Let a Thousand Censors Snip

News publication has an important role in ideological education, and our country’s security depends on strict control of news production.

—Chinese General Administration of Press and Publication

Chinese thought control begins with the near absence of a free press. Instead, for most Chinese citizens, all news flows from the official voice of the Communist Party and the world’s biggest propaganda mill—the Xinhua news agency.

Each of Xinhua’s almost 10,000 reporters undergo extensive political indoctrination from the government’s aptly named Central Propaganda Department. As a group, these quasi-journalists are tasked with the job of producing “all the news that fits the party line” for more than 9,000 magazines, 2,000 newspapers, 300 radio stations, and 350 TV stations.

Even as Xinhua churns out its steady stream of propaganda, other competing tentacles of the Communist Party are employed in the most massive censorship operation the world has ever seen. In this Orwellian world, newspapers are routinely prohibited from reporting on a wide range of subjects, particularly government corruption. Coverage of public protests and events, such as environmental disasters, is likewise tightly restricted.

This is not to say that the zealotry of Chinese censorship doesn’t occasionally border on the darkly comic. For example, foreigners living in Beijing frequently find that when their subscriptions to magazines such as Time and Newsweek arrive, the pages resemble the remains of a child’s paper doll project. Offending sentences, whole articles, photos, and even the Victoria’s Secret ads are cut out by hand—along with whatever happened to be on the opposite side.

Besides low comedy, Chinese censorship can also offer high irony. Even as China regularly excoriates Japan for its “revisionist history” of the Rape of Nanjing, Chinese propagandists have effectively erased all the articles, pictures, and videos documenting the Tiananmen Square massacre from the collective Chinese memory bank. As Exhibit A, there is that stark image of a single young man standing before a column of oncoming tanks that is so burned into Western minds; this image is virtually unknown in modern Beijing.

Of course, Chinese censorship is hardly limited to the print media. The government regularly jams radio broadcasts from sources ranging from the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) to the BBC. In addition, the only place you can see TV stations like CNN are in tourist hotels.