of any ability to form a “correct” judgme

The attack on Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet (“Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong”) put China’s vision for a new world order in stark relief for an American audience, showing the lengths to which China will go in its campaign to squelch free speech. Xi Jinping’s administration is doing to foreign businesses what it has long done to domestic dissenters: punishing those whose words stray outside ever-narrower red lines. Airlines have had to redraw maps. T-shirt slogans that seem to suggest Taipei and Hong Kong are on a par with Beijing have been withdrawn. A pro-democracy shoe designer saw the shoes he had designed for Nike taken off the shelf. A BNP lawyer in Hong Ko

Discussions of American satirical cartoon South Park have disappeared from the Chinese internet after the show mocked Beijing’s human rights practices in a recent episode.  In a recent episode titled Band in China, the cartoon poked fun at the country’s censorship regime, detention facilities and how American companies have bent to Beijing’s pressure.  South Park has no official releases in China, but pirated versions have for years been circulating among its small but loyal fans – many of them young, well-educated people familiar with American culture.  Although the Comedy Central show often stirs up a controversy in the US for going after politicians, celebrities and religious groups, it

The editor of the Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper made a rare departure from his loyalist views on Wednesday, complaining that the country’s strict internet control was “over the top” and made his job harder. “As the National Day nears, it’s extremely difficult to visit foreign websites,” Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Global Times, wrote on the Chinese social media site Weibo. Beijing is preparing for the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist-rule China on Oct 1 and has tightened physical security in the Chinese capital.  Every time there is a major event, “the authorities want to ensure that dissenting voices are silenced,” a co-founder of GreatFire.org, a Chinese censo

Like many Chinese who live in the US, I relish the freedom of being able to use Google, Twitter and YouTube whenever I like. This means I have no need to use virtual private networks (VPN) to “leap over” China’s Great Firewall, the way that my friends in China have to, in order to access uncensored social networks and news sites. It is no secret that, because of China’s tight control over information, many of these sites are inaccessible from inside the country, unless you use a VPN.  But what's more surprising is that, increasingly, Chinese people outside the country are using VPNs to get back into the Chinese internet. I’m not doing this to access some sort of censored internet nirvana, no