News of the death of Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, who had warned of a strange new virus outbreak but was admonished by police and charged with spreading rumors, spread quickly in the early hours of Feb. 7 this year. Grief and anger spread across social media. For people at home and abroad, Li Wenliang’s death illustrates the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress negative information.
However, China’s censors have decided to intensify their efforts. Secret instructions to local propagandists and news organizations warned that Li Wenliang’s death posed an “unprecedented challenge” that could trigger a “butterfly effect” and that officials must work to suppress negative news and regain control of the discourse.
They ordered news sites not to send push notifications of Li’s death to readers. They asked social media platforms to gradually remove his name from their trending topics pages.
The New York Times and ProPublica reviewed thousands of classified government directives and other documents, including these orders, the New York Times reported Dec. 19. The documents reveal in detail the system that helped Chinese authorities shape online public opinion during the outbreak.
The New York Times report said China is manipulating online discourse to strengthen the party’s public opinion propaganda at a time when digital media are deepening social divisions in Western democracies. In an effort to rein in information that appeared on China’s Internet earlier this year, authorities have imposed strict rules on the content and tone of news reports, instructed online water troopers to keep spreading rhetoric on social media that adheres to the party line, and deployed an army of stability guards to silence unauthorized voices.
While Beijing makes no secret of its belief in tight control of the Internet, these documents show how much behind-the-scenes effort goes into keeping control firm. It takes a huge bureaucracy, an army of manpower, expertise built by private contractors, constant monitoring of digital news media and social media platforms – and, presumably, a lot of money. It’s much more than flicking a switch to block certain unpopular ideas, images or a few news items.
The Chinese government began restricting information about the outbreak in early January, when the new coronavirus had not even been identified, the documents show. A few weeks later, when the outbreak began to spread rapidly, authorities cracked down on anything that portrayed China’s response in an overly “negative” light.
For months, the United States and several other countries accused China of making early attempts to conceal the severity of the outbreak. One may never know if a freer flow of information in China could have prevented the outbreak from becoming a global health disaster. But the documents suggest that Chinese officials worked hard to manipulate the narrative not only to prevent panic and debunk damaging domestic disinformation, they also wanted to make the virus seem less serious – and to make the authorities seem more competent – because the world was watching them.
The New York Times is reporting that the documents include more than 3,200 instructions and 1,800 memos and other documents from the office of China’s cyber regulator, the Internet Information Office, in the eastern city of Hangzhou. The documents also include internal documents and computer code from China’s Yunrun Big Data Service Co. that developed software used by local governments to monitor Internet discussions and manage large volumes of online comments.
The documents were shared with The New York Times and ProPublica by a hacking group calling itself C.C.P. Unmasked. The Times and ProPublica independently verified the authenticity of many of the documents, some of which were obtained separately by China Digital Times, a website that tracks Internet control in China.
Researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of people in China work part-time, posting comments and disseminating content that reinforces the state’s ideology. Many of them are grassroots employees of government departments and party organizations. Universities recruit students and teachers for this task. Local governments also hold training sessions for them. And Chinese government departments have a variety of specialized software to shape what the public sees online.
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