THE CHEAT SHEET. Censor and sensibility

Another Austen pastiche? No, it’s actually Chinese social media, which just had its most censored day this past week.

On their Twitter-like app? The rate at which censors removed posts from Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging service, has been increasing in the last few months, but it hit an all-time high of 150 posts deleted out of every 10,000 last Sunday.

Is that a large number? Weiboscope, a web analytics project based in Hong Kong university, said that Chinese web censorship on September 28 was more than double that on June 4 this year, which was the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen student protests. And those protests have been all but erased from official Chinese history.

So, were they deleting only tweets? No, search results from Baidu, the mainland’s biggest search engine, kept disappearing. As did thousands of photographs from Instagram as users kept receiving this message: ‘Can’t refresh feed.’ Twitter is already blocked there. Facebook and Google are occasionally turned off when their usage takes on political contours.

What are those censors so excited about? Sunday’s most deleted terms were ‘Hong Kong’ and ‘police’, and obviously any search result that has to do with the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Doesn’t Hong Kong already have more freedom than the rest of China? Hong Kong used to be a British colony but was handed over to China in 1997 on an agreement (the ‘one country, two systems’ deal) that the city would be afforded a lot more freedom in its administration than the rest of China. It was also promised democratic elections and universal suffrage in 2017.

And China did something to upset the balance? China is clearly reluctant to cede control of the city, given Hong Kong’s status as one of the world’s premier financial centres. Chinese companies float their IPOs in Hong Kong and foreign investments into China are routed this way. Hong Kong is also something of a financial reform laboratory for China. The government has been trying to make the yuan acceptable as a global currency through trade settlements in Hong Kong; yuan-denominated bonds are issued here.

What sparked the protests? Beijing’s interference, so to speak, has been gradual. In 2012, thousands of teachers, students, and parents in Hong Kong marched against the introduction of ‘national education’ lessons in school syllabi, intended to instil a Chinese identity in students. Textbooks were given a pro-Communist Party version of Chinese history. More recently, Beijing published a white paper claiming it has complete jurisdiction over Hong Kong and that it would screen candidates running in the 2017 election to be the city’s chief executive.

That’s not very democratic. Exactly. Protestors believe that all of the screened candidates would be pro-Beijing, further restricting Hong Kong’s freedoms.

And are they getting around the social media blackout? Protestors are turning to the FireChat app, which uses Bluetooth instead of the internet, to communicate. But Bluetooth only works over short distances, so the censors have considerably slowed down the rate at which messages can be passed on. And since media in the mainland is all pro-Beijing, people there are barely aware of the storm brewing to their south.

COMMENT NOW