Censorship in China

Censorship in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is implemented or mandated by the PRC's ruling party, the Communist Party of China (CPC). The government censors content for mainly political reasons, but also to maintain its control over the populance. The Chinese government asserts that it has the legal right to control the internet's content within their territory, and their censorship rules do not infringe on the citizen's right to free speech.

Censored media include essentially all capable of reaching a wide audience including television, print media, radio, film, theater, text messaging, instant messaging, video games, literature and the Internet. Chinese officials have access to uncensored information via an internal document system.

Reporters Without Borders ranks China's press situation as "very serious", the worst ranking on their five-point scale. In August 2012 the OpenNet Initiative classified Internet censorship in China as "pervasive" in the political and conflict/security areas and "substantial" in the social and Internet tools areas, the two most extensive classifications of the five they use.Freedom House ranks the press there as "not free", the worst ranking, saying that "state control over the news media in China is achieved through a complex combination of party monitoring of news content, legal restrictions on journalists, and financial incentives for self-censorship," and an increasing practice of "cyber-disappearance" of material written by or about activist bloggers.

China

China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a sovereign state in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.35 billion. The PRC is a one-party state governed by the Communist Party, with its seat of government in the capital city of Beijing. It exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces; five autonomous regions; four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing); two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau); and claims sovereignty over Taiwan.

Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometers, China is the world's second-largest country by land area, and either the third or fourth-largest by total area, depending on the method of measurement. China's landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes and the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in the arid north to subtropical forests in the wetter south. The Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third- and sixth-longest in the world, run from the Tibetan Plateau to the densely populated eastern seaboard. China's coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometres (9,000 mi) long, and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East and South China Seas.

Great Firewall

The Great Firewall of China (Simplified Chinese: 防火长城; traditional Chinese: 防火長城; pinyin: fánghuǒ chángchéng, commonly known as 墻 "wall") is a blanket term with ironic connotations thought to have been coined in an article in Wired magazine in 1997 and used by international, including Chinese, media to refer to legislation and projects initiated by the Chinese government (which is controlled by the Communist Party of China, CPC) that attempt to regulate the internet in Mainland China. It is the main instrument to achieve Internet censorship in China. These CPC regulations include criminalizing certain online speech and activities, blocking from view selected websites, and filtering key words out of searches initiated from computers located in Mainland China.

Origins of Chinese Internet law

While the United States and several other western countries passed laws criminalizing computer crimes beginning in the 1970s, China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body, the National People's Congress (NPC) passed CL97, a law that criminalizes "cyber crimes" (计算机犯罪; jisuanji fanzui), which it divided into two broad categories: crimes that target computer networks and crimes carried out over computer networks. Behavior illegal under the latter category includes among many things the dissemination of pornographic material and the usurping of "state secrets."

Internet censorship in China

Internet censorship in China is extreme due to a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. In accordance with these laws, more than sixty in the future Internet regulations have been made by the government of China, which have been implemented by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, companies, and organizations. The apparatus of China's Internet control is considered more extensive and more advanced than in any other country in the world. The governmental authorities not only block website content but also monitor the Internet access of individuals; such measures have attracted the derisive nickname "The Great Firewall of China."

Amnesty International notes that China "has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world" and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders stated in 2010 and 2012 that "China is the world's biggest prison for netizens." The offences of which they are accused include communicating with groups abroad, signing online petitions, and calling for reform and an end to corruption. The escalation of the government's effort to neutralize critical online opinion comes after a series of large, anti-pollution, anti-corruption protests, and ethnic riots, many of which were organized or publicized using instant messaging services, chat rooms, and text messages. The size of the Chinese Internet police force was reported to be 2 million in 2013.

Michael Anti

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