China’s new Internet crackdown isn’t about porn
Zhang Jialong / Foreign Policy BEIJING—Chinese authorities have put would-be free speech advocates on notice: Step away from the computer. As an April 14 article in Communist Party-run news portal Seeking Truth avers, from mid-April until November, government offices nationwide will be striking out at online media in a dedicated campaign called “sweep out porn, strike at rumors.” An April 16 headline on state news service Xinhua declares the move is in response to “calls from people in all walks of life.” But at its core, this is about going after rumors—party parlance for destabilizing falsehoods—in the name of going after porn. In other words, it’s about ensuring that party organs, and not the Chinese grassroots, have the loudest voice on the country’s Internet.
This latest campaign has been months in the making. On Feb. 5, the Central Propaganda Department (CPD), the party organ tasked with censorship and information dissemination, ordered an investigation of “pornographic and vulgar information”—one whose main target was actually a variety of online columns, infographics and trending or recommended reading. Interpretation of the actual meaning of “pornographic and vulgar information,” of course, rests entirely with the CPD. Over 20 literary websites, including Sweet Potato Net, an inoffensive fantasy fiction site, have already been reportedly closed or investigated.
The public impact is becoming increasingly visible. On April 14, Sina Reader, a large online portal for book lovers, stated that it was temporarily shutting down for an internal investigation because of suspicions that some of the content on the channel posted by users endangered a “clean online environment.” This implies that further censorship campaigns of greater scale will likely emerge soon. The campaign’s very name is redolent of 2013’s attack on online rumors—both of which have been styled as “jing wang,” or efforts to cleanse the web—and Seeking Truth has explicitly stated this latest announcement marks a continuation of a larger movement.
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