Chinese censorship of online discourse

Abstract

<p>In this chapter we explore how practices of security governmentality are enacted in everyday<br />censorship of online discourse in China. We do this by showing how internet censorship can be<br />approached as a form of controlling the fl ow of ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘dangerous’ words and images.<br />Together with propaganda, censorship, even on the level of words, is part of how political discourse<br />is controlled in China. We illustrate this with two case studies that display what we call<br />overt and covert meta-level censorship on China’s largest microblog service Sina Weibo and her<br />largest search engine Baidu.com respectively.<br />Our analysis shows how meta-level search engine fi ltering is based on a two-layered system,<br />where short-lived political incidents tend to be fi ltered for brief periods of time, while words<br />that are conducive to building oppositional awareness tend to be censored more continuously.<br />Controlling discourse in this way affects identity formation and power positions ( Fairclough,<br />1992 ) in Chinese society. Furthermore, censorship is used to sanitize images in the Chinese<br />internet in order to create a neutral or pro-regime online environment for Chinese internet<br />users, in our case, where it concerns the issue of democratic criticism. We begin the chapter by<br />fi rst introducing our framework and the main tenets of research on Chinese internet control.<br />We then present our two case studies on internet control over social media and search engines<br />on Sina Weibo and Baidu.<br /></p>