In the first clear example of China’s new Cybersecurity Law being cited to target major social media platforms, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice today saying that WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba — a popular online community linked to Baidu’s search services — were under investigation for violations of the new law, which took effect on June 1 this year.
The investigations will be carried out, the notice says, by the CAC’s Beijing and Guangdong offices. While Weibo and Baidu are based in Beijing, Tencent is based in Shenzhen.

A near tragedy unfolding earlier this year on the outskirts of the bustling Chinese business hub of Shenzhen offered both a promise and a stark warning about the power of big data.
At roughly 4PM on January 26, a man walked into the local police station in Shenzhen’s Longgang District to report that his three-year-old had gone missing. The child, it was feared, had been abducted by child traffickers — a frightfully common problem in China, where it is estimated that tens of thousands of children are kidnapped and sold every year. Police leapt into action. They quickly obtained video footage, captured by an unspecified surveillance camera, showing a middle-aged woman making off with the child. Next, they isolated an image of the suspect’s face, which they ran through a facial recognition program, “locking down [the woman’s] identity,” as Chinese media later reported. Finally, learning that the woman had boarded a train for the city of Wuhan, police were able to intercept her upon arrival, rescuing the child. The entire saga, from the first police report to the location of the abducted child, lasted just 15 hours.
Naturally, we should breathe a sigh of relief, along with the child’s parents, at this happy outcome. At the same time, however, we should read between the lines, recognising the immense potential for abuse in these 21st century reservoirs of big data that can be trawled for information about each and every one of us. Sure, criminals might be exposed — but then, so might we all be.
In many respects, China leads the world in the application of big data and machine learning to questions of law enforcement and social control. The above success story tells us that local police in China have expedient access not just to residential and other surveillance cameras, but also to national identity databases that can be matched in real time against train or other ticket purchases requiring identification. This, in fact, is just the tip of the iceberg. China is now applying a big data approach to every manner of problem, betraying a dangerous faith in the liberating power of technology, with no public discussion whatsoever about how these assumed advances might entrap citizens within the all-seeing lens of state-controlled machine data.
China is certainly not alone in the development of such technologies. But it stands apart in their actual deployment, which is happening quickly and in the utter absence of scrutiny.
In April this year, Intellifusion, the company whose facial recognition technology was behind the child abduction breakthrough, worked with traffic police in Shenzhen to install a new jaywalking detection system exposing pedestrians who cross the street in violation of traffic laws. The system, based on facial recognition technology, apparently maintains a database of pedestrians — so that it can search out, instantly, repeat offenders. Shenzhen traffic police are also trialing the use of sonar imaging technology that could help combat what the China Daily newspaper calls the “annoying misuse of car horns” in heavy traffic by isolating the offending vehicle and capturing images of both the vehicle plate number and the driver, who may receive surprise notification of a fine of around 65 Euros.
In an interview earlier this year, Intellifusion co-founder and CEO Chen Ning gleefully reported that his firm was now working on technologies to predict criminality. “Some clients, as they come to understand Intellifusion’s technology system, will raise a concept from science fiction: prediction of criminality,” said Chen. “A few months ago, we began research in this area, which is basically about digging clues out of big data and then setting a number of behavioral parameters. In fact, right now we can do this to a certain extent, making predictions about behaviour.”

Digital disruption has been the name of the game in China’s media space for several years now. The same technology wave that has inundated everything from transportation to brick-and-mortar retail has hit traditional media hard, leaving wreckage in its wake.
Late last year, the Beijing Times newspaper closed its doors after more than 15 years of operation, and on January 1, Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post, long one of the country’s leading commercial newspapers, also closed up shop. More such extinctions are to be expected, diminishing choice at the Chinese news stand.
But another important element of digital disruption is the radical re-envisioning of choice itself. Why browse the newsstand or fumble through the inky metro tabloids when algorithms can do the work for you? Show an inclination to check out real estate content through a news app like Toutiao (今日头条), or “Today’s Headlines,” and the app will pre-select for you, modelling your behavior to generate customized news feeds.
Toutiao and other apps powered by artificial intelligence technologies have been a space of fevered activity in China since around 2012. For Chinese authorities, however, this type of disruption apparently has its limits.
On July 6, the Party’s official People’s Daily ran a commentary piece called “News Must Not Be Hijacked By Algorithms.” The piece was read by many as a direct attack on Toutiao, the industry leader in the field of AI news.
The piece attacked news apps “promoting low quality content” to the detriment of “truth, comprehensiveness, objectivity and independence.” Recalling that the notion of “guidance of public opinion,” or ensuring social and political stability through media control, is the true value underlining the Party’s approach to information in China, one must wonder whether one of the perceived dangers in the rise of AI news apps is the way they might allow readers to select out the sorts of messages authorities would like them to absorb.
Perhaps China’s propaganda authorities are coming to realize that the selection methods now being advanced through these apps might be undermining the Party’s own efforts to “guide” the information and ideas to which the public is exposed.
A translation of the People’s Daily piece follows:

“News Must Not Be Hijacked By Algorithms”
By Lu Hong (吕洪) / July 6, 2017
Recently, news apps drunk on technologies and algorithms have become more and more “basic and coarse.” Just open a single article and they will rapidly flood your screen with related content, without even extending you the right of refusal. Some people even elected these news distribution algorithms to the plane of artificial intelligence, suggesting they are a major development trend representing the future of text, the future of content, and even the future of media.
What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is the simulation of the information process of human thought. These algorithmic technologies based on social networks and click rates, and especially these small-time mechanisms of machine selection and their hard-pushing of content, cause users great annoyance.
Algorithms can have some positive impacts on news production. On the one hand, they can induce content producers to pay greater attention to content of interest to audiences, approaching content production from the reader’s perspective — so that no longer do they talk to themselves alone. On the other hand, they have diminished the time investment required of consumers and raised the efficiency of reading, to the benefit of enriching information and knowledge.
However, a number of apps, keen on news delivery and indulging in algorithms, have had a very negative impact on the future of news. Taking the so-called “free ride” of the algorithm, some news apps that were previously quite rich informationally are more and more bland, some content producers that were previously impartial are now rather biased, and the once broad reach of some news media has been increasingly narrowed.
In recent years, there have been many advancements in artificial intelligence in various sectors, but these have remained somewhat detached from ordinary people. Why is this? Because artificial intelligence to date has been unblemished to achieve breakthroughs in non-linear thinking, this mode unique to human beings. We click into a piece of horrific social news out of instinctual human curiosity — but instinct is not intelligence. When different viewpoints interact, or even face off, this potentially leads to greater thought or knowledge. To be introspective about our instincts, and to surpass them, is a development of human nature. A number of news apps, relying only on parsing people’s clicking habits and promoting low quality content, can only cause them annoyance.
But are we to be held captive by algorithms, traffic and hits, only showing those parts of the world that readers want to see — or do we uphold the truth, comprehensiveness, objectivity and independence, using quality content to shape our style? This is the question media people must think deeply about.
Traditional media must not act like so many Don Quixotes, being blind to algorithms and technology and avoiding progressive trends. But they cannot at the same time rely on these entirely, becoming slaves to algorithms and technology. Traditional media must actively strategise and must actively participate in the process of [media] transition and convergence. But in the process of media convergence, they must maintain their own styles and standards, safeguarding their own values and independent spirits, injecting the soul of traditional media in the online space — allowing algorithms and technology serve news of true value.
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THIS WEEK the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released its latest blue book on the development of new media in the country, with special research chapters on topics ranging from notable trends such as live-stream broadcasts and media convergence, to more specialized topics like the use of emoticons by Chinese university students.
From the outset, the report strikes a familiar balance between sanguine assessment of the economic and political opportunities presented by media development, and the attendant risks.

It was a busy day over at the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). On May 2, the agency, created in February 2014 to exercise overarching control over the country’s internet and every related enterprise, launched not one but three separate regulations, dealing with everything from “procurement of important network products and services” to “online news and information services.”
The bottom line?
These regulations, which will formally take effect on June 1 along with the Cybersecurity Law, mark the maturation of President Xi Jinping’s grand plan for information under the Chinese Communist Party in the 21st century. That vision centers on 1) cybersecurity as integral to national security, and grasps cybersecurity through the lens of regime stability and the core need for information controls at home and abroad, and 2) informatization, or xinxihua (信息化), the idea of internet and digital development as the new, perhaps even now primary, source of production, replacing industrialization at the heart of the national economy.

IN A RECENT WORK REPORT on the state of radio and television production in China, the deputy director of the country’s print and broadcast regulator, Tian Jin (田进), offered acerbic criticism of certain “harmful trends” in the industry — including over-attention to ratings and box office results, and the “wanton spoofing and deconstructing of historical figures.”
“We must recognize,” said Tian, “that our broadcast sector suffers from both chronic diseases and new problems, all of which urgently await solution.”
In particular, Tian cited an obsessive focus on “box office, [television] ratings and [online] hits,” to the detriment of program quality — which he did not elaborate — and traditional culture. On the latter point, Tian briefly noted the phenomenon of “naked Peking opera” (裸体京剧), the flippant and sometimes indecorous treatment of one of China’s most celebrated forms of traditional culture.
Echoing recent actions against live video streaming in China, Tian Jin said that many “audiovisual products” online were of “vulgar quality,” and that online anchors, or hosts of live video streaming programs, often provided content that was of a violent or indecent nature. His agency would “deal severely with those responsible,” he said, but there was still a need to “raise the intensity of governance.”
Also in his report, Tian apparently praised the recent hit series In the Name of the People, a dramatization of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption campaign, and said regulators still felt that the overall trend was for Chinese programming with “main themes that resounded and were full of positive energy” — meaning, in essence, favorable to the state and to its understanding of public an private morals.
A still from the unexpurgated version of the 2015 drama Empress of China, aired on Hunan TV before being pulled by regulators for fresh edits.
Tian Jin, a long-time veteran of China’s original broadcast regulator, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) — which in 2013 merged with the country’s press and publications regulator, GAPP, to form a new super-agency (SAPPRFT) — has in recent years been the public face of regulation in the entertainment industry.
It was Tian who fielded questions from reporters in 2015, when his agency pulled the popular television drama Empress of China for overhaul because it “contained scenes that harmed the healthy development of youth.” Translation: too much cleavage.
Propaganda officials and broadcast regulators in China go through cyclical periods of intense prudishness over entertainment content, and officials responsible for overseeing television — and now live video streaming — are especially notorious for their micro-managing of the country’s living rooms.
In March last year, Tian Jin’s agency, SAPPRFT, issued new television rules banning depictions of homosexuality, excess smoking and drinking, adultery and even reincarnation.
“If arts and culture lose their way in the roaring tide of the market,” Tian Jin said in his recent report, “if they they become slaves to the market, being covered with the stench of filth — then a series of problems will surely follow in a chain reaction.”

TWO YEARS AGO in Hong Kong, I sat around a conference table with some of the finest journalists to have worked in the Chinese media in the past two decades. Left and right of me were reporters who had broken major stories of corruption, malfeasance and cruelty, and who had, in the process, shaped the contemporary history of Chinese journalism — a history in which, from time to time, a broader notion of the public interest won out against the narrow interests of the Party-state.
Now, however, all of them were busy with start-ups (“innovation” being the buzzword of the day) having little or nothing to do with journalism. The low point for me came when one seasoned former reporter said with some bitterness: “I no longer think of myself as a journalist at all.”
Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that much of the experience the journalism profession in China has gained since the 1990s is being hollowed out by deeper economic, political and technological shifts in the media industry.
Many factors have driven an exodus of older talent from China’s media, from poor pay and the digital transformation of the industry — now hitting traditional Chinese media that for many years had seemed protected from the storms buffeting media elsewhere in the world — to the vagaries of censorship, which can sap the professional spirit. But the net effect of this shift is the progressive loss of professional journalism capacity in China’s media.
That capacity could take many long years to rebuild, particularly if the stringent controls we’ve seen under President Xi Jinping continue into the next decade, leaving few stories on which journalists can cut their teeth.

CHINESE MEDIA REPORTED on April 17 that White Deer Plain (白鹿原), the television drama adapted from the novel of the same name by Chen Zhongshi, had been shelved after the airing of a single episode. It is not yet clear what the reasons are for the pulling of the drama — whether, for example, it is a suspension ordered by the authorities, or a decision taken by the show’s distributors — and there is so far no indication of whether or when the series might air again.

While broadcast authorities in China often nitpick films and dramas, subjecting them to censorship throughout the production process, abrupt withdrawals from the broadcast lineup are rare, says Cai Yiming (蔡一鸣) at Media Internal Reference (传媒内参). One of the most recent cases was the suspension in January 2015 of the period drama The Empress of China, which was pulled to make additional cuts after officials said it contained “unhealthy scenes.” The concern in that earlier instance was plunging necklines and a surfeit of exposed skin, and the move from regulators drew widespread ridicule from Chinese online — sometimes in very creative ways — before and after the series re-aired.
In a pair of identical posts to their respective official Weibo accounts just before noon on April 18, the broadcasters of White Deer Plain, Jiangsu Television and Anhui Television, said cryptically: “In order to obtain better broadcasting results, the drama White Deer Plain will be broadcast selectively. Thank you for your attention!”

Media Internal Reference, a WeChat public account observing China’s media industry, offered two speculations making the rounds in China as to the reasons for the sudden pulling of the drama.
One possible reason observers have noted is that China Central Television, the state-run broadcaster, intends to “offer an olive branch” to Jiangsu Television and Anhui Television, two of its major competitors, working with them to broadcast the series. It is unclear, however, why such an arrangement would be to the advantage of either of the networks. Another possible reason, said Media Internal Reference, is that the distributors of White Deer Plain fear the immense popularity of In the Name of the People, the anti-corruption drama airing on Hunan Television, will be a drag on ratings for the show.
Political sensitives are of course a third possibility. The Global Times, a spin-off of the official People’s Daily newspaper, ran an English-language report late Tuesday on the show’s sudden disappearance. But that report is now missing, calling up a server error. A cached version of the article is available, but a cached version of the article is available and does discuss possible political pressure.

As of Tuesday afternoon, no other reasons have been provided for the takedown. Chinese netizens have speculated that it may have been due to the appearance of politically related content.
In his post on Tuesday, Du [Ren, a film director] speculated that one of the reasons behind the removal may be related to the main character’s political background and tragic ending. This post was removed later that day.

The original newspaper headline for the story in the Global Times was “Mysterious Disappearance.” In any case, the situation as it stands now is without clear precedent.