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Censorship in China

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Censorship in China

With the freedom of speech and social media to give everyone a voice, you’d expect it’d be harder for governments to oppress their people. But apparently, “where there’s a will, there’s a way” is a saying vehemently believed by the government of China. Thus, it has embarked on a mission no government has ever accomplished before, which is the blackout of media that connects the Chinese people to the rest of the world. Now, they’re not completely disconnected. They can stay in touch. Using the apps that are sanctioned to be used within the country.

So yes, Chinese people can’t access Twitter or Google or even Facebook; they use these measly local appsWeibo, Renren and YouKu. In fact, this one app WeChat is exclusively dubbed as Chinese Facebook. Even if you were to try to access YouTube in China using a VPN, it is very likely not to work either because only certain VPNs allowed by the government work. It has established a particularly draconian system of censorshipto have control over the population and the news that reaches them. Talk about being possessive.

Out of the 1.4 billion population, only 800 million have access to the Internet, and that too to get news regulated by the government.

Concealing the actual truth about history

To say China’s censorship follows a complex ecosystem would be an understatement. It’s practically a pyramid. With the citizens at the bottom followed by the telecom and the tech companies and the rules that governed them. Then comes the Communist Party, which has quite the hold over the censorship laws and on top of them all the President of China,Mr. Xi Jinping, who has the ability to control and observe the Internet being used in real time. British Essays Help would just like to say that I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a breach of privacy and highly creepy.

Although censorship is not much of a big deal in China, as people have lived like this for centuries, it has become a norm. Given that whole sections of history are not taught in schools,it ought to give you some insight into this. It’s a political agenda to keep the population within reins and not cause any rebellions. The last major political protest recorded according to history took place in 1989. If you were to ask a Chinese kid what they know about Tiananmen Square, they’d say they know nothing about it. The reason for that being that the Chinese Army opened fire on the protesting citizens and ended up causing causalities. Hence, the cover-up.

Quelling down rebelliousness

In China, basically, everything you do or say on their “local” social media is under surveillance; privacy be damned. The government gets to have the last word on whether something should be seen by you or not. Talk about a dystopian nightmare much? But, look, it’s not a complete blackout, at least. You’re allowed to interact with one another on the social media copycat platforms that have been developed solely for you. Like Weibo and Youku etc. All the government requires you to do is follow the rules that more or less state that don’t bite the hand that feeds you, that’s all. Sounds pretty decent, no?

On the other hand, if you’re an activist living in China, the government will not be pleased with you if you don’t play by their rules. Because apparently, President Xi Jinping doesn’t like to be criticized in the slightest. The government has been known to be carrying out crackdowns on people who are found spreading dissent on social media. One such example is Chung Ai-Ja, who was a school counsellor. She had posted something that was an apparent jab at the President, which resulted in the authorities questioning her and days later, she was fired from the job.

The extent of censorship

If you’re wondering how the government could’ve been keeping such a close eye on each of the posts, it’s not that hard, actually. They have simply filtered out posts that have mentioned any word from the list of phrases that the President finds either offensive or against him and has declared such tweets or posts to be flagged and singled out. For instance, “I disagree”, “I oppose”, “my emperor”, and whatnot. To facilitate their censorship laws, China has even impose banned on NGOs, imprisoned its human rights lawyers and issued a bunch of strict cybercrime laws.

China has taken censoring news to a whole new level by not just covering up past events but even the current ongoing issues within the country. One such crisis happens to be the persecution of Uighur Muslims within the province of Northwestern China. It is estimated that over a million Chinese Muslims are placed in concentration camps under the guise of reeducation centers. But in truth, the government’s been carrying out the most heinous and barbaric acts on these prisoners and clearly violating their right as a citizen. But if you’re living in China, you wouldn’t even have a clue about any of this.

Of course, United Nations has taken notice of this barbarism; however, China has simply denied all allegations, which is not surprising.China has gone as far as to ban the kids show Peppa Pig because the cartoonish character has been promoting gangster attitudes. Although, a few days later, the ban was lifted, which just serves to tell how baffling the censorship dictators are at making such decisions. If they don’t like something, they ban it; if they feel like that same thing is fine a few days later, they’ll lift the ban. Talk about mood swings.

The best British essays would mention that the Chinese government can’t decide for themselves what laws need to be taken seriously in terms of censorship. It’s like they don’t give much thought to what the rest of the world thinks, but as long as the people are under control, everything’s fine.

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