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Nectar Gan and Steve George

 

The Communist Party thinks China's prolific censors are not censoring enough

 

Weibo, China's answer to Twitter, has long been a prime target for stringent online censorship thanks to its broad audience base and ability to help influence public opinion.

 

But in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, it is not censoring enough — and needs to pay a price, literally.

 

On Tuesday, Weibo was fined $470,000 for repeatedly disseminating "illegal information" in violation of the country's laws and regulations, including its cybersecurity law and a law on the protection of minors.

 

That's far from the first time Weibo has been slapped with such a hefty fine by the government. Over the first 11 months of this year, the social media giant was fined 44 times for transgressions that cost it a total of $2.2 million, according to the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a government agency under the control of the party.

 

Weibo said in a statement it "sincerely accepts criticism" from the regulator and has established a working group in response to the penalty.

 

The latest punishment on Weibo came just two weeks after Douban, a popular site for reviewing movies, books and music, was fined $236,000 on similar grounds — adding to the $1.4 million in fines it has accrued this year to November for apparent content violations.

 

Chinese internet companies have long been subject to government crackdowns, with their executives frequently summoned by the CAC for "criticism and rectification." But it is rare for government regulators to openly admonish platforms for doing a botch job on censorship, analysts say.

 

"The first step in censorship is you can't talk about the censorship. You're not allowed to disclose it unless told to [by the government]," said Eric Liu, an analyst at China Digital Times, a US-based news website tracking censorship in China.

 

In announcing the penalties against Weibo and Douban, Liu said the Communist Party is "bringing the matter to the surface" on purpose — signaling that such harsh punishment could become a regular occurrence.

 

In addition to government censors, Chinese internet firms also hire dedicated moderators to police their own platforms, removing content deemed illegal or harmful by the party — which ranges from pornography, violence and fraud to criticism of the government and other information the party considers "politically sensitive" or "morally degenerate," such as LGBTQ content.

 

Liu, the analyst, previously worked as a content censor at Weibo. He and his colleagues received more than 800 censorship orders during his stint at the company from 2011 to 2013. But nowadays, he says, the orders from internet regulators are issued more discreetly via more secured channels, making it much more difficult for employees to leak them.

 

"Now, it's the censorship of censorship. Censors are being watched too," he said.

 

Under President Xi Jinping, the party has tightened its control of the internet, viewing it as susceptible to Western infiltration. A little over a decade ago, Weibo hosted vibrant public debates on a variety of social issues, and liberal-leaning public intellectuals were able to cultivate large followings.

 

But that changed under Xi. Today, most liberal voices have been silenced. Topics such as feminism, the LGBTQ movement and environmental advocacy are increasingly viewed with suspicion as stooges of Western influence, with censors struggling to keep up with an ever expanding list of "sensitive words" or banned terms.

 

When Liu worked at Weibo, the company employed about 200 content moderators, he said. Liu expects the number to have multiplied, given that the platform now boasts over half a billion monthly active users.

 

"When the network traffic increases, the pressure on censorship is also mounting. Within the Great Firewall, everybody is facing stricter and stricter censorship — it's like inflation," he said, referring to the country's sophisticated internet censorship system.

 

"Censorship is expanding everywhere, which means companies need to hire more people." And that could become a big financial burden, especially for smaller companies, added Liu.

 

Sarah Cook, the director of research for China at US non-profit Freedom House, said the latest fines are part of an ongoing campaign by the Communist Party to "pressure tech firms to more strictly control the content on their platforms."

 

"It's an almost impossible task for the platforms, given the scale of users and constantly changing red lines, but these kinds of periodic fines and 'rectification' efforts keep them on their toes and incentivize them to carry out the Communist Party's censorship."

 

While the internet regulator did not specify what content triggered the penalties for Weibo and Douban, analysts believe they could relate to the #MeToo scandal surrounding Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai.

 

Peng, 35, publicly accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, 75, of sexual assault on Weibo on November 2. Her post was deleted in under 30 minutes and her Weibo account blocked from searches, but screenshots of her post still circulated widely across social media and in private chat groups before they were censored. And despite censors' best efforts to scrub all discussions and even the vaguest references to her allegations from the internet, allusions and veiled discussions still spring up from time to time — including on Weibo and Douban.

 

"It appears that Weibo is punished this time for the Peng Shuai scandal, which is the biggest censorship campaign of the year," Liu said. But Chinese authorities will never admit censorship has taken place on Peng in the first place, he added.

 

"We all know some posts have been censored, but nobody dares to ask why anymore. Even discussing which posts have been censored has already become an extremely scary and provoking act."

Emperor's relics unearthed

A large-scale mausoleum unearthed in Xi'an, Shaanxi province has been identified as belonging to Emperor Wendi of the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 25), China's National Cultural Heritage Administration said Tuesday. The site is surrounded by more than 100 ancient tombs and burial pits. Excavation started in 2017, and relics uncovered include dressed pottery figurines, crossbows and official seals.

Fake Covid tests busted

In early December, a traveler in Harbin, the capital of China's northern Heilongjiang province, was about to board a plane when he was stopped by authorities. They had bad news: his negative Covid-19 test, a requirement to travel out of the province, was fake.

 

The traveler had spent more than $45 on a fast-tracked nucleic acid test for himself and his partner before their trip, according to state media Beijing Youth Daily. The alleged test had been conducted not at a healthcare center or official testing site – but inside a private vehicle.

 

Despite the unusual testing procedure, the couple received their report with negative results within a few hours, and set off for their trip – only to have authorities recognize it as a false report at the airport.

 

Harbin police say they have detained a man surnamed Li and his wife in connection with the fraudulent operation. Together, the couple illegally collected samples from more than 100 people — mostly students and business people with an urgent need to travel — and reaped a profit of nearly $1,600, according to China's state broadcaster CCTV.

 

Li and his wife are alleged to have charged extra for fast-tracked reports. The fraudulent documents were nearly identical to legitimate ones, except for minor differences in font color and the absence of an official QR code, according to police.

 

Li was allegedly tasked with fabricating the reports, while his wife would send the samples to a real laboratory for testing to make sure they didn't come in contact with anybody who was actually infected, state media reported.

 

A local police detective said travelers who left the city with the fake reports had all tested negative, according to police investigations.

 

— By Cheryl Ho

China's economy is still running into some trouble spots and the threat of new Covid-19 outbreaks will likely keep causing concern into the new year. 

Government data released Wednesday spelled bad news for a couple of key sectors, including retail and real estate. Residential housing prices in dozens of major cities in November fell for a third consecutive month, a sign that China's property crisis is continuing to deepen. Retail sales, meanwhile, rose just 3.9% last month from a year ago, slowing down from October's rate of 4.9%. 

Not every leg of the economy is stalling. Industrial output in November ticked up 3.8% from a year ago, a slight increase from October. 

But China's massive manufacturing sector isn't completely free of worry. Wednesday's data from the National Bureau of Statistics dropped as the country battles a coronavirus outbreak in Zhejiang province, one of its biggest manufacturing and export hubs. Many factories in the province have suspended operations as local authorities have tightened curb on movement to stop an outbreak of more than 200 cases from getting worse. 

November's data shows that "the economy has stabilised a bit," thanks to an easing power crisis and some tweaks to policies related to the real estate sector, according to Larry Hu, chief China economist for Macquarie Capital. "That said, the broad down-trend is set to continue into the new year."

He added in a research note that while an official GDP target of more than 6% in 2021 was "low hanging fruit, defending 5% for next year is a hard task."

After emerging from 2020 as the only major economy to record growth, China this year has been dealing with a lot of threats to continued expansion. An energy shortage dogged authorities for much of this year as the country struggled to balance its need for electricity with efforts to tackle the climate crisis. 

Those problems eased as the country ordered coal mines to ramp up production. But Beijing is still dealing with several other issues. 

The real estate market has long been in trouble, especially as massively indebted developer Evergrande has struggled to make its financial obligations. The company defaulted on its debt last week, leading Beijing to intervene in an attempt to prevent a disorderly collapse that would wreak havoc on the economy and trigger wider risks for homeowners and the financial system. 

There also remain questions about the effectiveness of China's "zero-Covid" approach, which involves aggressively locking down neighborhoods, cities and entire regions in response to just one or two cases. Prior shutdowns in major economic hubs have snarled shipping ports and stunted global supply chains. 

The extent to which the outbreak in Zhejiang will hurt manufacturing is not yet clear. But the city of Ningbo, home to one of the world's largest container ports, has tightened entry, raising concerns about disruptions.

"The international environment has become more complex and severe, the impact of the domestic spread of the virus continues, and supply and demand are still facing many constraints," said Fu Linghui, a spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics, at a Wednesday press conference in Beijing.

Concerns about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus also loom large. This week, China reported two cases of the variant, one in the northern port city of Tianjin and another in southern Guangdong province.

Around Asia

• China has detected its second case of the Omicron coronavirus variant in a traveler more than two weeks after he arrived in the country from overseas, posing a fresh challenge to the government's zero-Covid strategy.
• Australia's largest state New South Wales has announced its highest number of new Covid-19 cases in three months, with local officials attributing the rise to an outbreak of the Omicron variant.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte withdrew his bid to become a senator Tuesday, the same day his preferred successor quit the presidential race, adding to uncertainty about the mercurial leader's political future and the scope of his influence.

• A court in Vietnam jailed a journalist and prominent dissident for nine years on Tuesday for anti-state activities, her lawyers and state media said.