Beijing sets scene for crackdown on Chinese Twitter
Our main briefing in the latest Courcy’s Intelligence Brief analyses China’s recent erratic behaviour in the diplomatic field and attributes it in part to growing high-level jitters about internal stability which, in turn, has been fuelled by the way the use of social media has been instrumental in the Arab unrest and in the past week’s rioting in Britain.
Beijing’s concerns about the use of social media can only have increased further by the fact that dissident artist Ai Weiwei has again begun “tweeting” anti-government remarks three months after his release from detention. In the past few days he has tweeted that colleagues detained because of their association with him “innocently suffered great mental abuse and physical torture” when they were “illegally imprisoned”.
Against this background, the excellent BBC Monitoring Service has just produced a timely analysis of Chinese officially inspired commentary on the rise of microblogs, specifically Weibo, the local version of Twitter. Our own sources are suggesting that this presages an imminent crackdown.
Here are some examples of recent officially inspired criticisms of Weibo:
Xinhua (official news agency), 3 August: “The microblogging sector is still in its infancy in China. There are no laws or regulations concerning how they are used, and the authenticity of information posted on microblogs can be hard for most users to verify.”
The Global Times (tabloid run by Communist Party’s People’s Daily):
- On a special webpage created in June: “Though Weibo magnifies people’s true voices, its problems are causing more and more worries. In this space of almost absolute freedom, it takes as little as a few key strokes to launch verbal attacks and abuse and vent emotions. Sometimes rumours spread like viruses, causing additional problems to social stability.”
- 5 August editorial: “Weibo is increasingly dominating the way information is perceived in China, while traditional media sources have gradually surrendered the power of guiding the public discourse agenda...It is worrying that many traditional media personnel have started to worship Weibo and lost the ability to judge it objectively...The anonymous nature of Weibo makes it a perfect harbour for extremism.”
CCTV (state broadcaster):
- 3 August: Broadcast of a critical programme entitled: “An investigation into Weibo falsification: Where is Weibo’s ethical bottom line?” The programme was about cases of alleged fraud on Weibo.
People’s Daily (official organ of the Chinese Communist Party): In a commentary in the 10 August edition, the People’s Daily took a more moderate approach to Weibo, but the warning that users should not overstep the mark was nevertheless implicit. The paper wrote: “As long as Weibo users can always stick to a rational, objective, and moderate stance, and as long as Weibo administrators can always stick to the principle of ‘good treatment, good use, and good management’, Weibo will definitely be able to play a more positive role in promoting social progress.”
All this suggests that Weibo has been put on notice that if it cannot control the service to the satisfaction of the authorities a complete shutdown would follow. One well-informed Chinese blogger says that eventually the authorities may have to choose between “Weibo and regime survival”.
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