Some mid-week reading

New Republic on how online activist movements in China such as ‘Occupy the Men’s Bathroom’ led to change – until the state perfected censorship techniques, with mention of further developments in Hong Kong…

The result is a choreography of threats and capitulation, a pas de deux between state and citizen. The number of active websites in China shrank by roughly a third between 2017 and 2023, to about 3.9 million—fewer sites than exist in Italian and a fraction of the Japanese web, even though these languages have far fewer speakers.

Hong Kong offers a glimpse of what happens when that dance is imposed all at once on a previously free society…

…For journalists like Allan Au, a meticulous columnist and lecturer in journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the new order arrived as a shock. Au had spent decades in Hong Kong’s media, at the TV network TVB, where I was his colleague, then as a popular host at RTHK, before being dismissed in 2021 as the government reined in the station. He continued to write sharp commentaries for outlets including Stand News, the kind of journalism that once felt safe in Hong Kong, on broadcasters’ eroding independence and how the creeping normalization of self-censorship was hollowing out the city’s press. In April 2022, national security police arrived at his home before dawn and arrested him for “conspiracy to publish seditious publications.” The message was unmistakable: Words that had once been part of ordinary argument were now criminal. Au was forced to take a leave from his teaching post and placed under restrictive bail conditions that effectively bar him from leaving Hong Kong; his passport was confiscated, and the sedition charge hangs over him like a suspended sentence.

From ASPI Strategist, how Chinese authorities allegedly use millions of fake social media accounts to flood platforms with spam, including porn, to swamp content it doesn’t like…

During 2022 protests over Covid-zero, Chinese-language users on Twitter repeatedly complained that searches for city names and protest-related terms were being overwhelmed by pornographic and gambling spam, burying footage and first-hand accounts. At the time, it was unclear whether this reflected a coordinated censorship tactic or opportunistic spam exploiting trending keywords.

…[X head of product Nikita] Bier’s remarks suggest that X now interprets this activity as deliberate state-level information denial: censorship by saturation rather than removal. What stands out is the platform’s response. When users and researchers raised detailed questions at the time, Twitter offered no public explanation. Years later, X has instead opted for an executive tweet asserting intent and scale without evidence, context, or structured disclosure.

China Digital Times on the scale of Beijing’s military purges…

Zhang and Liu are just the latest senior military officers to fall. At The New York Times, Chris Buckley highlighted a report last November from Asia Society’s Neil Thomas and Lobsang Tsering, which stated: “Of 44 uniformed officers selected to the [Party’s] Central Committee in 2022, 29 have either been purged or are missing, leaving a political survival rate of only 34.1% for China’s top generals. Lower-ranking officers fared only slightly better: seven of 23 military alternates, or 30.4%, are also in trouble.”

From Jamestown, a comparative analysis of official announcements on the purges of Zhang Youxia and of earlier top military officers…

Official statements point to disagreements with Xi Jinping over PLA development and training, and even instances of open resistance to his directives, as the cause of the generals’ downfall.

…while both cases cited damage to the PLA’s “political ecology” (政治生态), Zhang was additionally described as causing “severe damage to the military’s political awareness” (政治建军). This wording suggests that Zhang did not prioritize political loyalty as the guiding principle of military building. Given the absence of major personal corruption allegations, the core issue likely involved placing military effectiveness above political control.