Political Communication in China

Summary

No state in the world manipulates political communication with the reach, sophistication, and scope of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP has adapted digital tools and computational technologies on the internet and routinely polices content and internet users. Information manipulation is an especially common practice on social media. However, such manipulation is best understood not as a single state apparatus acting upon a population, but as an evolving and contested field in which party organs, central and local government agencies, state and commercial media, internet celebrities, and increasingly powerful technology platforms interact with—and are pushed back by—more than 1 billion internet users. Scholarship on this field has developed most rapidly in three areas: censorship, the restriction and removal of political information; propaganda, the production and promotion of party-favored messages; and the quality, credibility, and transparency of the information that circulates. Across these areas, a central tension recurs between the state’s tight control of political discourse and its simultaneous cultivation of a globally competitive information economy. This coexistence reflects a distinctive digital governance model in which control and development search for an equilibrium—sometimes operating in concert, at other times in considerable conflict. A growing body of research shows that the party’s mechanisms of control are often porous, that its propaganda is frequently unpersuasive, and that netizens are technically sophisticated and skeptical of state interference. Newer lines of inquiry extend beyond domestic opinion to several fronts: digital surveillance, the projection of Chinese information control beyond national borders, and the broader politics of digital governance. Taken together, this scholarship positions China as an important example for understanding how authoritarian regimes govern political communication in the digital age.