Mar 9, 2016

Xiao Qiang Uncovers China's Censorship Rules

From The New York Times

What Chinese Media Mustn’t Cover at the ‘2 Sessions’

By Didi Kirsten Tatlow

Tastes differ. Some people may enjoy salacious stories about philandering abbots, or hair-raising ones about violence between doctors and patients.

Others may prefer reports on the wealth of parliamentary delegates, military budgets or compliance with international human rights conventions. And there are always a few who are into burial guidelines.

China’s propaganda authorities do not appear to want any of these tastes satisfied during the current parliamentary meetings in Beijing. That is according to a list of forbidden news topics they reportedly issued that leaked to a WeChat account, from where it was posted to Weibo, to be taken down on Sunday and discovered in a sweep of censored Weibo posts by China Digital Times, a website based in California....

Xiao Qiang, a founder and editor of China Digital Times at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Bandurski, a media scholar based in Hong Kong, said that they believed the list was genuine. It gives a clear picture of the authorities’ anxieties, Mr. Xiao said in an interview.

“This tells us what’s really important, doesn’t it?” he said.

Mr. Xiao said he regularly discovers such notices, which he said propaganda officials circulate to news editors but not to reporters, by using a special algorithm. The algorithm is not publicly available, but Freeweibo and Weiboscope, two services that trawl China’s Great Firewall of Internet censorship, perform similar searches....

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Xiao Qiang is the founder of the China Digital Times and an adjunct professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Last updated:

October 4, 2016