Screenshot of “Not That Simple” (没那么简单), a sketch for last month’s Spring Festival Gala on CCTV.

The annual Spring Festival Gala broadcast by state-run broadcaster CCTV is a hallmark of New Year festivities in China, running in the background as families nationwide gather around the dinner table for a brief and boisterous reunion. The hours-long variety show has been running since the 1980s, offering viewers carefully calibrated social commentary and, occasionally, some unforgettable gaffs.  

One sketch in this year’s show, airing on January 28, was a dramatized version of how the country’s top internet control body, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), would like the public to view their ongoing crackdown on “self-media” (自媒体), individual user accounts on social media platforms like WeChat that publish self-produced content. 

Since November 2018, when the CAC unveiled a broad cleanup of the social media publishing platforms — referring to them as internet information services of “a public opinion nature” (舆论属性) — the agency has regularly announced new campaigns. In 2019, clarifying the terms of the clean sweep, the CAC released a set of “Security Assessment Regulations” (评估规定) instructing platforms for self-media on how to conduct “security self-assessments” to root out “illegal and harmful information” (违法有害信息). This phrase is applied expansively in China, and encompasses speech seen to violate the political media control objectives of the Party. 

More recently, in March 2023, the CAC unveiled a new special action to address what it called “disorder” in the self-media ecosystem.

Oversimplifying to Rationalize Control

Titled “Not That Simple” (没那么简单), the Spring Festival Gala sketch last month told the story of a young man performing a simple act of kindness for an old man on the street. But as the story got garbled by a succession of online commentators, it became increasingly sensationalist and inaccurate — fodder for racy clickbait headlines and dark conspiracy theories from keyboard warriors terminally online. 

In this scene from the skit “Not That Simple,” one character explains how the write post headlines so that they are sensational and draw attention. 

Told in the form of a “crosstalk” (相聲) comedic dialogue, the skit won praise from other state-run media like the People’s Daily, which hailed it as a timely warning about how self-media create “internet chaos” by “making something out of nothing” and drowning out good, accurate information — meaning from trusted official sources like CCTV and the People’s Daily that are sufficiently under government control.

The sketch was in keeping with the CAC’s latest “Clear and Bright” (清朗) crackdown on online content, announced on January 19, on the eve of the holiday. Fake news, clickbait headlines, and rumor-mongering were all on a special hit list for censors during the Spring Festival, aiming to enforce a “joyous and harmonious atmosphere” over the holiday. 

Few would rally to the defense of fake news or clickbait, but in China these are often used as pretexts to assert more control over the flow of information and ensure that state-run sources maintain a monopoly over what is true. By painting citizen journalists in a purely negative light — ignoring the positive roles they have played at critical times like the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic — the Gala itself could be accused of peddling untruths.


Alex Colville

Researcher

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