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The Chinese national emblem outside Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong was vandalised on July 21 during a march organised by the Civil Human Rights Front against the now withdrawn extradition bill. The incident triggered Chinese media to end its silence on the Hong Kong protests. Photo: Edmond So

Censored by China, deleted social media posts live on in Hong Kong

  • A team from the University of Hong Kong has been tracking online censorship on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat for years
  • They look for patterns in posts that have been removed by the government or internet service providers, and archive everything they find has disappeared
Technology

July 21, 2019 remains seared into Hongkongers’ memories for the shocking images and videos of white-shirted men, some suspected to be gangsters, beating protesters and train passengers with sticks in the Yuen Long railway station.

Over the border in mainland China, the date evokes a different scenario: black-clad protesters converging on Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong and defacing the national emblem of the People’s Republic of China with black spray paint.

Until that day, Chinese media had been silent on protests erupting in Hong Kong against a now withdrawn extradition bill that would have allowed criminal suspects to be sent for trial on the mainland, among other jurisdictions with which Hong Kong does not yet have such an agreement.

For Fu King-wa, associate professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), who has had an interest in Chinese state censorship spanning 30 years, the assault on the national emblem – just hours before the attack in Yuen Long as protesters returned home – was a trigger point.

The following day saw a huge number of posts mentioning “Hong Kong independence” on the Chinese Twitter-like microblogging service Weibo, Fu says.

“A lot of people, including state media, framed the whole story [of the protests] as a challenge to authority and the homeland. But we understand that has nothing to do with Hong Kong independence, but with the extradition bill, and the government’s mismanagement of the whole issue that led to police violence,” he says.

Fu King-wa, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. Photo: Tory Ho

The context of the protests was lost on the public in mainland China, Fu adds. All they saw was news of the so-called attack on China’s dignity with the protesters branded as separatists.

The case for a separatist movement went global when, on October 4, Daryl Morey, general manager of America’s Houston Rockets basketball team, tweeted an image with the words, “Fight for freedom / Stand with Hong Kong.”

“It was a very general way to support Hong Kong, but it was considered to be [about] Hong Kong independence,” Fu says.

Police officers at the Yuen Long Police Station in anti-riot gear ahead of a demonstration to condemn the assaults at Yuen Long railway station. Photo: Sam Tsang

These alternative perspectives are of special interest to Fu, whose first brush with activism against censorship was as an HKU freshman studying electronic engineering. In the spring of 1989, Fu and his dorm mates were glued to the television, watching the pro-democracy demonstrations taking place in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

They began attending rallies and, feeling compelled to inform mainland Chinese people living outside the capital of the unfolding events, they transmitted news briefs using the latest technology: fax machines. The fax numbers came from a copy of the China Yellow Pages the students had found.

“We didn’t have money, so we asked companies with fax machines to help us fax, say, 10 pages to 10 fax numbers. Later, people donated fax machines to us,” he recalls.

“We did this every day because every day there were updates. Some people thanked us saying, ‘We did not know all these things’ … some people asked why we were sending rubbish to them because [they thought] it was untrue. They didn’t have any television broadcast about this.”

Members of Amnesty International performing an interpretation of censorship against journalists by gagging and surrounding supposed journalists by mock police on May 31, 2008 in Paris, ahead of the Beijing Summer Olympics. Photo: AFP via Getty Images
Today, Fu monitors censorship using computer programs he has developed. Every day, his team makes copies of public posts on Weibo and WeChat – China’s largest social media network and messaging app – and stores them in an extensive database, revisiting them later. If a post disappears, that means it has been censored.

With a sufficiently large data set, Fu and his team can look for patterns in posts that have been removed by the government or internet service providers.

Fu graduated in electronic engineering in 1993 and two years later studied a master’s degree in the field at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He then worked for a local engineering firm for two years before deciding to switch careers, and became a reporter at the Hong Kong Economic Journal.

People started using pictures, posts and homophones to get around the censors. For example, xihongshi is ‘tomato’ in Mandarin, but it can also be ‘west red city’, which means Chongqing
Fu King-wa

In the early 2000s, after a spate of copycat suicides, Fu switched focus again. He did a PhD on media and mental health in 2006, and began working for the HKU Journalism and Media Studies Centre three years later.

Fu has been archiving the evolution of China’s social media scene for more than a decade now, which seems an eternity due to the speed at which the country has been developing technologically.

He began in 2008 before the Beijing Summer Olympics, when demonstrations erupted in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang. The unrest was reported on Fanfou, an early microblogging site.

“The Chinese regulator had no idea what a microblog was. They did not know how to regulate it and its impact. At the time, Fanfou was one of the most significant platforms to circulate information about Xinjiang. That, of course, upset the Chinese government, and that year they completely shut down the site,” Fu says.

How China censors its internet and controls information

In 2009, internet giant Sina developed the microblogging platform Weibo. It agreed to work hand in hand with the government to censor sensitive posts, deleting them according to key words or manually with an army of censors. That prompted Fu to apply his engineering skills to develop a computer system to track large samples of censored posts on the platform.

The program, called Weiboscope, follows “Big V” accounts – popular businesspeople, celebrities, human rights lawyers, descendants of senior leaders, scholars, media outlets and even NGOs. These accounts each have at least one million followers. At one time Weiboscope followed up to 300,000 accounts.

By the end of its first year in operation, Fu and his team at Weiboscope recorded 20 million censored posts.

China’s propaganda machine kicked into overdrive in February last year to defend the Communist Party’s move to scrap term limits for President Xi Jinping as critics on social media again defied censorship attempts. Photo: AFP via Getty Images

Weibo’s “golden period” came in 2012, when so many people were using the service that it became a headache for the government to regulate.

It was the same year the wife of then Chongqing Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai was convicted of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood. There was also the case of blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who dramatically escaped house arrest and fled to the US embassy in Beijing.

“These things are all on Sina Weibo. With one single click it can reach one million people, so how can the government control it?” Fu says.

Additionally, social media users on the mainland have increasingly been ramping up a cat-and-mouse game with the censors.

“People started using pictures, posts and homophones to get around the censors. For example, xihongshi is ‘tomato’ in Mandarin, but it can also be ‘west red city’, which means Chongqing,” Fu explains.

While Big Vs still use Weibo despite intense oversight, and censors are removing posts faster thanks to algorithms and AI, Fu says there has been a massive shift to WeChat since 2014 where, like Facebook, posts are disseminated to friends rather than the public. Fu subsequently developed WeChatscope in 2018, which monitors the public posts of the social media app.

China worst abuser of internet freedom as online censorship soars

Despite the detached nature of observing what Chinese people post online, Fu has indirectly helped some people in preserving important posts that would otherwise have been lost forever to the censorship machine. They include civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who was convicted in 2015 for Weibo posts critical of the Communist Party. Pu was handed a three-year suspended sentence for “inciting ethnic hatred” and “picking quarrels” that resulted in his disbarment and his Weibo account being shut down.

Fu’s project had archived an entire copy of his Weibo posts, which he gave to Pu through a mutual friend.

“This was the least I could do for Pu. I am very pleased to do something for public service. What he wrote should be part of history in the future,” Fu says.

Nevertheless, with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong stretching into their seventh month, and the landslide victory for pro-democracy parties in the recent District Council elections, Fu is concerned about what the future holds for the city and its residents.

“The next chief executive will have a heavy hand [on Hong Kong]. I expect the police state to continue. But at least now, I am at HKU and I can continue to do this project and collect censored posts in China,” he says.

“I will continue to look at Weibo to see how they frame the Hong Kong protests, and speak to the media about my findings. Until some point [when] the political and legal environment does not allow me to do it, I will continue to do it to the last. I’m not alone. I think a lot of people are doing the same thing.”

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