Chinese President Xi Jinping Exercises Greater Control After Media Blunders

China is once again enforcing its strict internet content rules. The government in China heavily monitors the internet, including banning porn and any critical views of the President Xi Jinping or the government itself. It comes with little surprise that CAC, the Cyber Administration of China, has called a conference of media executives and industry academics to discuss several pieces of news that came as critical or embarrassing of the administration. There are about 700 million Chinese people employing the internet as means of communication and current event resources, meaning that control of cyberspace is part of the government’s method of controlling how it’s people think.

There are a few incidents of the past few months that are directly responsible for this conference on media control. The first was a web portal which published a piece about Xi Jinping. This piece caused a stir when it spoke about Xi Jinping in a faulty light, something very taboo in China. It also expressed the desire for Xi Jinping to resign from President, which resulted in several editors, writers and employees of the portal to be restrained. While this occurred in March, the next incident was several months later in July and proliferated by Tencent, one of the top read websites in China. This was also spoken on Xi Jinping in a negative light, but with only one word causing alarm. The headline spoke about the President of China’s Communist Party speech as furious rather than important.

Both of these incidents were apparently inadvertent. The former website claimed the article was mistakenly published and the former switched up the two words which are very similarly spelled in the Chinese language. The conference that was called in retaliation to these events spoke about chief editors as the one within the company which should exercise greater control over the content that their websites produce in order to avoid unwanted political unrest.

Image via Kremlin.ru