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Chinese Censors Are Being Watched
Rambo Tribble writes "The Economist is reporting on two research teams, one at Harvard and another at the University of Hong Kong, who have developed software to detect what posts to Chinese social media get censored. 'The team has built up a database comprising more than 11m posts that were made on 1,382 Chinese internet forums. Perhaps their most surprising result is that posts critical of the government are not rigorously censored. On the other hand, posts that have the purpose of getting people to assemble, potentially in protest, are swept from the internet within a matter of hours.' Chinese censors may soon have to deal with an unprecedented transparency of their actions."
There is space to criticize the government in China. It's all in how you say it. Most domestic criticism is self-censored to some extent.
I've seen it many times myself. A protester in China can usually get away with saying something along the lines of "the local party bosses are corrupt", or "this particular party policy is harmful". Anything that suggests a localized and correctable problem, but always within the confines of the Communist system. This is what successful protesters in China do these days.
What triggers censorship, imprisonment and worse, is to suggest that the party system itself is the problem. That is what is beyond the pale in China.
This arrangement is hardly perfect of course. However it has created a remarkable amount of space for public discourse in China, far more than those citizens have had in many decades. That political space has allowed China to grow, reform and modernize. In time I suspect that China's reforms will only grow and get more powerful.