Many of the countless number of posts deleted from Sina Weibo on March 13 and March 14, 2014, dealt with the very staged press conference Chinese premier Li Keqiang hosted for foreign new reporters at the National People’s Congress.
The following is a string of deleted re-posts and comments made to a Weibo post reporting the news that Li Keqiang said at the March 13 press conference that China is a nation of rule of law. Separate re-post comments are marked by “//”:

The emperor putting on a show! It gets worse with each generation. . . // Three times yesterday Premier Li lavishly praised foreign journalists for their decent Chinese, just trying to lend some lightness to a very cold proceeding. I can’t imagine a colder scene. When those who don’t understand humour make jokes and you can only grin and bear it, that feeling is so intolerable. Now Premier Li is making another joke. Should we laugh or not laugh. It’s excruciating.

These comments, made at 8:04AM today, were deleted around 40 minutes later.

This post by Little Wooden House of Yanta (雁塔小木屋), which appears to show (a possibly doctored photo of) a member of a Han Chinese delegation on a visit to the home of a Tibetan farmer to bestow a poster of four generations of Chinese Communist Party leaders, from Mao Zedong to Hu Jintao, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before March 14 at 10:07AM. The post, made just after midnight, managed to stay alive for just over ten hours. “Little Wooden House of Yanta” has more than 3,700 followers on Sina Weibo.
The post reads:

Just look at how frightened this Tibetan farmer looks . . .

Sina Weibo censors are working hard to remove sensitive posts about the National People’s Congress, which opens today in the Great Hall of the People. The following is a selection of some of the many, many posts deleted so far today.
User Tang Shaojian (康少见) — who has more than 15,000 followers — wrote in a post at 11:08 AM (deleted around 11:46 AM):

Someone also set fire to something today on Tiananmen Square. The police respond really quickly.
今天还有在天安门前点东西的。警察反应真快。

User “Shen Buyao’s Dad” (沈步搖的爹) — who has more than 12,000 followers — responded to Tang Shaojian’s post:

It’s definitely someone with an appeal. Someone just ignited something combustible in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, just now, and a group of police and riot police rushed over, and in the flash of an eye they were gone.
肯定是有诉求咯。有人在天安门前点了个燃烧物，刚点着，一群警察武警特警扑上来，秒秒钟搞定带走不见了。

Just after 12:00 PM user “Beidaijin is Never Decent” (贝带劲永远不正经) posted a timeline of a supposed incident on Tiananmen Square aggregated from posts on another website:

10:49:57 — It seems there’s a fire, something going down at Tiananmen, a woman around 40 years old has set herself on fire.
10:59:36 — Around 11 AM another woman was giving out fliers and was immediately taken into custody and loaded into a police van. Everyone was taking pictures of it just now, but police only got their hands on me.
11:10:10 — One of the tourists said that as soon as that woman opened up her clothes she was set on fire, and then some people ran up with fire extinguishers. Now there’s a fence in front of the entrance to the Forbidden City and tourists aren’t allowed to get close.
11:14:58 — There’s a water truck cleaning up the scene now.
11:18:59 — Another woman was taken around 11:05 near Jinshui Bridge. A tourist only saw that she was carrying a black bag but didn’t do anything at all.

Weibo user “Wen Sanwa: (文三娃), who has more than 30,000 users, shared a post by user Sina Weibo #3684719771880168 that includes a picture of armed police that reads: “Stability Preservation: From the People and Used On the People.” The user’s words below read, in dark reference to the recent attack at the Kunming Railway Station:

On the square, if you raise a placard, then within a minute a whole bunch of people will throw you down; but if you brandish a knife you can go on killing for 25 minutes [before the police act] . . .
在广场，你若举的是牌，一分钟内就会有人把你扑倒；你若举的是刀，你可以绕场跑二十五分钟；你若举斧子和镰刀，你可以为所欲为liu shi 多载！

The above post, made at 11:11 AM, survived for almost three hours on Weibo, finally deleted just after 2 PM.

The following post, made by rights defender Tian Shuhua (如皋维权-田书华), who has more than 1,800 followers, includes a picture of petitioners gathering outside the State Bureau of Letters and Calls, the national-level office that handles petitions for redress of a whole range of issues. The post reads:

The 2nd Conference of the 12th National People’s Congress opens in Beijing on March 5, 2014. Meanwhile, petitioners are out in full force at the State Bureau of Letters and Calls (国家信访局).
第十二届全国人民代表大会第二次会议于2014年3月5日在北京召开。与此同时，国家信访局内访民挨肩接踵

The post was up for more than four hours, posted at 10:09 AM and deleted at 2:30 PM.

The following post made at 3:24 PM by Liu Fengyi (刘凤翼), a user with more than 30,000 followers, responds to a Weibo post from The Beijing News about Premier Li Keqiang by reaffirming calls for officials to report their personal assets:

Without public reporting of assets by officials and the loosening of restrictions on supervision by the press, reform is just a joke.
没有官员财产公开和开放报禁新闻监督，改革就是一个笑话

The post was deleted just before 4:09 PM, after a lifetime of just over 40 minutes.

On February 27, China announced the creation of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs, of which CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping was appointed chairman. This [latest move to centralise authority] follows the creation last year of the Central National Security Commission,. I feel confident in saying that this news doesn’t make Chinese internet users feel that the internet is now much safer — rather, it gives them a keener sense of dread.
Freedom and security have often been regarded as mutually exclusive. In the aftermath of 9/11, some politicians in the United States said it would be necessary for people to relinquish a degree of freedom and stomach increased surveillance in order to live with a sense of security. The Snowden affair intensified the debate in the West over the balance between rights and security.
Chinese state media are fond of reporting on the security debate in the West, which the Chinese Communist Party can draw on to further justify strict controls on its own population. But this is a complete deception that turns the argument on its head.The situation in democratic countries is entirely different. Freedom is the guarantee of security, and without freedom there can be no security.
Chinese internet users live every day with a sense of insecurity in a country that ranked in the bottom six in a report on world press freedom released by Reporters Without Borders. This insecurity does not arise from the infiltration of American ideas and culture, from the ascendancy of the Japanese political right, or from the threat of Uighur separatism, Tibetan separatism or Hong Kong separatism. The sense of insecurity arises from controls exercised on the internet by Chinese authorities.
There are thousands upon thousands of sensitive keywords on China’s web. If you’re not alert to these no-go areas you risk deletion of your Weibo posts or even the shutdown of your account. If, finally fed up with breathing foul air that threatens your well-being, you take to social media to vent your frustration and call for urgent government action, you might get a knock on your door from police who want to “invite you to tea.”
If, out of compassion, you join a group of others to mourn the death of 10 people in a horrible disaster — but official figures admit only 9 death — you risk being charged by police with spreading “rumours.” And if your post is read 5,000 times, or shared 500 times, you might face criminal responsibility.
If the police can’t get one of the above handles on you, but you continue to support things like democracy and freedom, your might have your company finances and personal life subjected to surveillance to substantiate all sorts of crimes.
According to a 2013 report on press freedom in China issued by the International Federation of Journalists, last year China’s justice department levelled all sorts of crimes to crack down on freedom of speech. They include: disturbing order in a public place, criminal damage to a commercial reputation, criminal libel, the crime of illegally obtaining commercial benefits, the crime of illegal business operations, the crime of assembling a crowd to engage in sexual promiscuity, the crime of spreading rumours, the crime of manufacturing false information, the crime of false registration and disturbing social order.
In its announcement of the formation of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs, the official Xinhua News Agency said that “clearing up and building the online space would be a long-term task,” and it characterised the 2013 “targeted crackdown on cyber rumours” as a positive example.
Everyone who understands China’s internet knows that after this crackdown there was a notable decline in activity on China’s internet. Web users grew fearful and avoided more sensitive public agendas. The crackdown on the sex industry in Dongguan brought a huge backlash on social media, but silence reigned after these voices were attacked in the official People’s Daily.
One of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” In China, this saying should be: if a political party surrenders freedom for security it will not have, nor will it deserve, either one.”
At the first meeting following the creation of this new special group on internet security, Xi Jinping said: “Without internet security there can be no national security; without digitalization there can be no modernisation.” What he really means to say with his first sentence is: without internet controls there can be no totalitarianism.
And the second sentence voids down to this: without freedom of information there can be no modernisation.

“Are you optimistic or pessimistic about China’s media?” I’ve answered this question for more than ten years now. I’ve answered with optimism. I’ve answered with pessimism. And it’s gotten to the point where I’m sometimes confused myself about what to say or what to feel.
Perhaps it’s better then to get back to concrete analysis and avoid simplistic pronouncements. Earlier this year, Ying Chan, the head of our center, wrote a piece for FT Chinese called, “Chinese Media: Avoiding Pessimism and Returning to Professionalism,” in which she listed out a number of important stories Chinese media had managed to report despite facing a horrific environment.
I agree with Professor Chan’s approach, that we should be mindful of encouraging efforts even as we recognise discouraging setbacks. And I’ve been delighted recently to discover another positive case in point, a documentary series called Chinese Words.
I’ve written before about my own flesh-and-blood experiences with political language, for example with the notion of a “red heart,” from my youthful days as a reporter in the People’s Liberation Army all the way through to the economic reform era. Now a group of my friends and colleagues are speaking on camera about 100 “Chinese words” — terms like zheng shen (政审), or “examination of one’s political record,” and jiating chushen (家庭出身), meaning someone’s “political pedigree” (were you a worker or one of the “five red types,” or a capitalist or one of the “five black types”?). An examination of these terms, so important to China’s recent political and cultural past, provides the substance of Chinese Words.
Many intellectuals in China have welcomed this examination with open arms. “These Chinese words,” said the scholar Zhang Ming, “are words that hold our blood and our tears.” The writer Hu Fayun said: “Chinese words are words particular to China, they are words that reveal how China’s unique character came to be.” Clearly, this documentary series is an opportunity to reflect back on our history and admonish many aspects of our present political and social circumstances.
In our current media environment, characterised by intensified control, this sort of media undertaking is a real rarity. And in it we can see a group of journalists at work who aren’t pessimistic — who in fact are seizing every opportunity.
Chinese Words was created in a very unique way as well, with content provided by the public and financing coming from the public. The 100 “Chinese words” were gathered through social media, and 3,000 citizens donated 100 yuan each to the project through the crowd-financing site “Zhong Shou Wang” (众筹网) , giving it a total budget of 300,000 yuan. The project even drew attention from other media, and China Youth Daily‘s “Freezing Point” supplement did a feature story on it.

Following the “Freezing Point” incident eight years ago, I wrote about what I call the “Three C’s” (Control, Change, Chaos), which describe the state of China’s media. While traditional controls on media continue, and have even strengthened, commercialisation of the media and the development of new digital platforms have also brought change. The resulting state of chaos in China’s media has generated opportunities for journalists.
With the emergence of Chinese Words we see the further development of this state of affairs. While traditional media face a crisis caused by the intersection of tightening controls and new media competitors, journalists in China are exploring new ways to work.
The creators of Chinese Words are all editors formerly from print media. In fact, they launched a very good magazine called China History (whose name was later changed to Views on History). However, facing constant pressures both commercially and politically, the original team pulled out one by one. They have every reason to be pessimistic, but they’ve chosen instead to pull themselves together and do something new. They’ve now created a new media production platform for history related content — the New History Cooperative (新历史合作社). Their products — including books, magazines, events and videos — are shared through the internet and through WeChat and Weibo.
The fate of Chinese media is not in the hands of control alone. The fight for space for media to exist and thrive requires brave action like that of citizens during last year’s Southern Weekly incident, but also efforts like that at the New History Cooperative that seek to find opportunity in the midst of crisis.
There are journalists in China who are endeavouring to find paths of survival in a complex environment at the intersection of power, the market and technology. New and unprecedented types of communication, financing and profit, and even new media frameworks, are emerging like fresh green shoots.
We cannot expect power to yield its control anytime soon, but the strength of society is growing daily, and the creative spirit of the media has not been crushed. I see the strength of this creative spirit in the Chinese Words project.

The following post by Weibo user “National Flag Micro Views” (国旗_微观点) was deleted sometime before 10:08 a.m. today, February 24, 2014. The post, which is accompanied by a picture of feeding lions, criticises Deng Xiaoping’s so-called “cat theory” of economic pragmatism — that it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. “National Flag Micro Views,” a poster with views on China’s political left, currently has 2,800 fans on Sina Weibo.

People cannibalising people isn’t so frightening. What’s frightening is a social system that allows people to eat people. Herein lies the poison of the ‘cat theory’ [of Deng Xiaoping]. Only Mao Zedong Thought can provide a solution!

The original Chinese post by “National Flag Micro Views” follows:

人吃人并不可怕，可怕的是这放纵人吃人的社会制度。猫论之毒，毒在其里，非毛泽东思想这剂猛药不能解也！[生病]

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

The following post by Wu Li (吴澧), an author and contributor to Southern Weekly, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 8:25 a.m. today, February 24, 2014. The post is a response to another Weibo post about ongoing unrest in Ukraine. Wu Li currently has just under 32,000 fans on Sina Weibo.

There is a certain country that has struggled for 65 years [PRC flag icon] and still uses palace intrigue rather than democratic processes to resolve things. Ha ha.

The original Chinese language version of Wu Li’s post follows:

一个国家折腾了65年 [国旗] 还在用宫廷阴谋的方式解决本应由民主程序决定的事情 [哈哈]

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise moment when official Party media in China lost the agenda. But the progressive erosion of Party media influence has been a fact ever since the 1990s, when the rise of a new generation of commercially operating metro newspapers and news magazines was paired with the rise of the internet.
Over the years at CMP, we’ve written a great deal about the many ways the Party has attempted to transform and solidify its control of information, a project it refers to as “guidance of public opinion,” or yulun daoxiang.
In 2003, the year of China’s SARS epidemic, we saw what was in some sense the culmination of a new force of agenda setting, resulting from the combination of commercialised media and the internet. By that time, commercial newspapers like Southern Metropolis Daily were pursuing harder-hitting stories in a bid both for market success and professional point scoring. Their stories could then find broader national audiences through commercial internet portal sites. Local news could go national in a matter of hours and impact subsequent coverage in unforeseen ways.
Never had the job of China’s propaganda leaders been more difficult.
Ever since that time, Chinese leaders have been trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Hu Jintao’s approach, in a nutshell, was to invest in core Party media (including the likes of People’s Daily Online) and encourage them to report quickly on sudden-breaking stories that were potentially sensitive. This tactic was combined with traditional forms of control, such as bans preventing commercial media from doing independent reporting. In this way Party media could control the agenda early on — or, as journalists said, “grab the megaphone” — allowing leaders to shape and dominate the story.
Another complimentary tactic under Hu Jintao was to strike out against investigative reporting by more independent-leaning commercial newspapers and magazines. This could be seen in a 2004 central ban on “cross-regional reporting,” the practice of reporting tougher news stories in neighbouring provinces to avoid reprimand by the local officials directly responsible for overseeing your publication. It could also be seen in the more aggressive internal control approaches taken at papers like Southern Weekly, which from 2008 onward had internal “news readers” exercising an unprecedented level of prior control on content — what eventually culminated in last year’s Southern Weekly incident.
But even before Hu-era control could have a decisive impact, along came new media platforms to upset the status quo. By 2010, microblogging services like Sina Weibo were having a dramatic impact on news cycles. It was no longer sufficient for Party media to dominate stories in the first couple of days when public opinion could coalesce around unforeseen stories in a matter of minutes.
The problem of Weibo was largely left to Xi Jinping, and over the past year we’ve seen very robust action — including the campaign against “Big V” users — to bring this now five year-old medium to heel. The thirteen months since the Southern Weekly incident have also seen continued encroachments on the work of journalists at the commercial papers and magazines where for years we have looked for the most professional in-depth and investigative reporting.
In the midst of this lull of uncertainty, central Party media like China Central Television have tried to reclaim the agenda with soft-glove “investigative” reporting, including spots on allegedly poor customer service by Apple in China, high prices for Starbuck’s coffee in China, or news writ large about a government crackdown on the sex trade in Dongguan.
Reports like these have not, however, won CCTV admirers. Many Chinese on social media panned the reports on Apple and Starbuck’s as petty and one-sided. After the reports on the sex trade in Dongguan, many Chinese chose to side with the victimised prostitutes rather than with the authorities.
Shortly after he came to power, Xi Jinping pledged to deal actively with the problem of corruption, “striking tigers as well as flies.” So far, however, Xi has been unwilling to deal systematically — rather than symbolically — with corruption. The government has persecuted those who, like the activist lawyer Xu Zhiyong, have called on officials to be transparent about their assets.
“Swatting at flies and letting the tigers run free” has long been a phrase in China’s media — generally levelled at state outfits like CCTV — to refer to half-baked investigative reports that go after small-time crooks rather than high-level officials. The crackdown in Dongguan, and related reports by Party media, seem to establish a new pattern of expectations, both in terms of the Party’s anti-corruption campaign and the Party’s journalism. That is, government campaigns that swat at flies, and media reporting that fawningly follows suit.
In the following article from the official Xinhua News Agency, the author argues that China Central Television has regained its place lately at the “forefront of watchdog journalism.” If that is true, it is only, unfortunately, because commercial media have been actively discouraged from pursuing harder-hitting coverage.
Real investigative reporting is under threat in China. Meanwhile, CCTV is establishing itself as the country’s preeminent swatter of flies. It’s hard to congratulate the network for exposing “serious quality issues with more than ten types of facial tissues” when there are serious stories in the public interest waiting out there.

After China Central Television exposed the story of the Dongguan sex trade, it then exposed such stories as that involving the “China Hospital Management Society (中华医院管理学会), and serious quality issues with more than ten types of facial tissues. The Dongguan report brought anti-prostitution campaigns in places across China, and the impact of these other reports is still unfolding. CCTV has once again returned to the forefront of watchdog journalism.
There was a period of time in which CCTV served a “flagship” role among Chinese media for the practice of watchdog journalism [or “supervision of public opinion”], with program’s like Focus, Friday Quality Report and News Probe capable of touching on serious issues and stirring attention. Later, with the rise of the internet, a new locus for public opinion was generated, challenging the authority of CCTV and other mainstream media [i.e., Party media], and China’s public opinion pattern experienced profound change.
Perhaps it was the fact that online public opinion was often “too extreme” that gave greater urgency to the task of mainstream media “seizing the public opinion initiative,” and directly challenged and diluted the role of supervision by public opinion. Up to the time of the appearance of Weibo, various news tips, true and false, emerged, so that all traditional media were behind the curve.
On March 15 last year, when CCTV exposed problems with Apple, And later exposed high Starbucks prices in China, it faced an unprecedented clamour online. This suggests that some people online already do not trust the public interest motive of traditional mainstream [Party] media in carrying out supervision by public opinion — and certain forces even wish to deprive CCTC and other [Party media] of their right to conduct supervision by public opinion.
If they do not conduct supervision by public opinion, traditional [Party] media will be progressively marginalised.
If social media sites become the unquestioned chief force in conducting supervision by public opinion, then they might actually become the broadcast center of public opinion in China and its moral high-water point. The fact that CCTV exposed the Dongguan sex industry, and yet still suffered a lot of online criticism, this should be heard as an alarm bell. Mainstream [Party] media Must once again capture the initiative in carrying out supervision by public opinion, winning the full trust of the public. This is most crucial in striking the right balance of online and offline public opinion in the new global internet era.
What we need to recognise is that, with the constant mounting of supervision by public opinion by commercial media and international online supervision, the public’s expectations of supervision by public opinion have already surpassed what they were in the early days of News Probe. . .
Supervision by public opinion can have a soft touch, or it can deal with serious problems we see all around us. The public hopes that mainstream [Party] media are brave enough to pursue “major” and “sensitive” issues, exposing things that the Me Media (自媒体) cannot. This might be strenuous, and it might mean taking risks, but this is certainly what the public expects of traditional mainstream [Party] media.
The influence and authority of the current mainstream [Party] media among the public is a matter that concerns China’s ability to persist along its present political path . . . The government must have a firm consensus about this, recognising that the protection of the authority of the mainstream [Party] media is a key part of enhancing its governing capacity.

In recent days, news of the passing of Li Junxu (李君旭) has been little more than a whisper, muffled amid the story of the crackdown on Dongguan’s sex trade. But 38 years ago, Li Junxu was the centre of a great big news story when it was reported that the 23 year-old factory worker had been arrested for fabricating a text called “The Last Will and Testament of the Premier” (总理遗言).
The world of Chinese politics is a black box, and black-box politics naturally gives rise to “rumour.” I remember very clearly the end of the Cultural Revolution, how people would whisper things privately and pass on speculative information. The core of most of this speculation was Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s last wife. In 1976, Deng Xiaoping was criticized in the movement to “strike back against the right-deviationist wind.” In the midst of this, Zhou Enlai passed away and this drove an undercurrent of rumour and speculation.
In Hangzhou, Li Junxu drew up a fictional “Last Will and Testament” for Zhou Enlai. In March and April 1976, Li’s document spread rapidly across China.

[The above image is of Li Junxu. The image is from Yuan Minzhu’s book, Reassessing the ‘Premier’s Will Case’ of 1976 That I Experienced]
The tone of Li Junxu’s letter was weighted with the sentiment of burden and humiliation. “Do not keep my ashes, but rather throw them away. Goodbye, my comrades!” When we look at the document years later, we can recognise clearly how it validates Zhang Chunqiao (张春桥) and Wang Hongwen (王洪文), but more important is what comes later: “Comrade Deng Xiaoping has done great work on a number of fronts over the past year . . . The pressures to come for Deng Xiaoping will be much greater, but so long as the path is correct, whatever difficulties can be overcome.”
These were fateful words at a time when Mao Zedong was in the midst of “criticising Deng and “striking back against the right-deviationist wind.” On April 1, 1976, The authorities proclaimed that “the so-called Last Will and Testament of the Premier is entirely counter-revolutionary rumour,” and called for an investigation. Just a few days later the “April 5” Tiananmen incident broke out, and Party media argued that political rumour had paved the way for the Incident and that rose who “fabricated counter-revolutionary rumours” must be suppressed. (People’s Daily, April 18, 1976, “What Does the Incident on Tiananmen Square Demonstrate?”.)
Party media said:

In spring this year, as the struggle against the right-deviationists was in full swing, achieving victory after victory, a flood of counter-revolutionary political rumours flooded up from the sewers. A small contingent of class enemies whipped themselves into a frenzy and manufactured the so-called “Directive from Mao Zedong, ” the so-called “Central Document,” the so-called “Last Will and Testament of the Premier,” the so-called “Speech from a Central Party Official,” and so on. They conspired to use the high prestige of Mao Zedong and the Central Party to peddle their black reactionary wares. This is a dangerous and poisonous counter-revolutionary strategy. The content of these political rumours is reactionary, their language is poisonous, their plot is bizarre and their methods disgusting!” (People’s Daily, May 5, 1976.)

The search for the originator of the “Last Will and Testament of the Premier” had begun. Thousands of people across the country were interrogated, and finally Li Junxu and six others were arrested. Li was subjected to brutal treatment while in prison. He was forced to spend long periods of time under powerful lamps, and later suffered from chronic insomnia requiring medication.
In the early 1980s, I once met Li Junxu, a man my own age, from the same hometown — and in fact a professional colleague, like me a writer of reportage who had won a national prize. Never did I imagine that this writer, so full of vitality, would be struck with illness soon after our meeting. In 1989 he suffered a brain haemorrhage that resulted in severe memory loss.
“Rumours” created. “Rumours” believed. “Rumours” passed on. “Rumours” denied. Then, inevitably, rumourmongers punished. This is a story that has played out time and again in China. In many cases, these so-called “rumours” are ultimately shown to be truths that are politically inconvenient. Other “rumours,” like Li Junxu’s will and testament, are actually creative works that express popular anger in an indirect way. This is the nature of Chinese politics. In 2013, Chinese a leaders once again launched am internet crackdown touted as (what else?) a campaign against “big rumours.”
Some of the din and clamour we hear today prompts us to think back to 1976. The spirit of Mao still lingers. This is precisely why those who care about Chinese politics must understand the Cultural Revolution — and why they must learn about “The Last Will and Testament of the Premier” and it’s author, Li Junxu.

Another year has passed. We can now take a comprehensive look back on China’s political discourse in 2013 — and what it can tell us about China’s current political atmosphere.

“Light Blue” Terms Associated with Constitutionalism and Democracy Reach New Lows

I use a graded color system of four quadrants to describe China’s political discourse. “Deep red,” on the left end of the spectrum, denotes political terms from the Maoist era. At the opposite end, we have “dark blue” terms. These are words and phrases, many of them associated with sensitive concepts like separation of powers or privatisation of the military, that the Chinese Communist Party does not permit.
“Light red” terms are those employed by the Party leadership. They represent the dominant orthodoxy in terms of CCP discourse. Finally, “light blue terms” are those the Party does not sanction but does not explicitly ban. They may be used by commercial media in China, but are rarely, if ever, seen in official Party media.

Many of the terms we have observed carefully in our discourse analysis on the topic of political reform within the Party in recent years belong to the light red category — terms like “democratic politics,” “political civilisation” and “intra-Party democracy.”

Light blue terms like “universal values,” “constitutionalism” and “civil society” coexisted peacefully (though not exactly comfortably) with light red terms throughout the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras. But in 2013, the first full year of the Xi Jinping era, light blue terms have been under assault — some moving into the dark blue end of the spectrum.

The idea of “constitutionalism” was the origin of the Southern Weekly incident in January 2013. Southern Weekly‘s New Years editorial — an important essay that generally sets the paper’s professional tone and mission for the year — had originally been called, “The Chinese Dream: the Dream of Constitutionalism.” During preparation of the New Years edition, the editorial was altered beyond recognition by censors in Guangdong. All 18 instances of “constitutionalism” in the essay were removed, and censors even added text to the edition (without input from editors) that contained serious and embarrassing factual errors. The incident created a major uproar, and prompted widespread calls for greater freedom of speech in China.

Using the advanced search function on Baidu.com, the most widely used search engine in China, we can see that 2013 was a different year from 2012 as far as light blue terms were concerned. In 2012, there were 150 distinct articles using the term “universal values” in the headline, of which 78 percent presented the term in a positive light. The same year, there were 400 articles using the term “constitutionalism” in the headline, of which all uses we’re positive.

In 2013, there were 500 articles using “universal values” in the headline, of which 84 percent presented the concept in a negative light. There were 1200 articles using the term “constitutionalism,” 86 percent negative.

Southern Weekly, Southern Metropolis Daily and The Beijing News have typically been publications where light blue terms like the above have thrived. But light blue terms fell off sharply at these newspapers in 2013. Here, for example is a graph of “civil society” in Southern Metropolis Daily over the past 10 years.

Not long after the curtain closed on the 18th National Congress in 2012, Xi Jinping emphasised the need to “govern according to the constitution.” This was the first time that this phrase, which is similar to the notion of constitutionalism, appeared in a headline in the Party’s official People’s Daily. In December 2012, use of the phrase “govern according to the constitution” soared in China’s media. But after this the term nosedived. In 2013, there were seven months during which the term was completely gone from People’s Daily. A search in Baidu News turns up just a handful of uses in headlines, and eight months in which the term is completely absent from headlines.

On the opening day of the Third Plenum of the 18th CCP Central Committee, a lengthy editorial on the front page of the People’s Daily, “‘The New Historic Starting Point’ on the Chinese Road,” did finally include this phrase about the constitution once again, and it emerged in another editorial two days later. But the term did not appear in the formal “Decision” coming out of the Plenum.

On January 6, 2013, the phrase “the two must not rejects,” or liang ge bu fou ding (两个不能否定), began appearing in Chinese newspapers. This term summed up a new political position emerging from the Party leadership, that “the historical period after economic reforms [in 1978] must not be used to reject the historical period before economic reforms; and the historical period before economic reforms must not be used to reject the historical period after economic reforms.” This new phrase generated an uproar, and it heralded the appearance of the “Seven Don’t Speaks,” a Party document — not formally released but widely discussed — restricting use of political ideas generally in the light blue quadrant, like constitutionalism and civil society.

From May to July of 2013 came the first round of attacks against light blue political concepts, but these attacks were met with concerted opposition from academics, lawyers and rights advocates online. Finally, in late August, Party media “showed their swords,” calling for a “public opinion struggle” (also referred to as a “struggle in the ideological sphere”). Both “public opinion struggle” and “struggle in the ideological sphere” are reminiscent of another term from the Maoist era, “class struggle in the ideological sphere.”

From this point deep red discourse moved to center stage. In September, criticism of light blue terms reached new heights, though this assault was put on hold on the eve off the Third Plenum.
On October 17, the People’s Daily re-ran in full an essay from the Party journal Qiushi attributed to “Autumn Stone” (秋石) — a writer, or group of writers, of unknown identity. It was called, “Firming Up the Common Ideological Basis for United Struggle by the Party and the People.” The article was essentially an open version of the “Seven Don’t Speaks,” and said that universal values and constitutional democracy are uniquely Western ideas and forms of governance. It severely criticized neoliberalism, historical nihilism and critiques of China’s reform project. Quite notably, however, the essay left a corner of the net open, touching on the notion of civil society that had previously been lumped in the “Seven Don’t Speaks” and been openly attacked. In discussing “socialist constitutionalism,” another idea roundly criticized for several months, the essay was also somewhat moderate in tone.

On November 8, the day before the opening of the Third Plenum, the People’s Daily ran a piece called, “Accurately Viewing the Two Historical Periods Before and After Economic Reform.” At first glance the piece seemed to expound on the idea of “the two must not rejects,” but in fact it did a patching job on the 1981 “resolution on Important Historical Questions” (历史决议), reaffirming the resolution’s rejection of the Cultural Revolution and its statements on other errors in the period prior to the Cultural Revolution.

Light Red Party Discourse Runs Hot and Cold

Some have described the recent Third Plenum of the 18th CCP Central Committee as a reform milestone, much as was the Third Plenum of the 11th CCP Central Committee that initiated Deng Xiaoping’s reform program. But 2013 was not 1978. For more than a year prior to the 1978 plenum, Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang were engaged in a fierce battle of strength with conservative elements in the Party — a process that was all about debating standards of truth, and ultimately clearing away the road to reform. In 2013, quite the opposite happened. The Third Plenum of the 18th CCP Central Committee, touted as a “comprehensive deepening of reforms,” in fact unfolded in the midst of a year-long atmosphere of ideological campaigning that was quite contrary to reform.

In 2013, the most widely used light red phrase was “the Chinese dream.” In 2012, the Chinese dream appeared 106 times in the People’s Daily. In 2013, it appeared 1,912 times, emerging as a classic super-term (超强话语). We can compare the term to other historical super-terms in the People’s Daily, such as Mao Zedong’s “general line” in 1959 (1,605 appearances), “Mao Zedong’s Thought” in 1966 (3,877), Hua Guofeng’s “grasping the key link to bring great order” (抓纲治国) in 1977 (1,145), and Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” in 2003 (2,928). Another term related to the Chinese dream, “trusting in the path” (道路自信), appeared 95 times in 2012 and 203 times in 2013.

Ever since the 16th National Congress in 2002, the Party has prescribed a whole set of regularized terms that deal with reform. These include: Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents, the Scientific View of Development, the Harmonious Society, the people as the base, political system reforms, political civilisation, democratic politics and intra-party democracy.

Among these, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents and the Harmonious Society are the banner terms of Xi Jinping’s predecessors, Deng, Jiang and Hu. They are, in other words, the slogans meant to encapsulate their ideas and policies. Some have argued that this set of terms can be understood essentially as “enlightened discourse” within the CCP — a strain of open-mindedness, if you will. The core of Deng Xiaoping Theory, for example, is Deng’s openness and reform policy. The essence of Jiang’s Three Represents (according to this reading) is the transformation of the CCP from a revolutionary party to a governing party, the most tangible result being the decision to admit capitalists into the Party. On the surface, the terms associated with Hu Jintao are also relatively moderate. My analysis has revealed that the weakness or intensity of these terms corresponds directly to the strength or weakness of light blue discourse in China’s media. In those years that these terms are on the rise, light blue terms enjoy more space to develop.

I conducted a search of this set of banner terms from 2004 to 2013 to determine their frequency of use over time. My sources were the People’s Daily database and Hong Kong’s WiseNews database, the latter representing hundreds of mainland Chinese newspapers. The following plots frequency in the People’s Daily:

Numbers in the People’s Daily reveal that all 9 of these terms, excepting “political system reforms,” reached historic lows in 2013. When we conduct a headline search in the WiseNews database, the results are the same. We see too that “political system reforms,” a light red term that straddles the light blue on my spectrum (used eagerly, that is, by more liberal commercial media), reaches its lowest point in seven years in 2013. The light blue term “constitutional democracy” seems to ebb away entirely. Most important to notice is the fact that the entire set of light red “enlightened” terms in the CCP discourse are on a downward slide in 2013. Among these, I note in particular the rapid descent of “intra-party democracy.”

What Does the Plummeting of “Intra-Party Democracy” Tell Us?

Among those who still hold out hope for political reform within the CCP, the most modest hope is that intra-party democracy can expand under the umbrella of single-party rule — which would include, for example, changes to selection procedures for the National Congress of the CCP and local Party governing bodies. During the Hu Jintao era, the term “intra-party democracy” experienced periods of advancement in the media. Hu Jintao affirmed the idea of putting organisational decisions to vote — by allowing multiple candidates (to the Party’s liking, of course) to compete for a certain number of positions — and during his tenure some experiments in internal elective procedures were encouraged.

The focus during the Hu era where intra-party democracy was concerned was on what is called “differential election,” or cha’e xuanju (差额选举), whereby multiple Party candidates stand for election by their Party peers for a number of positions (a differential of 105 percent, for example, would mean 105 individuals filling 100 posts). Under Hu Jintao there was also limited experimentation in certain areas with direct election of Party officials. After he took office, Hu encouraged a number of places in China to organize experiments in the direct election of grassroots Party officials. One of these places was in Jiangsu province, where the provincial Party secretary, Li Yuanchao, first experimented with “ or gongtui zhixuan (公推直选), between 2002 and 2007.

Gongtui zhixuan is one method of reforming the mechanisms by which leaders are chosen for official posts, a limited decentralization (or letting go) of the Party’s power to exercise control over its own cadres. The word gongtui, which means roughly “mutual nomination,” refers to the method by which candidates emerge. Formerly (and of course this is mostly still the case), candidates were simply appointed by their Party superiors. Now, in addition to candidates recommended by superiors, Party members can jointly or individually recommend candidates, and city residents or villagers can send representatives to take part in the nomination process. Zhixuan, which means “direct selection,” refers to a process by which a general meeting of Party members or a congress of Party delegates directly elects a candidate for a post from among the nominees.

When we search the People’s Daily over the past five years, we can see that “open nomination and direct election” reached a peak of coverage in 2010. “Differential election” reached its peak in 2012.
In 2013, use of the term “intra-party democracy” fell 74 percent in the <em<People’s Daily over the previous year. Use of the term fell 81 percent in the larger universe of Chinese newspapers represented by the WiseNews database. “Open nomination and direct election” dropped 88 percent in the People’s Daily in 2013, and 64 percent in the WiseNews database. “Differential election,” meanwhile, fell 67 percent in the People’s Daily and 48 percent in the WiseNews database.

At the same time, another term, “deliberative democracy,” or xieshang minzhu (协商民主), reached a five-year high 2013. When we conduct a headline search for the term on People’s Daily Online, the official online portal of the CCP mouthpiece, we find that use of the term increased 69 percent in 2013 over the previous year.

Party media assert that the idea of deliberative democracy has historic roots in the Chinese Communist Party, that it is not a foreign import. In fact, deliberative democracy is a concept that comes from mature constitutional democracies in the West. The term appeared for the first time in the People’s Daily in 2006, but specifically dealt with the workings of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress. The article quoted Li Junru (李君如), former deputy head of the Central Party School, as saying that, “Our democratic politics, in terms of the people’s congress system, essentially carries out elective democracy; and where the consultative congresses are concerned chiefly carries out deliberative democracy” (People’s Daily, April 7, 2006, p. 13).

In the CCP dictionary, “elective democracy” and “deliberative democracy” are opposites. In the past, Party media have asserted that a combination of elective and deliberative democracy is what makes for Chinese-style democracy. Deliberative democracy is also a term much loved by those of the China Model camp, who assert that China has developed its own unique set of values (distinct from those of the West) enshrined in its own unique and highly successful system. In 2013, the term “deliberative democracy” made a much stronger appearance in China. The Third Plenum defined economic reform as the focus of the reform project, and had little to remark on the issue of political reform. In his explanation of the Decision emerging from the plenum, Xi Jinping said:

The [Party] Congress has taken the widespread and multi-level systematisation and development of deliberative democracy as the chief content of political system reform, emphasizing, under the leadership of the Party, the carrying out of an expansive process of deliberation throughout society on major issues of economic and social development and real issues dealing with the immediate interests of the masses, carrying deliberation through from the policy-making phase to the policy implementation phase.

The only point in Xi’s speech dealing at all with political system reforms is directly connected with deliberative democracy. This elaboration by Xi would seem to suggest that we can only expect the scope of political reform [pursued by the Party] to narrow in the future. we can expect substantive moves on political reform, those touching on the thornier issue of Party power — such as an organisational system in the Party based principally on elective procedures, or separating the powers of decision-making, implementation and supervision — will be very slow indeed. The focus in promoting democratic politics under this formulation lies outside the Party, with “consultation” taking precedence over election. if this is indeed the case, I’m afraid what we have is the shelving of Deng Xiaoping’s idea that the core of political reform must be addressing the problem of “over-concentration of power.” As we see the rapid cooling off of the term “intra-party democracy” this can only anticipate further concentration of power.

Observations for 2014

1. Deep red. We must continue to observe the term “public opinion struggle.” While the term has mitigated somewhat in event weeks, it is still being used. Its last appearance in the official People’s Daily was on December 30. we must pay special attention to the phrase “raising high the banner of Mao Zedong’s Thought” (高举毛泽东思想旗帜). Over the past few years the standardised slogan has been, “raising high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics” (高举中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜), but just as Jiang Zemin did in his speech to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth, and Hu Jintao for the 110th, Xi Jinping used the phrase in his recent 120th anniversary speech. The question is whether or not use of the phrase will continue, and so we must keep a close eye on the use of deep red keywords this year.

I’ve pointed out before that “Mao Zedong’s Thought” is a measuring stick we can use to look at Chinese politics. If we look at the People’s Daily and at the broader universe of papers represented by WiseNews, we find that use of this term did not increase in 2013. However, if we search news headlines on Baidu.com, we find that “Mao Zedong Thought” has reached a six-year high (altogether 2,120 uses, of which 312 came between December 26 and December 31).

2. Light blue and dark blue. Something we have to look at very carefully is whether in fact “universal values” and “constitutionalism,” typically light blue terms in the past, have indeed shifted into the dark blue, becoming sensitive terms that cannot be used in a positive sense. It seems at the moment that “civil society” and “civil rights” remain in the light blue quadrant. Toward the end of the year, both People’s Daily Online and the official website of the court system, chinacourt.org, carried articles using “civil society” in a positive sense. We’ll have to see whether this situation holds.

3. Light red. Right now “the Chinese dream” is dominant everywhere. but this slogan is meant to be primarily motivational, like Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward incitement to “surpass England and the United States.” It is not, in fact, a banner term (or legacy term), like “Mao Zedong Thought,” “Deng Xiaoping Theory” or the “Three Represents.” There is a process to banner term introduction in the Chinese Communist Party, and these are not things leaders simply toss out as soon as they take the stage. It’s inconceivable that in the future people will be shouting, “Raise high the banner of the Chinese dream!” Nor can we imagine a legacy formulation like, “Comprehensively implementing the Chinese dream.” So the matter of Xi Jinping’s banner term is something we’ll have to keep an eye out for.
2013 was a year in which we saw the deck of China’s political discourse being shuffled. This year, we’ll have to be careful observers and see what cards are played.