The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a statement on Thursday that said it would conduct a massive campaign over the next two months to erase all content deemed “illegal and harmful” by Chinese Communist Party censors.
China’s state-run Global Times said the hyper-censorship effort would focus on “those hyping extreme incidents and disasters and spreading rumors and misinformation about public policies and social issues.”
This suggests anyone who thinks the Chinese economy is less than stellar under the leadership of dictator Xi Jinping should get ready to kiss their social media posts goodbye. The Communist Party has already deleted economists who questioned Xi’s policies, so deleting a few million social media posts should not be difficult.
Chinese officials frequently complain about memes that arise among the disgruntled population to complain about the scandal-plagued housing market, high youth unemployment, and a lackluster recovery from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Their current obsession is stamping out memes that accuse the Chinese Communist Party of viewing its subjects as vegetables to be harvested for their money and labor.
Young Chinese have complained online that they live in the “garbage time of history,” a sports term referring to the boring final minutes of a basketball game in which one team has no chance of winning. Young people facing high unemployment – which soared past 21 percent for young people before the regime in Beijing stopped reporting the numbers – feel like they are stuck on the losing team.
Chinese millennials protested a system stacked against them by “lying flat,” a meme that turned an old insult for laziness into an act of rebellion. They chose to become “full-time children,” living at home and eking out a meager allowance from their parents for doing odd jobs, instead of entering the corporate job market.
CAC signaled it would be cracking down on these acts of rebellion by deleting “negative content” related to “housing, education, healthcare and food safety.”
The censorship brigade also plans to crack down on social media users who “hurl malicious insults, slander, and stigmatize regions, professions, and groups, promoting negative emotions including pessimism and fear to incite group antagonism.”
The censors will also “target the sensationalizing of occasional extreme incidents, heatedly discussed events, disasters and accidents, events forcibly linked to history or labeled with specific regions, remarks promoting biased or discriminatory views to stir regional tensions,” plus “online rumors and misinformation related to public policies and social welfare, fabricated disasters, accidents, and incidents designed to spark public panic.”
That should cover censorship against Chinese subjects who object to the regime’s abuse of Tibetans and Uyghurs, and those who have lingering questions about the Wuhan coronavirus.
This would all be a tall order for even China’s million-strong army of censors in just two months, but CAC was confident it would have enough time left over to police “explicit and vulgar content such as posts, images, short videos and livestreaming with clear sexual innuendoes or provocative language,” not to mention “explicit novels, animation and provocative pictures with real models to promote adult products,” and online prostitution, online gambling, scam artists, and even “paid review services” which manufacture phony product reviews.
Last year at around this time, the CAC waged war against puns. The goal was supposedly to clean up “irregular and uncivilized” language that was “leaving people more and more confused,” as well as eroding the “ideological values of minors.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s actual beef with puns and homophones was that dissidents had grown very clever at using wordplay to evade ideological censorship and discuss forbidden topics, such as the deficiencies of Xi Jinping’s rulership.
The only people confused by the pun rebellion were foreign observers who did not realize certain phrases that sound very different in English are hilarious soundalikes in Mandarin Chinese. Native Chinese speakers understood that dissidents were referring to Communist officials as “paratroopers,” because the Mandarin words for “paratrooper” and “idiot” sound alike.
Last week, CAC introduced draft regulations that would push the “Great Firewall” of Communist censorship into outer space, by forcing global satellite Internet providers like Starlink to filter all content through China’s gigantic censorship system – on pain of losing their ground stations in China, or facing other economic sanctions, if they refuse to comply.
