In the land where a one-month cleansing of internet “chaos” is midway to its authoritarian conclusion, netizens will soon be safe to venture online without fear of cultural assault from “quasi-pornography,” “misconceptions” or “challenges to public aesthetics” in short videos.
The drive, conducted by the Cyberspace Administration of China, is erasing content that uses “special effects and props to deliberately create an ugly image to attract attention,” “cross-dressing and suchlike to manufacture vulgar personas” and the taking of official comments out of context.
From December 22, the purge is going hand in hand with a second crackdown from the Ministry of Public Security that, in sentiments echoing the Cultural Revolution and forwarded to the rest of the world by the Global Times media outlet, will “mobilize social forces to participate in the governance of online rumors.”
To this end, support is envisaged “from internet companies, industry associations, netizen volunteers, and research institutions” to found a system whereby any online account — but particularly celebrities’ — spreading content deemed false by the Chinese Communist Party will be placed on a centralized blacklist, communicated to other internet platforms and then presumably expunged from the cybersphere.
Real-name sign-up for internet platforms is required in China, and the wide scope of entities that are called to help in enforcement implies a form of social excommunication, hardly a new tactic for the government in Beijing to control speech it dislikes, but one that will see an uptick in victims over the coming months.
Giving some idea of the kinds of “rumors” that may fall prey to this tightening of web restrictions, China’s Ministry of State Security has also been actively discouraging pessimistic commentary on the condition of the country’s economy, which it increasingly views as a threat to the mode of rulership.
Accordingly, in the past few days, statistics revealing that almost one billion Chinese citizens earn less than 2,000 Chinese yuan ($281) per month have reportedly been removed from Weibo, China’s equivalent of X. The salary revelations are both domestically and globally embarrassing to Beijing, since it continually advocates a new approach to human rights that is centered on economic development rather than basics like voting and expressing oneself.
Meanwhile, an article in the relatively forthright business magazine Caixin was censored for likening the present-day situation in China to the immediate post-Mao period, when, according to the author, there was a need to base policy on reality, not dogmatism, in a new climate of openness, in order to release the Chinese economy from ideological shackles and misinformation. Since, at the time of publication, China President Xi Jinping was set, the very next day, to pay homage to Mao on the 130th anniversary of the latter’s birth and is aggressively curtailing frank economic discussion, the article was quite a direct admonishment of his governance.
Ironically, one category of content that has sparked the Cyberspace Administration of China’s ire in the aforementioned month-long internet clean-up campaign is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate false information, which is precisely what Beijing seems to have been caught instigating beyond the Great Firewall of China by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
In a report named Shadow Play, ASPI asserts that 30 YouTube channels containing 4,500 videos with a combined total of more than 700 million views have been using AI avatars to convey China-favorable propaganda to a global audience. Using techniques such as video essays and the appearance of real hosts, including at least one with a purported U.S. accent, it is believed to have garnered some genuine traction among viewers.
The network serves as another potential omen for a world in which authentic criticism of Chinese Communist Party rule on internet platforms is submerged in an ocean of Beijing-positive opinions that appear to come from multiple sources, but in fact trace back to one.
Because such content is cheap and fast to manufacture, it could, therefore, one day drown out other news like those from mid to late December covering the adoption of a resolution by the European parliament condemning “repressive assimilation policies in place throughout China, especially the boarding school system in Tibet that seeks to eliminate the distinct linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions among Tibetans and other minorities” and the present trial of Li Qiaochu (李翹楚), a female activist who has been targeted for sharing articles by her husband, the jailed legal scholar and human rights defender Xu Zhiyong (許志永), and publicizing details of his mistreatment at the hands of authorities.
ASPI, however, notes a second prescient and highly contemporary threat from artificially manufactured online content that goes beyond merely using it to flood the internet: It can be also deployed to “poison datasets used for AI products, such as large-language models,” essentially making them more likely to spout pro-China fantasies, too.
The aim of the ASPI-uncovered campaign was to convey Beijing as the certain victor in a global competition with Washington, which, if effective, could encourage people in other countries to align themselves with what they perceive to be the more successful and reliable country.
This couples with other alleged techniques for China to swing public opinion or perhaps lay the foundations for doing so in the future that have come to light in recent days: intimidating phone calls to book-purchasing voters in pre-election Taiwan, the suspected pressuring of a rock band from the country that refused to endorse the view that Taiwan is part of the Middle Kingdom and the scraping of electorate and campaign information during the 2022 federal elections in the United States of America.
As per the latter’s Department of Justice, the data garnered by China is not believed to have been used to influence election results on this occasion, but it is nonetheless of some concern. Moreover, the approach couples with the brute violence to cow public opinion that accompanies Xi Jinping on his stately visits. Last month, it was San Francisco; this, it is Hanoi, where reports have emerged of dissidents’ homes and known protest spots being guarded by security forces to prevent any expression of discontent at his presence.
Despite its communist background, Vietnam is a relative hotbed of opprobrium towards Beijing due to China’s obnoxious management of maritime territorial disputes and the legacy of the Sino-Vietnamese War. Therefore, Xi will have been delighted to see opponents silenced in a manner that megaphones to consumers and businesses around the world the mixed virtues of switching supply chains to Vietnam on human rights grounds.
However, for all Hanoi’s sins, the scale of abuse does not come anywhere close to the Chinese Communist Party’s, especially in East Turkestan (Xinjiang). In late December, Radio Free Asia provided evidence, including an unconfirmed video, of Uyghur homes being destroyed to make way for a coal-extracting energy company there, while the Uyghur Human Rights Project stripped back the multiple layers of the mass police presence in the supposedly autonomous region in order to lay bare the role of law enforcement in what it terms as a genocide.
The genocide assertion then received another potential sliver of corroboration in a photo essay by Léa Polverini published in The Guardian on December 28 in which an endocrinologist in a Kazakh hospital, who has treated approximately 50 former captives from China’s camps in East Turkestan, stated, “Men or women, many have damaged genitalia. Some told me they’d been given drugs, others said they’d been raped.”
Speaking under a pseudonym to protect against retaliation, she also said that infertility was a recurrent problem. While it could be that sexual abuse, camp conditions or unintended medicinal side-effects have led to this kind of physical degeneration, it may also represent a deliberate attempt to prevent births from specific peoples.
The specter of such awful crimes is informing a renewed drive to retract academic papers that use genetic data taken from minorities in China. Reported also in The Guardian, the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics has requested the publisher Elsevier to take down one of its own papers amid concerns that blood and saliva samples harvested from Uyghurs and Kazakhs to inform its writing could not have occurred in conditions of meaningful consent, which has sparked calls for a review of similar work.
The purpose of the paper was to assess the efficacy of gene sequencing technology by a U.S. company named Thermo Fisher Scientific, which has long been the target of protest from Tibetan and human rights organizations due to the provision of its DNA products to Chinese authorities such as the abovementioned Xinjiang police.
Given that gene data can be deployed to track and separate people, facilitate organ harvesting and is of obvious interest to anybody with genocidal intent, any research or tools that broaden the Chinese Communist Party’s knowledge of the field are a severe and unacceptable risk.
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