From The New York TImes
China Keeps Lid on Information, as Hopes Dim in Yangtze Ship Disaster
By Edward Wong and Austin Ramzy
China sought to maintain a tight grip on information about a capsized cruise ship on Wednesday, even as hopes dimmed for the hundreds of people aboard who remained missing and as new questions emerged about the vessel and about the captain’s decision to sail into a storm....
In the current climate of tight news media restrictions pushed by President Xi Jinping, even traditionally aggressive outlets have been reined in, said Xiao Qiang, China Digital Times’s editor in chief and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now it’s much, much more restricted,” he said....
Alternative sources of information and discussion on Chinese social media have been extremely limited, in part because of continuing clampdowns on freewheeling discussions online, Mr. Xiao said. The phrases “Oriental Star” and “shipwreck” were the most censored search terms on the Sina Weibo microblog platform, according to the monitoring site freeweibo.com.
“It’s amazing not only how little information there is but how little discussion there is, other than general expressions of anxiety,” Mr. Xiao said. “There’s nothing people can do. There’s no independent information to see what’s going on.”...