Delegated Censorship: The Dynamic, Layered, and Multistage Information Control Regime in China

• Published date: 01 June 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00323292211013181
• Author: Taiyi Sun,Quansheng Zhao
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211013181

Politics & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/00323292211013181

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Article

Delegated Censorship:

The Dynamic, Layered,

and Multistage Information

Control Regime in China

Taiyi Sun

Christopher Newport University

Quansheng Zhao

American University

Abstract

How does internet censorship work in China, and how does it reflect the

Chi nes e state’s logic of governing society? An online political publication, Global

China (海外看世界), was created by the authors, and the pattern and record of

articles being censored was analyzed. Using results from A/B tests on the articles and

interviews with relevant officials, the article shows that the state employs delegated

censorship, outsourcing significant responsibility to private internet companies and

applying levels of scrutiny based on timing, targets, and stage of publication. The

dynamic, layered, multistage censorship regime creates significant variation and

flexibility across the Chinese internet, most often in decisions about what to censor.

This approach aims to maintain regime stability and legitimacy while minimizing costs.

Rather than blocking all information and players, the state recognizes its technical

and bureaucratic limits but also realizes the benefits of a degree of toleration.

Delegated censorship utilizes both power control and power sharing and offers a

new understanding of authoritarian state-society relations.

Keywords

delegated censorship, authoritarian resilience, graduated control, interactive

authoritarianism

Corresponding Author:

Taiyi Sun, Department of Political Science, Christopher Newport University, McMurran Hall 361B,

One Avenue of the Arts, Newport News, VA 23606, USA.

Email: tsun@cnu.edu

1013181PASXXX10.1177/00323292211013181Politics & SocietySun and Zhao

research-article2021

2022, Vol. 50(2) 191–221

Censorship is the repression of speech through suppressing and deleting anything con-

sidered objectionable to the state. Censorship is used by countries throughout the

world, regardless of their regime types or developmental levels. With the emergence

of the global internet and with information today produced and disseminated at an

unprecedented speed, some governments now censor by simply creating a switch to

turn the internet on and off. However, China, which has the highest number of internet

users in the world,1 has never switched off its internet entirely (unlike India, which has

the second-highest number of users and shut down its internet 154 times between

January 2016 and May 2018).2 Rather, China has developed a complex and sophisti-

cated censorship regime. How does internet censorship work in China? What is the

rationale behind the content screening mechanism? How does the censorship reflect

the logic of governing the society by the Chinese state?

China has come a long way from the totalitarian period under Mao Zedong

(1949–76), when the state had a high degree of penetration into individuals’ political

and social lives.3 With the limited, yet monopolized, state-controlled media outlets of

that time, censorship meant keeping a few key decision makers in check.4 More than

four decades since the Mao era, and particularly after the controlled liberalization of

the “Reform and Opening” policy under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese authoritarian

state today allows a certain degree of free expression, although the government still

maintains a tight grip on expression overall.5 Technologies such as cellphones and the

internet have made content generation decentralized and ubiquitous—and more diffi-

cult for the state to control.

The pluralization of content generation is largely driven by the shift away from reli-

ance solely on traditional media toward greater use of internet-based media. Content for

traditional media is typically produced by organizations through venues such as TV,

radio, newspapers, and magazines. “New media” utilize more advanced technologies

such as digital content, mobile platforms, satellites, and the internet.6 Nevertheless,

content producers of new media are still largely organizations. That is not the case with

other emerging media that are central to this article: self-media. As shown in Table 1,

self-media (自媒体), sometimes referred to as “we-media” in other countries,7 refers to

independently operated media accounts that publish texts, audio, and video on various

platforms. Self-media is a subcategory of new media in which content producers are

typically individuals (rather than organizations) and operate independently and unoffi-

cially, making content generation swift but sometimes inaccurate. Self-media also dif-

fer from social media in that the audience is the public as a whole, rather than only those

in one’s social network.

The rise of self-media in China poses new challenges to the censorship regime.

Whereas traditional media and new media are generated on platforms that are rela-

tively easy to regulate, self-media let every individual speak directly to the entire

internet audience. Those individuals do not have to follow the party line and some-

times cover events and issues and provide commentaries in a way that is quite different

from the official line. Since information control is a vital part of Chinese Communist

Party (CCP) governance, self-media pose unprecedented challenges to the regime.

WeChat, TikTok, Sina Weibo and its blog, Toutiao, and Zhihu, among many others, are

192 Politics & Society 50(2)