China has captured global attention due to its rapid development of Internet infrastructure owing to the introduction of economic reform and marketization over the recent decades. The Internet regulation in China also has its Chinese characteristics. China has long been an authoritarian country whose censorship tradition is deep seated in its historical background and political entity. It has spawned a prosperous Internet culture to ironize the censorship action itself, netizens willingly use “to harmonize” as a synonym of “to censor”.
My thesis aims to investigate the complex view of China’s Internet regulation and its Chinese characteristics, and how the censorship is practiced to secure the harmonious socialist society, from both existing research and news media. By investigating existing literature, I unfold the governmental development of the massive cyberspace surveillance and the ways in which the censorship works. On the basis of the theoretical understanding of China’s Internet regulation, my research continues to explore the specific cases of censorship programmes happened in the 2010s represented by news reporting, i.e. anniversaries of the Tiananmen Protest, Occupy the Central, the 50 Cents Army and the banned Internet spoofs, in order to see how China’s Internet censorship was portrayed in the real cases. The research primarily adopts case study and content analysis methodology, carefully identifies novel censorship phenomena appeared during the recent decade to embody the harmonization censorship processes.
This paper serves to encapsulate the intricate Chinese Internet regulation system for both Chinese and western scholars, and most significantly, for the young generation of Chinese Internet consumers, to gain an improved understanding of the status quo of China’s cyberspace landscape
