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The Chinese Government's Grip on Online Media Just Got a Lot Tighter

The Chinese crackdown on online media shows no sign of abating.
President Xi meeting with CCTV. Image: Getty/Xinhua News Agency.

This year China ranked 176th out of 180 in the annual Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders—an NGO that promotes freedom of the press and information—meaning that the country now sits one place above Syria and three above North Korea. The NGO notes that the Communist Party of China exerts "total control" over media outlets and that independent journalists are routinely harassed and jailed in the country.

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China's President Xi Jinping is on the organisation's list of "predators of press freedom". The term matches the sinister tone of his smash-down on dissent, freedom of speech and any media deviation from the party line, that has become increasingly ruthless since he took power in 2012.

Now authorities are modernising the media crackdown into a bastion of 21st century authoritarianism, with a string of new measures for Chinese online media. With social media voices being far harder to police than than easily-whipped state media lapdogs, new rules have been brought in with regards to verifying social media sources.

The new focus on controlling internet media has been brought into sharp focus by the new appointment of President Xi ally Xu Lin, as the new head of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the government body responsible for internet policing, including censorship.

Xu moved fast to assert authority. Earlier this month, days after his appointment, the CAC announced that, "All websites should bear the key responsibility to further streamline the course of reporting and publishing of news, and set up a sound internal monitoring mechanism among all mobile news portals [plus] Weibo or WeChat." The latter two outlets are China's censored version of Twitter and a social media and messaging app that is vastly popular in the country respectively.

The department also said that, "It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts… no website is allowed to report public news without specifying the sources, or report news that quotes untrue origins."

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Image: Wikimedia Commons.

In isolation the statements don't seem particularly controversial. Who would object to encouraging reporters to not use "hearsay" and "untrue origins" as sources? But when looked at in context of authorities' other internet media crackdown measures, it's clear that the department is not simply encouraging internet media outlets to do better fact checking.

The Chinese government already employs an army of censors to scrub dissenting voices from the web, and there is a disturbing trend for people in the country to be arrested for posting pro-democracy pictures or messages on Weibo. China's Great Firewall blocks many foreign news websites and social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, despite Mark Zuckerberg's recent China charm offensive.

Last year the CAC introduced rules to force Chinese social media outlets to make users submit their real names, potentially giving authorities more power to track down and persecute online dissenters. That came two years after a crackdown on what authorities fuzzily called "online rumors" and the subsequent jailing of people who criticized the party on forums.

Perhaps the biggest indicator that controlling online reporting was the new priority for the government, however, came last November. In that month the CAC and State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television issued 594 online reporters press cards along with the congratulations/warning: "The press cards distributed today are the same as those held by traditional media. Card holders enjoy the same reporting rights, responsibilities and obligations."

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After an accreditations ceremony the CAC said that the internet was the "main battlefield for ideologies [and] a front for the wrestling of opinions." State media added that the CAC decreed that "online media reporters are expected to actively expound socialist core values and amplify the mainstream voice in the internet, making cyber space 'clear and bright.'"

The crackdown shows no sign of abating.

Last February the extent to which this expounding of "socialist core values" is now expected was underlined when President Xi toured state media headquarters in Beijing. Photos of him shaking hands with beaming journalists in news rooms were released as he instructed them to show loyalty to the party with "thought, politics and action".

State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) welcomed him with a placard saying: "The central television's family name is the party." President Xi said that reporters must "love the party, protect the party".

Often in China announcements about new media regulations seem to be more about sending a message than signalling meaningful implementation. However, with the announcement of the social media source rules state media said that news portals Sina.com, Ifeng.com, Caijing.com, Qq.com and 163.com had already been punished for fabricating news. The penalties they received were not revealed.

The crackdown shows no sign of abating. Last December, speaking at the World Internet Conference in the Chinese city of Wuzhen, President Xi warned the international community to "respect the right of individual countries to choose their own path to cyber development."

He was referring more to cyber security than online journalism, but the overriding aim of exerting deep control of both is the same: to protect the party. Roseann Rife, East Asia Research Director at Amnesty International, responded by telling CNN: "Under the guise of sovereignty and security, the Chinese authorities are trying to rewrite the rules of the internet so censorship and surveillance become the norm everywhere. This is an all-out assault on internet freedoms."

As Chinese online reporters go about "loving the party" with their reports, expect China to make a solid run at Syria for position number 177 in next year's Press Freedom Index.