This brings upfront the danger that has always been lurking in the shadow on account of cooling economy and mounting public anger at official corruption. The authorities have slapped tight controls on the Net and surfers but sanctions have shown no desired impact.
Against this backdrop a four-day annual conference of top Communist party officials become significant. “The reform of the cultural system” figures high on the agenda of the meet which opens today, Saturday, Oct 15. It is a term widely seen as including measures to ensure media and Internet firms are in synch with the official thinking and official goals.
In the run up to the meeting, propaganda chief Li Changchun, fifth in the Communist Party hierarchy, met the heads of China’s main search engine Baidu. He also reportedly put other leading Internet firms to tighten government grip on the web.
China has repeatedly vowed to clamp down on Internet ‘rumours’ — often used as code for criticism of the government. This step came in the wake of furious public response on social media sites after a fatal high-speed rail crash in July. These ‘rumours’ even made the state media follow the ‘herd’ mentality until instructions came from the top.
The government is not finding the going on the Net a smooth affair. Many Internet companies in China are in private hands, and therefore the web has become a huge challenge to attempts to block content deemed politically sensitive.
China’s weibos — microblogs similar to Twitter — have formed a large-scale social network on which information can be disseminated and action coordinated at an unprecedented speed. It is naturally a challenge to the practioners of CPC ideology and adherent to the party’s concept of social control.
China has so far faced no hurdles worth the name in blocking numerous overseas sites. Known as the robust Great Firewall, the censoring system in place is also able to censor information and news on these sites. This Firewall coupled with the tight leash on which the print and TV reporting is kept, have made Weibos an effective public platform for the socially conscious.
And to keep the ‘unrest’ conscious officials at bay, weibos are now forced to set up ‘rumour-curbing teams’. First to fall in line were Sina, an internet company that runs a popular weibo, and Youku, a Chinese site similar to YouTube. Beijing’s most popular newspapers, the Beijing News and Beijing Times also reportedly came under the direct management of the city’s propaganda bureau.
Censorship has never delivered desired results. In fact it has always proved to be counter-productive. Open society, good governance, and transparent news management are the key to checking unrest particularly in a developing country or a semi-developed country.
