https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...954bbc-1dd9-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html
The Internet was supposed to foster democracy. China has different ideas.
BEIJING — Wen Tao has been saying what he thinks on China’s booming social-media outlets for the best part of a decade.
His forthright views have won him tens of thousands of followers, but his criticism of the authorities has also come at a cost: He says his social-media accounts have been closed down about 20 times, and he has been bombarded with curses, personal insults and death threats from other social-media users.
China’s Communist Party and its military say they are waging an ideological war against hostile Western ideas on the Internet, and people like Wen are in the firing line.
Through censorship, intimidation and repression, and with the help of an army of “patriotic” netizens, the party appears to be winning.
It is part of China’s larger effort to tame the Internet and to disprove the notion that the flow of ideas across the World Wide Web would be an unstoppable force toward democracy. News and information that might threaten the Communist Party are kept out of the country under a system of censorship known as the Great Firewall, while foreign social-media networks such as Facebook and Twitter that allow private citizens to share ideas and join forces are also banned. Behind the wall, China’s own social-media networks are closely policed to ensure public opinion does not coalesce into a threat to one-party rule.
In February, the government finally banned Wen for good, among a group of Internet users who had supposedly abused their influence, spread rumors and disrupted social order...
Indeed, social media is increasingly being harnessed by autocratic regimes to bolster their rule, says University of Toronto political scientist Seva Gunitsky. It helps dictatorships gauge public opinion and discover otherwise hidden grievances, while also allowing them to disseminate propaganda and shape the contours of public debate.
“China has been at the forefront of this, and they are quickly getting very sophisticated about it,” he said. “Social media can allow autocrats to become stronger, more informed and more adaptable. As with radio and television before it, social media is not just a way to spread information but a potential tool of subtle control and manipulation — one that often works more effectively than brute-force suppression.”
In a refinement of traditional Communist Party propaganda, the core of the attempt to tame social media since 2008 has been to “channel” public opinion into narratives that suit the party and divert attention away from controversy, says David Bandurski at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project...
Censors work selectively, especially targeting posts that threaten to spur some form of collective action. Pro-government voices generally do not engage critics in discussion or argument — that would draw too much attention to controversial subjects —
but do often subject them to personal attack.
The war was effectively declared in earnest in July 2011, after a high-speed train crash in Wenzhou in eastern China, when news and outrage spread over Chinese social media and the party felt it had lost control of the narrative, experts say.
In October of that year, the party’s top leadership vowed to “seize the commanding heights” of the Internet and has steadily rolled out a series of measures to do just that — a campaign that has only intensified since Xi Jinping became president in 2013.
The Communist Party’s own Internet army is at the forefront of these efforts.
Some posters are popularly believed to be paid — the “wumao” (the 50-cent Party) who are supposedly given half a renminbi ($0.08) for every post praising the government or denigrating its critics.
But a much larger number may just be employees of the state, doing part-time work outside their main jobs to support the party’s agenda.
Various arms of the Chinese government, together with individual state employees, by their own admission operate more than 150,000 official Weibo accounts, but the real number of accounts run by state employees could be far higher.
A study released in May by Harvard University’s Gary King, Stanford University’s Jennifer Pan and the University of California at San Diego’s Margaret Roberts suggests that government-directed accounts generate nearly 450 million posts a year, with intense bursts of “cheerleading” or “distraction” around specific events or at sensitive times.
Others are volunteers, reportedly recruited by the Communist Youth League in the millions to spread “positive energy” and “civilize” the Internet. They are nicknamed the “Bring-your-own-grainers” because they supposedly work for free...
Experts say the participation of these various pro-party groups has transformed China’s social-media environment.
On the other side, prominent critics of the government might be blocked, insulted or accused by their fellow netizens of spreading rumors — a charge that now has legal bite.
Yang, the University of Pennsylvania professor, calls it a form of “psychological war” but also a harking back to the early days of Communist China, when the masses were mobilized to support major new government policy directives.
“It’s a Maoist-era strategy revived in new technological conditions,” he said...
Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.
