Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall by Margaret E. Roberts (review)

With over seven hundred million internet users, China's netizens would seem to be all but ungovernable.¹ Viral outrage and scalable coordination should alarm a government whose actions are still guided by memories of the events of 1989. Yet as Margaret Roberts relates in her new monograph, information management in China is so effective that in 2015, even a young professional engaged in feminist activism, despite having studied in the United States and regularly using a VPN, remained completely unaware that five activists had been detained in Beijing for their plans to protest sexual harassment.

Rather than self-censorship, this anecdote suggests that the secret of authoritarian control lies in insulating activists from their audience. Roberts marshals considerable evidence in support of this proposition, showing that first-hand experience with censorship seems not to have a chilling effect, while minor inconveniences (such as the Great Firewall) are enough to divert online traffic away from sensitive areas. She terms this strategy "friction," and pairs it with "flooding," in which coordinated waves of information, either in newspapers or from an army of paid posters, distract citizens from bad news. These tools of censorship are less likely to incite a backlash than fear-based deterrence, and might even escape the notice of the censored population.

Like Roberts, I have noticed the subtle power of these methods in my own daily life. I frequently use Baidu or the Chinese version of Bing rather than connect over VPN to use Google, and I sometimes substitute other news sources for the New York Times when in China. Yet I wonder if Roberts goes too far in arguing against the importance of self-censorship. Although many Chinese criticize the government online, politics is still a taboo topic of conversation. Social sanctioning could play a powerful role in limiting speech, even when state persecution is unlikely. Furthermore, closed restaurants, sealed side entrances to my building, and a friendly visit from the police during this spring's Two Meetings provided small but meaningful reminders of state power during a sensitive period. I realize that as a foreigner, I am part of the "skeptical class" that Roberts suggests has been walled off from the rest of the public. Yet in its biggest shortcoming, the book does not address in detail how censorship deals with this skeptical class. How does the government attempt to silence activists without provoking a backlash, and how do dissatisfied elites try to circumvent the censors?

However, the theory of friction and flooding is a well-substantiated and valuable explanation of how China governs the vast majority of internet users. If past research by Bruce Dickson suggests that private enterprise is co-opted by the CCP,² while Joseph Fewsmith and Minxin Pei argue that the Party has little incentive to change,^3,4 Roberts' work suggests that those wishing for political reform in China should not place their hopes in networked citizens either. Rather, Roberts concludes that potential misdirection during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, opaque search algorithms, and the debate over net neutrality leave democracies with reason to worry about the internet's role in their own political process.

This is not to say that friction and flooding are perfect tools. In normal times, their permeability is an asset, making censorship harder to observe and reducing the chance that censorship might actually draw attention to an issue. Yet in times of crisis (such as the Tianjin explosions in 2015), many citizens are both willing and able to evade these forms of censorship—precisely the reason that the state seeks to distract citizens from potential focal points before they grow out of control.

In addition to tackling the "how" of censorship, the book discusses what information is censored, tolerated, or promoted. News of and calls for protests, as well as pornography, are most strictly policed, while some criticism of the government is permitted as...