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[h=1]How China Tamed The Country's Top Bloggers, And Took Back The Net[/h] [h=3]from the Weibo-vs-WeChat dept[/h] Techdirt has been reporting for a while on China's continuing clampdown on the internet, the latest step being the new national security law. You might think these stringent measures, combined with numerous previous moves to strengthen censorship, would be enough. But a fascinating report in The Australian Financial Review reveals that over the last few years the Chinese authorities have also used other techniques in order to ensure that their control of the online world is as complete as possible.
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Central to that re-education were some helpful hints about what topics they might like to write about in the future:
During the seminar, the authorities even put up a slide, showing what they believed to be a successful re-education of one blogger. The person in question, who had once written about politics and the rule of law, had now turned his keyboard to more appropriate subjects, according to the moderator, such as hotel reviews, fashion and first-world type lifestyle problems.
As the rest of The Australian Financial Review's report makes plain, most of the country's top bloggers have gotten the message. Social media is now a "dreary mix of food reviews and gossip," and China's grip on the online world looks firmer than ever.
The government's recent handling of their stock market crisis is an example of how the regime handles "bad news". From The Economist link:
If economic stability is not in peril, the best explanation for the interventions is politics. When the stockmarket was soaring, the press cheered the bull run as an endorsement of the economic reforms of the Xi-Li team. Now that it is falling, regulators want to shore up the leadership’s reputation.
It is not just the motive that is dodgy; the nature of the intervention is also unwise. Cutting interest rates as support for the economy when inflation is so low is fair enough. But regulators capped short-selling; pension funds pledged to buy more stocks; the government suspended initial public offerings; and brokers created a fund to buy shares, backed by central-bank cash (see article).
Remember that the government tried to cover-up the emergence of the H7N9 avian flu outbreak. If leaks had not occurred on social media, we still might never know that a new strain of flu was killing people. link.
