Instead of “all is quiet on Weishan Lake”, where Communist guerrillas hid while fighting the Japanese, he sang “all is quiet in the Forbidden City”, the old imperial centre of Beijing, and home to China’s leaders. FOR SOMETHING deemed so subversive, the act was understated, even underwhelming. During a live performance in mid-July, Guo Degang, a comedian, tweaked a popular Chinese revolutionary song. His precise meaning was ambiguous, not pointed. He drew little more than a light chuckle from the audience. But he elicited far more from state authorities: a crackdown that epitomises the narrowed space for speech in China.
Authorities publicised penalties for people who had “spread rumours” online, including one who merely speculated that thousands might be buried in the rubble. Videos of the disaster, including one showing a mud torrent overwhelming a border crossing, were scrubbed from online platforms. Only a handful of journalists from big state organs were allowed into the flood zone for the first ten days. There are questions to be asked. How could Nepal, with fewer resources, update its casualty list rapidly, whereas China’s barely budged?
Had China shared enough weather data with Nepal before the glacial collapse?
But Xi Jinping made clear soon after taking power in 2012 that the unruly internet had to be tamed and the media must serve the party.
China still has plenty of commentary beyond pure state media, especially in “public accounts” on WeChat. The party used to be a big step behind China’s once-rumbustious online chats; now it undoubtedly has the upper hand, says Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times, a site that monitors censorship. Neither Mr Guo’s travails nor the circumscribed flood coverage will surprise those who track Chinese speech. Both are grim markers of how far the information environment has shifted. In the early 2000s the internet seemed to offer an opening for debate. Chinese journalists sometimes pursued courageous investigations. On his own terms, he has been successful. Yet anyone posting there knows that taboo topics get accounts closed, a strong incentive to play it safe. More recently, artificial intelligence has given censors great power to survey the digital landscape in all its vastness and to speedily delete undesirable content.
