The latest China Media Bulletin of Freedom House featured reports on censorship, surveillance, and interrogation of Uyghurs.
This statement was originally published on freedomhouse.org as part of the China Media Bulletin 170 – May 2023.
CAC crackdowns: China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), announced the beginning of a two-month nationwide “clean-up” campaign on March 28 to tighten content controls and crack down on “serious online chaos,” “fake news,” and rumors. The campaign particularly focuses on “self-media,” a category that includes independent writers, bloggers, and social media celebrities. The new campaign followed a spate of removals, fines, and other actions already undertaken in the first quarter of 2023. Over 4,200 sites and 55 apps were reportedly shut down, and the regulator summoned the people in charge of over 2,200 websites to bring their content in line with government content standards. Among the platforms fined or which had management summoned were Microsoft’s Bing, Baidu, Sina Weibo, DouYu, and Douban. Since March, the CAC has banned videos and posts that portray the challenges faced by poor, elderly, or disabled people, as part of an effort to control material deemed to damage the image of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or to disrupt economic and social development. One piece of content that was removed from the Chinese internet is a video made by Hu Chenfeng, titled “Randomly Finding an Elderly Person Shopping, I Will Pay for It.” In the video, Hu interviews an elderly woman living on a meager monthly income of $15, then goes grocery shopping with her and insists on paying for the total amount of goods, $18. The clip was removed from two China-based video platforms but survives on YouTube; Hu’s online accounts were reportedly suspended.
People’s Daily recall: On March 30, millions of copies of the People’s Daily, the CCP’s mouthpiece, were recalled due to an omission of Xi Jinping’s name in one sentence. The full sentence should have read, “The central government with comrade Xi Jinping at the core assesses the situation,” but instead read “with comrade at the core” in the middle. Such errors in reporting on state officials’ names or positions are regarded as serious political incidents and may result in punishment. The latest case has reportedly provoked fear among media workers and officials at People’s Daily, and speculation as to whether Tuo Zhen, the paper’s president and a veteran of the party’s propaganda apparatus, might be removed. Netizen mocked the incident, joking that “Xi Jinping is gone” or that the paper “killed” Xi. Others reported that the edition with the error was being sold for hundreds of yuan per copy.
Integrated Shanghai surveillance system: On May 2, the surveillance-focused outlet IPVM reported that the Chinese authorities have intensified their campaign to monitor foreign journalists and Uyghurs through a specialized big-data alert system, according to documents they had discovered. The system is part of the Shanghai police’s digital transformation, and uses 26 modules to sift through police data and send notifications for various incidents. These include detecting foreign journalists booking travel to Xinjiang and identifying Uyghurs arriving in Shanghai, in addition to those aimed at tracking sex workers, illegal immigrants, and drug traffickers. The system connects to the police’s cloud platform, which is run on a customized Alibaba cloud, enabling access to 34 categories of information including biographic information on foreigners, visa details, customs, hotel check-ins, civil aviation, and railway booking data.
Interrogation of Uyghurs over religious content on mobile phones: On May 4, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that police in Xinjiang had used automated mass-surveillance systems to search 1.2 million phones nearly 11 million times in Urumqi from 2017 to 2018. The searches flagged Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim residents for interrogation based on a master list of 50,000 multimedia files labeled as “violent and terrorist.” However, a sample of 1,000 files examined by HRW found that 57 percent included materials with no apparent connection to violence compared to only 13 percent that did (28 percent could not be identified). Among the nonviolent content potentially triggering interrogation was a well-known documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown, as well as Islamic religious content, such as Quranic verses and wedding songs.
