Why is china so restrictive

Online ideas also turned into offline activism. Human rights activists, lawyers and journalists came together to investigate, publicize and litigate cases involving land seizures, forced evictions, environmental degradation and employment discrimination.

In college, I volunteered at legal aid centers for migrant workers where I met human rights lawyers, children who lost most of their fingers while illegally operating printing machines, and American law students from universities like Harvard and Columbia.

Everyone involved was determined to find justice and build a nation rooted in the rule of law, and foreigners were welcome to help out. In , when I moved to Washington, D. I had grown up in a China that was getting better each day, both more prosperous and more open. I, the daughter of farmers from a small village, wanted to learn what I could in the West, and come back to help our country grow into not just an economic superpower, but a land of freedom and rights.

In February , an online appeal calling for people in China to emulate the Arab Spring uprisings resulted in small gatherings of curious onlookers in Beijing and several other cities.

In late , Xi Jinping became the paramount leader of China, assuming the position of secretary general of the Communist Party. With the document setting the tone, what followed was a period of unrelenting crackdowns on the internet, media, civil society and education that largely blocked any meaningful channels through which young people could gain perspectives that are different from official narratives. Gradually, the experience of being online in China changed. The list of banned words and images grew.

Articles and posts that managed to be published got removed quickly. The government got savvier, and more aggressive, about using its own technology: AI-powered censors could scan images to determine whether they contained certain sensitive words or phrases. An increasing number of foreign websites were blocked by the Great Firewall.

Twitter has long been inaccessible, and so have the Times and the Journal. It is still possible to use VPNs and other circumvention tools to scale the Great Firewall, but it is getting increasingly dangerous to do so.

Some people went to jail for selling VPNs, and others were fined for merely using them. The government also tightened its ideological grip over universities and schools.

Some professors, including foreigners, were punished for making comments critical of the government. Perhaps the most devastating form of censorship is physical. Authorities have silenced numerous leading writers, rights lawyers and activists who served as the conscience of the nation: aforementioned Ai Weiwei is in exile, Xu Zhiyong has been forcibly disappeared , and Liu Xiaobo died three years ago in state custody. In July , authorities rounded up and interrogated without counsel about rights lawyers, legal assistants, and activists across the country, many of whom were subjected to torture and other ill treatment and a few are still in prison today.

Police jailed some Twitter users while forcing others to close their accounts. When so few have alternative sources of information, government propaganda becomes more believable: The coronavirus was brought to China by the U. Inside China, people are living in an information bubble that the government is getting better at controlling.

In some cases, this is almost leading to a generational split. In my cohort—those who experienced a relatively free internet as young people—many strongly resent the Great Firewall. Among people who started college after Xi took power, however, there is a strong impulse to defend it. Having grown up never hearing of or using international platforms such as Twitter and Google, they believe the Firewall has protected them from false information and the country from social instability.

But while the U. The way the state media depicts the U. Some examples of this new nationalism are absurd but largely harmless, like a storm of criticism that erupted around a famed infectious disease doctor for suggesting that Chinese children should have protein-rich eggs and milk for breakfast, rather than rice porridge.

But some nationalistic fervor has the potential for real-world harm. Recently, there have been renewed calls for the Chinese government to seize the opportunity created by the pandemic to take Taiwan by force.

Videos and photos have also emerged of people, including children , warning or wishing for the deaths of Americans. Of course, not all youth are strident nationalists. While rising nationalism in China is a reality and policymakers should take it seriously, they should also keep in mind that many in and from China live in silent fear, struggling with guilt for not speaking up.

On 23 July , a high-speed train derailed in the coastal city of Wenzhou, leaving at least 40 people dead and injured. But local residents took photos of the wreckage being buried instead of being examined for evidence.

As many as 54 officials faced disciplinary action as a result of the crash. The internet also provided a new sense of community for Chinese citizens, who mostly lacked robust civil-society organisations.

In July , devastating floods in Beijing led to the evacuation of more than 65, residents and the deaths of at least 77 people. Local officials failed to respond effectively: police officers allegedly kept ticketing stranded cars instead of assisting residents, and the early warning system did not work.

Yet the real story was the extraordinary outpouring of assistance from Beijing web users, who volunteered their homes and food to stranded citizens. In a span of just 24 hours, an estimated 8. The story of the floods became not only one of government incompetence, but also one of how an online community could transform into a real one.

Yet as the internet increasingly became a vehicle for dissent, concern within the leadership mounted that it might be used to mobilise a large-scale political protest capable of threatening the central government. The government responded with a stream of technological fixes and political directives; yet the boundaries of internet life continued to expand. The advent of Xi Jinping in brought a new determination to move beyond deleting posts and passing regulations.

Beijing wanted to ensure that internet content more actively served the interests of the Communist party. Within the virtual world, as in the real world, the party moved to silence dissenting voices, to mobilise party members in support of its values, and to prevent foreign ideas from seeping into Chinese political and social life.

Early in his tenure, Xi embraced the world of social media. One Weibo group, called Fan Group to Learn from Xi, appeared in late , much to the delight of Chinese propaganda officials. Under Xi, the government has also developed new technology that has enabled it to exert far greater control over the internet.

This was surprising to many outside observers, who had believed that VPNs were too useful to the Chinese economy — supporting multinationals, banks and retailers, among others — for the government to crack down on them. In spring , Beijing launched the Great Cannon.

Unlike the Great Firewall, which has the capacity to block traffic as it enters or exits China, the Great Cannon is able to adjust and replace content as it travels around the internet. One of its first targets was the US coding and software development site GitHub. The Chinese government used the Great Cannon to levy a distributed denial of service attack against the site, overwhelming it with traffic redirected from Baidu a search engine similar to Google. The reaction by Chinese internet companies was immediate.

The government also adopted tough restrictions on internet-based rumours. Some social media posts and photos of the flooding, particularly of drowning victims, were also censored. Discussions began to move away from politics to personal and less sensitive issues. The impact on Sina Weibo was dramatic. According to a study of 1.

It has also adopted sophisticated technology, such as the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield. Perhaps its most potent source of influence, however, is the cyber-army it has developed to implement its policies. They are employed across government propaganda departments, private corporations and news outlets. One Harvard study estimated that the Chinese government fabricates and posts approximately m comments on social media annually.

A considerable amount of censorship is conducted through the manual deletion of posts, and an estimated , people are employed by both the government and private companies to do just this. Private companies also play an important role in facilitating internet censorship in China. The process is made simpler by the fact that several major technology entrepreneurs also hold political office.

An internet that does not work efficiently or limits access to information impedes economic growth. Scientific innovation, particularly prized by the Chinese leadership, may also be at risk.