Part IV: China’s Assessment of its Online Civil Disobedience
It is commonplace to credit the Chinese government with considerable power in its application of cyber assets to contain online dissent. Studies of the takedown rates by the country’s army of censors of internet posts considered offensive or subversive reveal both high capability and tenacity by government agencies and their co-opted partners in civil society and private sector businesses. Indicative works include studies by the China Media Project at Hong Kong University and a 2013 study by a group of five scholars on the “velocity of censorship”. On April 10 2015, The New York Times reported on China’s highly effective use of a new internet censorship tool dubbed by foreign researchers with the nick name “the great cannon”.
In contrast to studies on the effectiveness of take-down rates by the regime and its other technical successes, we see less often direct evidence of official assessments by Chinese agencies of the scale of online civil disobedience, its trends and its political implications. Much of the study of online political opposition to the Chinese Communist Party has focused on what might be called classic dissent, which involves articulate political activists usually organized around some platform of well-argued ideas. There has also been considerable study of public opinion, especially that expressed in mass proportions through the internet. There has been less analysis of what might be called “online civil disobedience” or “civil disobedience in cyber space”.
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