on chinese media: control & representation chinese media: control & representation zhongdang...

On Chinese Media: Control & Representation

Zhongdang PanDepartment of Communication Arts

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Outline

10/6/17 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 2

q Descriptive Characterizations

q An illustration: The CCTV Spring Festival Gala

q Professionalism: Fragmented, under attack

A Sketch of the Control System


§ Who own the media?§ How does control get implemented? And§ What’s the nature of power?

A Sketch of the Control System


Pan, Z. & Chan, J. (2000). Building a market-based Party organ: Television and national integration in China. In D. French & M. Richards (Eds.), Television in contemporary Asia (pp. 233-263). New Delhi: Sage.

§ Who own the media?§ How does control get implemented? And§ What’s the nature of power?

Descriptive Labels

§ “Party-market corporatism” Ø Party-state: patron; media: clients

§ “Market-based Party organ”Ø Party-state: owner, board of directors, censor,

final arbiter; media: units of the stateØ “Free” space: Hiccups in the control; tensions

in claims and deedsØ Some elements of “corporatism”


The Cleansing of the Online Space


accounts can also be closed, possibly for censorship pur-poses. Users cannot delete their own account, only thesystem can delete accounts. We conducted a variety ofshort empirical tests to see if we could distinguish thedifferent cases. We concluded that we can detect twokinds of deletions.

If a user deletes his or her own post, a query for thatpost’s unique identifier will return a “post does not ex-ist” error. We have observed this same error code re-turned from censorship events and we refer to these, inthe remainder of the paper as general deletion. However,there is another error code, “permission denied,” whichseems to indicate that the relevant database record stillexists but has been flagged by some censorship event.We refer to these as permission-denied deletions or sys-tem deletions. In either case, the post is no longer visibleto Weibo users.

The ratio of system deletions to general deletions inour user timeline data set is roughly 1:2. In this paper, wegenerally focus on posts that have been system deleted,because there appears to be no way for a user to inducethis state. It can only be the result of a censorship event(i.e., there are no censorship false positives in our systemdeletion dataset). Because we followed a core set of userswho post on sensitive subjects, we did not find it neces-sary to account for spam in our user timeline dataset.

Our crawler, which repeatedly fetches each sensitiveuser’s personal timeline, is searching for posts that ap-pear and then are subsequently deleted. If a post is inour database but is not returned from Weibo, then weissue a secondary query for that post’s unique ID to de-termine what error message is returned. Ultimately, withthe speed of our crawler, we can detect a censorship eventwithin 1–2 minutes of its occurrence.

For each returned post from Weibo, there is a fieldwhich records the creation time of the post. The life-time of a post is the time difference between the time oursystem detected the post being deleted and the creationtime. Therefore a post’s lifetime recorded by our systemis never shorter than its real lifetime, and never longerthan its real lifetime by more than two minutes.

4 Timing of censorship

For easier explanation we first give some definitions. Apost can be a repost of another post, and can have embed-ded images. Also other users can repost reposts. If postA is a repost of post B, we call post A a child post andpost B a parent post. If post A is not a repost of anotherpost, we call post A a regular post.

Using our user tracking method, from 20 July 2012 to8 September 2012, we have collected 2.38 million usertimeline posts, with a 12.8% total deletion rate (4.5% forsystem deletions and 8.3% for general deletions). Note

that this deletion rate is specific to our users and not rep-resentative of Weibo as a whole. With a brief analysis,we found that 82% of the total deletions are child posts,and 75% of the total deletions have pictures either inthemselves or in their parent post.

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Figure 1: Lifetime histograms. (a) and (b) are the life-time histograms of all system deletions. (c) and (d) arethe lifetime histograms of regular text-only posts. (a)and (c) show the histogram of the whole lifetime, (b)and (d) only show the first two hours of the lifetimehistogram.

To demonstrate how long a post survives before it getsdeleted, we analyze the system deletion data set (see Sec-tion 3.3). Figure 1 gives us a big picture of how fast theWeibo system works for censorship purposes. The x axesare the length of the lifetime divided into 5-minute bins,and the y axes are the count of the deleted posts hav-ing the lifetime in the corresponding bin. We note thatthese figures have the distinctive shape of a power law orlong tailed distribution, implying that there is no partic-ular time bound on Weibo’s censorship activity, despitethe bulk of it happening quickly, and that metrics likemean and median are not as meaningful as they are in anormal distribution.

We can see that the post bins with small lifetimes arelarge. We zoom into the first 2 hours of data, which isplotted in Figure 1 (c) and (d). This tells us that systemdeletions start within 5 minutes, the same as text-onlyregular posts. For both of them, the modal deletion ageappears to be between 5–10 minutes.

In our data set, 5% of the deletions happened in thefirst 8 minutes, and within 30 minutes, almost 30% of

Zhu, T. et al. (2013). The velocity of censorship: High-fidelity deletion of microblog post deletions. Presentation at the 22nd USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, D. C., August.

What Got Censored


American Political Science Review Vol. 107, No. 2

Figure 3. “Censorship Magnitude,” The Percent of Posts Censored Inside a Volume Burst MinusOutside Volume Bursts.

-0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8

01

23

45

Percent Censored at Event - Percent Censored not at Event

Den

sity

(a) Distribution of Censorship Magnitude

Censorship Magnitude

Den

sity

02

46

810

12

-0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8

Collective ActionCriticism of CensorsPornography

PolicyNews

(b) Censorship Magnitude by Event Type

We discuss the state critique hypothesis in the nextsubsection. Here, we offer three separate, and increas-ingly detailed, views of our present results.

First, consider panel (b) of Figure 3, which takesthe same distribution of censorship magnitude as inpanel (a) and displays it by event type. The result isdramatic: events related to collective action, criticismof the censors, and pornography (in red, orange, andyellow) fall largely to the right, indicating high levels ofcensorship magnitude, while events related to policiesand news fall to the left (in blue and purple). On aver-age, censorship magnitude is 27% for collective action,but −1% and −4% for policy and news.6

Second, we list the specific events with the highestand lowest levels of censorship magnitude. These ap-pear, using the same color scheme, in Figure 4. Theevents with the highest collective action potential in-clude protests in Inner Mongolia precipitated by thedeath of an ethnic Mongol herder by a coal truckdriver, riots in Zengcheng by migrant workers overan altercation between a pregnant woman and secu-rity personnel, the arrest of artist/political dissident AiWeiwei, and the bombings over land claims in Fuzhou.Notably, one of the highest “collective action potential”events was not political at all: following the Japaneseearthquake and subsequent meltdown of the nuclearplant in Fukushima, a rumor spread through Zhejiangprovince that the iodine in salt would protect peoplefrom radiation exposure, and a mad rush to buy salt en-sued. The rumor was biologically false, and had nothingto do with the state one way or the other, but it washighly censored; the reason appears to be because ofthe localized control of collective expression by actorsother than the government. Indeed, we find that salt

6 The baseline (the percent censorship outside of volume bursts)is typically very small, 3-5% and varies relatively little across topicareas.

rumors on local Web sites are much more likely to becensored than salt rumors on national Web sites.7

Consistent with our theory of collective action po-tential, some of the most highly censored events arenot criticisms or even discussions of national policies,but rather highly localized collective expressions thatrepresent or threaten group formation. One such ex-ample is posts on a local Wenzhou Web site expressingsupport for Chen Fei, a environmental activist whosupported an environmental lottery to help local en-vironmental protection. Even though Chen Fei is sup-ported by the central government, all posts support-ing him on the local Web site are censored, likely be-cause of his record of organizing collective action. Inthe mid-2000s, Chen founded an environmental NGO(dddddddd) with more than 400 registeredmembers who created China’s first “no-plastic-bag vil-lage,” which eventually led to legislation on use ofplastic bags. Another example is a heavily censoredgroup of posts expressing collective anger about leadpoisoning in Jiangsu Province’s Suyang County frombattery factories. These posts talk about children sick-ened by pollution from lead acid battery factories inZhejiang province belonging to the Tianneng Group(dddd), and report that hospitals refused to re-lease results of lead tests to patients. In January 2011,villagers from Suyang gathered at the factory to de-mand answers. Such collective organization is not tol-erated by the censors, regardless of whether it supportsthe government or criticizes it.

In all events categorized as having collective actionpotential, censorship within the event is more frequentthan censorship outside the event. In addition, theseevents are, on average, considerably more censoredthan other types of events. These facts are consistent

7 As in the two relevant events in Figure 4, pornography often ap-pears in social media in association with the discussion of some otherpopular news or discussion, to attract viewers.

333

King, G., Pan, J., & Roberts, M. E. (2013). How censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expressions. American Political Science Review, 107(2), 336-343.

§ Automation§ Labor of people

Beyond “censoring”§ Paid cyber posters§ Official productions

Training of The “Big Vs”


An Illustration: CCTV Spring Festival Gala


§ 1983-2017, “three world records”§ Addressing all “Chinese sons and daughters around the

world,” global simulcast in four languages (2004 onward)§ A “national cultural feast” on a global stage§ “A designated state-level project” (2014)

An Illustration: CCTV Spring Festival Gala


This is from the 2014 Spring Festival Gala. China by now has become an economic power in the world, second only to the US. This is manifested in the skyline of meta cities, the highly modern infrastructure, the abundance of consumer goods, and the newly found, unlimited confidence that China could face down any world power, she needs to have a say in setting the rules of the global system.

Journalists’ Self-Views (2002) Prescriptive

Markers Test

Results Levels of professionalization compared with …

Occupants of established professions

Same < 2

Occupants of non -professions Higher > 2 Social status compared with …

Occupants of established professions

Same < 0

Occupants of non -professions Higher > 0

§ Levels of professionalization: 3=higher, 2=same, 1=lower§ Social status: 1=low, 10=high

Achievement Recognitions (2002)

Prescriptive Markers

Ranking of recognitions of professional achievements

Wining national professional awards First Peer recognition Second Audience responses Third Leaders’ praises Fourth

Journalists’ Self-Views (Now)

q Exodus

q Nostalgia over “the Golden Age”

q Journalistic Professionalism: § “It’s total B.S.”§ “Utopia of the West”§ “A professional ideology that serves the big capital”§ “Not a business model”

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