How Chinese Censorship Is Going Global–With Help From US Companies

China's vast domestic censorship system is spreading abroad, helped in part by U.S. companies, in a way that is affecting the global information environment and posing major challenges to U.S. interests, according to a report written for a congressional commission.

"These challenges necessitate that the United States takes action to safeguard its domestic information space and to preserve a free and open internet, both of which are vital factors for continued U.S. economic prosperity and individual liberty," said Censorship Practices of the People's Republic of China, a detailed report by the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a think tank belonging to Exovera, an intelligence and security company in Vienna, Virginia.

The report comes at a time of tension between the United States and China on multiple fronts, with U.S. security agencies seeing China as the nation's biggest strategic rival. It was requested by the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, which monitors the relationship between the countries and provides recommendations to Congress for action.

Calling China's information control system "the world's most elaborate and pervasive censorship apparatus," the authors said that as well as using censorship to maintain the Communist Party's monopoly on power at home with "public opinion guidance," as the CCP calls it, the party also views the overseas information environment – the internet and media, companies, diplomacy and international politics - as vital to the party's survival and carries out extensive "international public opinion guidance" in global information environments.

They used a broad definition of censorship that goes beyond simply preventing publication to include such practices as deliberately pumping out false online information to drown out or distort facts, or punishing companies for saying things that China believes violate its interests in an effort to ensure that they self-censor.

China's embassy in Washington, D.C. told Newsweek "We firmly oppose these groundless accusations against China. The Chinese government protects press freedom in accordance with law, and gives full play to the role of media and citizens in supervising public opinion." Spokesperson Liu Pengyu said: "We urge the U.S. to reflect on itself and stop framing China for the so-called 'censorship system'."

"US media including the New York Post have revealed cases about how the US Department of Defense and the FBI had meddled in social media platforms to disseminate disinformation and manipulate domestic and international public opinion," Liu said, adding that last year China released a report that said the United States was manipulating media and social media companies to influence global opinion.

The commission's charter mandates it to track restrictions on speech and access to information in China in relation to the United States security, "as well as any potential impact of media control by the People's Republic of China on United States economic interests."

Asked for comment, the commission referred Newsweek to its November 2023 annual report to Congress where it said Beijing's overseas influence activities had become "flagrant."

"Foreign countries' media, politicians, businesses, academic institutions, and ethnically Chinese citizens and residents are all major targets of Beijing's harmful, aggressive, and at times illegal overseas influence efforts," with activities including "harassment of the press, including allegedly framing individual reporters for criminal activity," the commission wrote in a section titled, "Battling for Overseas Hearts and Minds."

Global Rise - Helped by America

China's leader, Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, says China will lead the world in the economy, science and technology, and have a military capable of "fighting and winning wars" by 2049 at the latest. Chinese leaders view the U.S. as the key obstacle to its global rise to preeminence.

Despite that, U.S. companies are helping the party grow its censorship system, the authors said, while noting that there was only limited evidence to suggest that any such help from U.S. firms was deliberate.

"The PRC is devoting considerable resources toward the development and fielding of advanced AI and big data analysis technologies for online content monitoring," they said.

"Crucially, many of these AI-enabled "public opinion guidance" tools rely on off-the-shelf components imported from the United States, such as general processing units (GPUs) and cloud computing infrastructure," the authors write, adding, "Chinese firms that produce censorship and surveillance technology have allegedly instrumentalized partnerships with companies such as Google and IBM to refine and improve their products."

Newsweek has reached out to Google and IBM for comment. It has also reached out to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C.

While some U.S. firms are only indirectly implicated, "in many cases, foreign companies working in China deliberately conceal their connections to China's security services, which complicates due diligence to avoid contributing to the PRC's censorship apparatus," the authors warned.

Censorship over Russia-Ukraine War

To illustrate the global challenge to the U.S., the authors singled out China's censorship of the Russia-Ukraine War. "While maintaining an ostensibly neutral stance on the Russia-Ukraine War, China has actively facilitated the propagation of pro-Russian content," the report says. "The extensive and adaptive censorship efforts—ranging from flooding the airwaves with Russian talking points and engaging in keyword suppression to the deletion of dissenting and aberrant views—illustrate an intricate web aimed at shaping domestic and international narratives to align with China's geopolitical and ideological objectives, while subtly highlighting its sovereign prerogatives."

Under Xi, censorship is growing in scale and sophistication. Online and offline it is run by all levels of the Chinese party-state from the Central Propaganda Department in Beijing down to the county and village level, as well as by multiple ministries – including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which says it "guides and safeguards China's information security"- state-owned enterprises, and even many private companies.

The report said that over the past decade, China had punished more than 120 companies for supporting speech that it believed had violated its interests. This included blocking hotel group Marriot's website in response to a customer survey that suggested Taiwan was a country — rather than the region of China that Beijing says it is. Gap, the clothing company, was forced to issue an apology for selling clothing featuring a map of China that omitted Taiwan and southern Tibet.

The China Internet Network Information Center says that 1.07 billion Chinese are online, using the internet to access services from instant messaging to online news to live streaming and online gaming.

They are a main target of the biggest censorship system in human history which employs tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people - and increasing numbers of AI systems - to produce a specific information environment in China that allows for some local dissent but that moves swiftly to block information when debate grows too large, or, for example, targets the CCP or its leaders.

How Censorship Spread COVID-19

In a key example of why this vast system of censorship in China threatens people everywhere and not just China, the authors point to how the authorities handled the COVID19 outbreak that emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, before spreading around the world and killing about 7 million people.

First, they censored a Wuhan doctor and whistleblower, Li Wenliang, who tried to alert people about the fast-spreading disease. Li later died of it. Then, "China stifled researchers by restricting what could be published, and then it flooded domestic and international media platforms with disinformation," the authors write.

They warned a similar scenario could affect the world should China experience an economic crisis, affecting U.S. and other nations' ability to respond to a dramatic downturn and possibly spreading economic contagion around the world.

Countermeasures

The U.S. should undertake a host of measures to counter all this, the report says, including operating satellite internet constellations which "have the potential to undermine the CCP's stranglehold over data flows into and out of China."

Satellite-based internet is, however, not a panacea, as the PRC is already updating its censorship tactics and deploying its own satellite internet infrastructure to meet the challenge.

"Nevertheless, shifting to this model for internet dissemination would impose significant cost on the PRC's censorship apparatus by forcing it to police a much more decentralized telecommunications infrastructure environment," the authors write.

Both the Department of State and the Department of Commerce should look much more closely at challenges from Chinese censorship and act on these, the authors say. For example, State should more aggressively "expand and improve upon U.S. public diplomacy efforts in China and provide objective reporting on misconduct and misgovernment by the Party-state," they recommend. "Moreover, elements of the U.S. intelligence community should deepen avenues for sharing information on tactics, techniques, and procedures" used by state-backed hacking groups. The authors singled out China's DRAGONBRIDGE "advanced persistent threat" (APT) group that specializes in information operations. It is also known as Spamouflage Dragon.

Other proposed countermeasures included: Restrict the transfer of data, hardware, software, and expertise used to support next generation censorship tools and other inputs such as data used to train machine learning models.

The U.S. should issue a public advisory list of Chinese companies that support state censorship, including their subsidiaries or shell companies: "Doing so will greatly assist due diligence by U.S.-based technology firms and will enable them to avoid inadvertently supporting China's censorship regime," the authors said.

They also advocated for greater federal funding of Internet archive services, such as the Wayback Machine, and increasing the budget of grant-making agencies that support scholars and journalists hit by "entry bans" to China so they can continue to work on uncovering vital information.

The report noted that online searches for information from outside China were heavily censored, citing a report in 2023 by researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab that found 60,000 unique ways to partially or totally censor search results across Chinese media and technology platforms Baidu, Baidu Zhidao, Bilibili, Microsoft Bing, Douyin, Jingdong, Sogou, and Weibo.

"Independent journalism and scholarly research have been central to undermining PRC censorship of sensitive topics, ranging from the 2019 prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong to the CCP's mistreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Accordingly, the United States can support these efforts by increasing funding for scholarships and grants for research related to China as well as facilitating broader access to resources such as archives," they write.