[Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has imposed the most extensive censorship in China in years, flooding the airwaves with communist propaganda and reining in investigative journalists and social media celebrities.]
By
Javier C. Hernández
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Chinese blogger Ma Ling,
right, speaking at an event in Shanghai in 2018.
Credit Zhou Junxiang /Imagine
China
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BEIJING
— She was known as China’s
clickbait queen, an irreverent blogger who prescribed shopping to combat
sadness (“better than sex, orgasms, strawberry cake”) and makeovers to win back
cheating husbands (“men are visual animals”).
But late last month, Ma Ling, a blogger who
commanded an audience of more than 16 million people, went conspicuously
silent.
In the battle for control of the Chinese
internet, the authorities had designated Ms. Ma a threat to social stability,
pointing to an article she published about a young man with cancer whose talent
and virtue were not enough to overcome problems like corruption and inequality.
The state-run news media accused Ms. Ma of
circulating false information, and her social media accounts were wiped from
the internet.
The silencing of Ms. Ma, better known in
China by her pen name, Mimeng, reflects a broader campaign by President Xi
Jinping to purge the public sphere of popular voices that the ruling Communist
Party finds threatening, no matter how innocuous they may seem.
“There is no longer any freedom of speech in
China,” Jia Jia, a blogger who writes about history, said of the campaign. “In
the end, no one will be spared.”
Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has
imposed the most extensive censorship in China in years, flooding the airwaves
with communist propaganda and reining in investigative journalists and social
media celebrities.
Now Mr. Xi is pushing to tame one of the most
vibrant corners of the Chinese internet: the more than one million self-help
gurus, novelists, sportswriters and other independent writers who make up the
so-called “self-media.”
Since December, the authorities have closed
more than 140,000 blogs and deleted more than 500,000 articles, according to
the state-run news media, saying that they contained false information,
distortions and obscenities.
The party seems concerned that independent
commentators, who have become a primary news source for China’s more than 800
million internet users, are drowning out its propaganda messages. It also
probably worries that independent media sources could help fuel social unrest
in 2019, a year of politically sensitive anniversaries including 30 years since
the crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
“Bloggers are seen as encouraging discontent
in society and potentially causing social instability,” said Hu Xingdou, a
political economist in Beijing.
But Mr. Hu said the risk of unrest might
actually increase if individuals were not permitted to air grievances online.
“Our society should allow multiple voices,” he said. “Only in this way can
discontent be released.”
Such blogs represent one of the last bastions
of relatively free discourse in China and have proliferated in recent years as
the state-run news media has become more heavily focused on praising Mr. Xi and
his policies.
For many writers, blogs are a lucrative
business, with readers paying small fees for content and advertisers paying for
mentions of their products. To avoid China’s strict laws on news gathering,
many bloggers occupy a gray area, framing their views on current events as
commentary.
The freewheeling competition for eyeballs has
led to an alarming rise in fake news, a concern that the government often uses
to justify its crackdown.
But Mr. Xi is targeting much more than false
information. The authorities have blacklisted writers who traded celebrity gossip,
analysts who discussed rising property prices and advocates who wrote about
problems in the countryside.
In interviews, bloggers described the
silencing of Ms. Ma as a clear warning to independent media in China: The party
is in charge, and writers must play by its rules.
But while the range of banned topics in China
was once clear — independence movements in Tibet and Taiwan, and the bloody
crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example — the party’s red line has
become much more ambiguous.
China’s trade war with the United States is
now considered sensitive. So too, sometimes, are musings about the futility of
work, a theme often derided by censors as promoting “slacker culture.”
Li Yongfeng, who runs a popular book review
channel, said he avoided publishing articles that mentioned social movements or
past or present political leaders, even to offer praise.
“The Chinese government always sees itself as
a serious father,” he said. “He always wants to control his people and to
determine what they like and dislike.”
Mr. Xi has demanded absolute loyalty from
state-run news outlets, saying their names should include the word “party.” And
he has urged officials to take command of new media by deploying tools like
blogs and apps to promote communist ideology.
Lotus Ruan, a researcher at the University of
Toronto who studies the Chinese internet, said she expected censorship to grow
as the rules became more arbitrary.
“At the end of the day, it is up to
authorities to decide what constitutes ‘positive energy’ and what does not,”
she said.
In December, the Cyberspace Administration of
China listed offenses by bloggers that included distorting government policy
and party history, “flaunting wealth” and “challenging public order.”
But the party defines those terms widely.
An account that focused on women was
suspended last year after the authorities said its posts on sexual health were
“distasteful.”
Similarly, an account run by a nonprofit
named NGOCN was shut down in December after it published articles on a chemical
spill in eastern China, said Wu Lilan, the group’s executive director.
Increasingly, the party is seeking to limit
content that depicts life in China as a constant struggle. That seems to have
driven the attacks on Ms. Ma, the clickbait queen.
Ms. Ma, 42, already had detractors who
accused her of making money by manipulating people’s emotions with articles
like “I Love Money, It’s True” and “Men Don’t Cheat for Sex.” She charged
$113,000 to advertisers for a mention on her blog and bragged about paying her
interns nearly $90,000 a year.
In January, Ms. Ma, a former journalist who
started her blog in 2015, came under attack after publishing “The Death of a
Top Scorer From a Poor Family,” a post about a hardworking 24-year-old man who
died of cancer. The article suggested that even though the man was bright and
virtuous, he was still powerless in the face of the high cost of health care.
The article was widely circulated online and
prompted debate about China’s wealth gap, surging medical costs and the value
of education — common complaints of China’s middle class. Soon, however,
internet users pointed to factual errors and said the piece had been invented.
Ms. Ma had to apologize and promise to
“communicate values with more positive energy.”
But the government did not relent. People’s
Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, accused Ms. Ma of
manipulating public opinion. Her social accounts were deleted on Feb. 21.
Ms. Ma did not respond to a request for
comment, nor did the Cyberspace Administration of China.
Wang Yongzhi, an outspoken commentator in the
eastern city of Hangzhou, said the broader problem was that China’s leaders
paid little attention to social issues, leaving a void that bloggers helped
fill.
Mr. Wang said he had begun blogging because
it provided a “seed of journalistic freedom” in a tightly restricted society.
But on Jan. 1, he said, he closed his WeChat blog because he had grown tired of
the constant battle with censors.
“It is becoming unbearable,” Mr. Wang said.
“The party simply can’t tolerate anyone who has a big influence on society.”
Follow Javier C. Hernández on Twitter:
@HernandezJavier.
Echo Hui and Zhang Qian contributed research.
