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[THREAD] This is a fascinating read from Jessica Batke and Marieke Ohlberg on the biz of public opinion monitoring in China. I wrote about this industry and CCP's internet strategy at a much earlier stage, in 2013, so I'll add a few historical nuggets https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/features/message-control-china
By 2013 there were already more than 100 Chinese companies officially hawking systems for monitoring and filtering public opinion online to ministries and local governments. Beijing municipality's internet-propaganda office had bought one for $4.3m
Interestingly there was at least one foreign supplier: The British co Autonomy had devised a public-opinion monitoring system for the China market in 2006 and had takers in government. HP bought Autonomy in 2011 (I don't know what became of this but Autonomy imploded as a biz)
Here's how one supplier, Founder, created by Peking Univ, pitched to potential govt customers: “The early-warning [feature] monitors sensitive information which needs to be dealt with immediately…such as June 4th [and] Charter 08” (the latter was an anti-authoritarian manifesto)
The CCP has been paranoid about public opinion online since the early days--authorities shut down an online bulletin board at Peking U in 1996 when young nationalists began agitating for demonstrations against Japan. There were fewer than 80,000 people online in China back then
A more aggressive approach to opinion-shaping can be traced to 2005-07. Hu Jintao warned in '05 of a "smokeless war" with China's enemies. In January '07 he told the Politburo it needed to “assert supremacy over online public opinion” and “study the art of online guidance”.
It was in this period that the CCP took to paying commentators online and "public opinion guidance", and an industry sprouted. As Batke and Ohlberg document, that work has taken on industrial scale since then, and permeates every level of society in China https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/features/message-control-china
And as seen in @paulmozur's story here, it's a sophisticated system that often works https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/technology/china-coronavirus-censorship.html
The trajectory shows China has indeed figured out ways to harness the internet, for the time being anyway. It helped (a lot) to be paranoid from the start. A good case of how paranoia is a necessary feature of authoritarian systems, more than a weakness (tho it can also be that)
You can read more about the history here. Some of the details in this thread are from the section called "Cat and Mouse": https://www.economist.com/special-report/2013/04/06/a-giant-cage
Tagging @MareikeOhlberg here. Apologies to her for misspelling her first name at the start of this thread, which helps explain why I had trouble finding her twitter handle. Highly recommend following her and her work.
