IT WAS bound to be a messy combination and, according to a new report on censorship in China, it is. The country has an estimated 600m internet users who are growing ever more accustomed to reading what they want and saying what they think. It also has a rigid one-party system, the leaders of which are ever more determined to keep at least a modicum of control over what may be read and said online.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based NGO, describes the nation’s complicated information landscape in a 27-page report released Tuesday, “Challenged in China: The shifting dynamics of censorship and control.” The group says that China’s traditional press, “controlled by the state and beset by propaganda directives,” now co-exists with “a new online ecosystem where news breaks and spreads faster than censors can catch it.”
The report (available also in Chinese) warns that officials may not be able to sustain their sprawling system of online control, which relies on multi-level keyword filtering, self-censorship requirements for operators, surveillance of users and threats of punishment.
“Today’s Chinese citizens are more informed, interconnected, and worldly than ever. They will no longer accept government propaganda as news, nor will they remain silent when faced with official lies about issues affecting their lives,” said Bob Dietz, the group’s Hong Kong-based Asia Programme Coordinator.
Though the report breaks little new ground, it does a useful job of bringing together CPJ’s own findings on the treatment of journalists in China with the research, analysis and insights of others, including a California-based website called China Digital Times, a 2012 studypublished by scholars at Harvard University, and media outlets from Hong Kong and overseas. The report notes several times that the Chinese government did not respond to CPJ's written requests for comment. 
The group says China’s record of imprisoning journalists has fluctuated slightly but remained poor during the ten years’ rule, now coming to an end, of China’s president, Hu Jinatao, and prime minister, Wen Jiabao. CPJ documented 39 Chinese journalists behind bars in both 2002 and 2003. There were 32 last year, ranking China third among the world’s jailers of journalists, behind Turkey and Iran. 
The report says that during the past decade officials have cut back on the use of criminal prosecutions against journalists in the traditional press who overstep boundaries. Those reporters are controlled instead with fines, enforced leave, demotion or dismissal. But legal action, on the basis of China's ominously vague laws and regulations, has been taken more frequently against activists using social media. These differences in their treatment, says CPJ, “have helped drive a wedge between the two communities.”
CPJ also warns that China’s system of information control is already being exported, citing Iran, Pakistan and Vietnam as countries that have tried to emulate it.
“The danger for many fledgling media is that repressive governments do look to China, particularly when trying to understand how best to limit the reach of online media. The wealth and expansionism of the Chinese state, combined with widespread knowledge of how China’s internet is restricted and censored, has made China a model for regimes that want to keep free discussion in check,” the report says.
(Picture credit: Committee to Protect Journalists)