DISSIDENT’S DEATH PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON ZEAL OF CHINESE CENSORS
It came as little surprise when, after the death of the dissident Liu Xiaobo, China’s vast army of censors kicked into overdrive as they scrubbed away the outpouring of grief on social media that followed.
The accounts of censorship have been mostly anecdotal. But systematic research by the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto showed a “significant shift” in censorship techniques in the days after Liu’s death on July 13, particularly on WeChat, the popular messaging app from Tencent.
On WeChat, which has 768 million daily active users, the number of keyword combinations that were blocked greatly increased, Citizen Lab reported on July 16. Additions to the blacklist included general references to his death, such as “Xiaobo+died” in Chinese and in English, and even just his name “Liu Xiaobo”, effectively censoring any messages that mentioned him.
Citizen Lab said it was also the first time that images were automatically filtered in private one-on-one chats on WeChat. Blocked images included photographs of Liu and of people commemorating him.
One of the distinguishing features of WeChat is that it does not notify users when their messages are blocked. The service also makes a distinction between accounts registered to phone numbers from mainland China and phone numbers from elsewhere.
In one experiment, researchers at Citizen Lab found that a photo of Liu Xiaobo posted to an international user’s WeChat social media feed was visible to other users abroad but was hidden from users with Chinese accounts.
The heightened — yet uneven — censorship elicited frustration and confusion among Liu’s supporters.
On the day after Liu’s death, one user posted on his WeChat feed: “‘Did you see what I just sent?’ ‘No, I can’t see it.’ For the last two days, this has been the constant question and answer among friends.”
The aggressive attempt at censorship is just the latest indication of the strong grip that the Chinese government maintains on local internet companies. In addition to automatically filtering certain keywords and images, internet companies such as Baidu, Sina and Tencent employ human censors who retroactively comb through posts and delete what they deem as sensitive content, often based on government directives.
Failure to block such content can result in fines for companies or worse, revocation of their operational licences. Censors are on especially high alert this year in light of the Communist Party’s 19th National Party Congress in the fall.
Over the years, the cat-andmouse game between Chinese censors and internet users has led to the rise of a robust internet culture in which censorship is normalised and satire and veiled references are par for the course.
So even as censors step up scrutiny, savvy Chinese internet users find ways to evade those efforts. In recent tributes to Liu, users referred to him as “Brother
Liu” or even “XXX”. They posted passages from his poems and abstract illustrations of Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.
However, tributes gave way to scathing A bouquet of flowers rests on an empty chair in front of a screen showing images of the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo during a ceremony in Taipei on July 14. critiques as friends and supporters of Liu reacted angrily to the news of his cremation and the scattering of his ashes at sea under strict government oversight.
One user took to his WeChat feed to express disgust with the use of Liu’s corpse in what some called a blatant propaganda exercise. “Swift cremation, swift sea burial,” he wrote. “Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.”
While the Chinese government routinely censors the discussion of sensitive issues, be it the death of a dissident, Tibet, Taiwan or human rights abuses, it’s not above going after softer targets as well.
Such as Winnie-the-Pooh. Internet users in China in recent days have reported problems posting references on social media sites to the kind-hearted bear made famous in the children’s books by AA Milne. The apparent reason? Some commenters are using images of Winniethe-Pooh to suggest that he shows a resemblance to President Xi Jinping.
The Communist Party bristles at even the slightest hint of criticism, and censors are especially sensitive to any mockery involving Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades.
The party has shown particular disdain for comparisons of Xi and Winnie-the-Pooh.
The government’s army of censors has been battling the meme since at least 2013, when Xi met then-President Barack Obama in Rancho Mirage, California. At the time, internet users posted pictures of Xi and Obama alongside an image showing Winnie-the-Pooh and his smiling companion, Tigger. Those images were quickly deleted.
And in 2014, censors took action when Winnie comparisons resurfaced after an awkward handshake between Xi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Internet users memorialised the encounter with an image of the yellow bear shaking hands with a gloomy-eyed and uncomfortable Eeyore.
The most recent blackout does not appear to be uniform. On Weibo, a Twitter-like site, it was still possible to write posts and upload images related to Winnie-the-Pooh. But posting comments on existing posts that included the term Winnie the Pooh, who is known in Chinese as xiao xiong wei ni (or “Winnie the Little Bear”), was more problematic, returning an error message.
After a fresh round of news reports about the censorship last Monday, including on the front page of the Financial Times, Chinese internet users took to social media sites to test the ban. Some seemed to be mocking the foreign news media, taking pride in being able to freely post pictures of the honey-loving bear.
“He’s so cute, who could he have offended?” wrote one Weibo user.
“Winnie-the-Pooh is also banned?” another asked. “Should everything related to Winnie-the-Pooh in Shanghai Disneyland be removed too?”
Research by King-wa Fu at the University of Hong Kong showed that an image of Winnie-the-Pooh was one of the most consistently censored items on Chinese social media sites in 2015. The image depicted Winnie in a toy truck, apparently meant to mock widely circulated images and video of Xi inspecting troops from a black limousine at a parade marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
© 2017 New York Times News Service