March 17, 2021
The internet age has brought a sense of community forChinese citizens but also greater surveillance and more control for the party.
Brian Wang
In 2000, then US president Bill Clinton famously said in a speech that he was confident the rise of the internet would push China towards democracy.
“There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet,” he said. “Good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
There were 22.5 million internet users in China in early 2001. By last year, that figure had ballooned to 989 million – more than three times the entire population of the United States and exceeding the 639 million internet users in India, according to the state-run China Internet Network Information Centre.
The clash of Chinaâs social media titans
Guan Cong, Qian Tong and Han Wei
Mar 16, 2021 â 4.23pm
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Beijing | Chinaâs internet giant Tencent and rising challenger ByteDance, creator of TikTok, are fighting an all-out war with escalating turf battles and legal tussles even as the countryâs regulators toughen scrutiny of big techâs market power.
The pair are clashing across multiple arenas as they fight for traffic. Tencent, the gaming and social media behemoth, has amassed more than 1 billion users on its popular messaging app WeChat, which connects with a wide range of services offered by Tencent and partners. But ByteDance is catching up. Its short-video platform â known as Douyin in China â has more than 600 million daily active users.
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A photo of President Xi Jinping is displayed on a smartphone, 15 October 2019, Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has compiled data showing how internet censorship has intensified in China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
This statement was originally published on rsf.org on 12 March 2021.
To mark World Day Against Cyber Censorship on March 12, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) unveils figures showing that China is reaching unprecedented levels of cybercensorship.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), an entity personally supervised by President Xi Jinping, has in recent years deployed a wide range of measures directly targeting China’s 989 million internet users. With an army of censors and the use of new technology, the regime controls the circulation of information by shutting down websites, blocking access to IP addresses, filtering web pages, and blocking keywords on social media. Such technologies
China Imposes New Rules to Restrict Independent Online Content Creators
Rebecca Davis, provided by
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China has this week imposed its tightest restrictions to date on the publication of original content online via short video and “self-media” accounts, in the latest escalation of its ongoing crackdown on public discourse that strays from the party line.
The country’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has issued new regulations requiring bloggers, influencers and content creators on public social media accounts, known as “self-media,” to possess a government-issued credential in order to publish anything on a host of topics, which came into effect Monday. Other social media categories such as trending charts, hot search lists, push notifications and short video platforms will also be impacted. The CAC did not, however, provide detail on what kind of punishment will be doled out for violators.