China Digital Times last week ran a translation of an article by a writer named Liang Jing and entitled "What can a clever news censor change?" (proxy link). Published in New Century News, a dissident news site blocked in China, the article made some interesting points in the wake of the dismissal of prior chief censor Long Xinmin and his replacement by Lu Binjie. Among these were that censorship in China is, "not so much a blockade of information as control of political behavior and in particular of political expression", which, to an extent, I agree with. Another was that an unintelligent news censor could harm China's leadership more than help it, which I also agree with, along with an assertion that Long Xinmin's head might have been rolled for censoring articles that Hu Jintao himself would have allowed to pass to avoid self-inflicted harm.

I am not an acute enough watcher of the Chinese government to render judgment on that last assertion one way or the other. However, whether you agree with it or not, it raises an interesting point about the nature of censorship: if you really want to control how people think, the most effective censorship is subtle and unnoticed.

Johnathan Ansfield, a Beijing-based journalist and CDT contributor, recently posted his own article (proxy link) on Long Xinmin's dismissal, with a rundown of Chinese opinions on the change. Ansfield wrote:

...the General administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) suffered no shortage of embarrassments during Long's abbreviated tenure, the last a bungled ban attempt on eight books. It triggered unprecedented outrage over censorship from Netizens, open challenges from several veteran liberals who were targeted, and most recently a lawsuit filed by one them, Zhang Yihe.

I think Ansfield has the main point there. Whether Hu might have agreed with Long's decisions or not, a censor that is creating highly visible controversies and embarrassment is an ineffective censor because he is calling attention to things that someone wants invisible. You don't really want to remind people of the process. Shi Tao (proxy link), after all, was jailed not so much for revealing specific information that censored as for revealing the mechanism itself.

There's a basic PR rule that applies: if you want to bury a story, the last thing you do is loudly call attention to it with clumsy attempts at suppression that attract more attention than the original story itself. Ideally, you catch a negative story in its early phases a find a way to arrange a quiet death. Overreacting after it is public, or at too late a stage in the process, is almost always a fast route to further self-inflicted pain or reputation damage. The best buried story is the stillborn one that the public never finds out about.

Diligence and patience are probably qualities of good censors. Censorship is like compound interest: it accumulates on itself in the long run. Its the hundreds of small decisions over time rather than the splashy, high-profile moves that shape discourse and have the biggest effect on eventual outcome.

Granted that there at least two main types of censorship. One is loud censorship to set an example. Here is where the boundary is. Don't cross it. Kill the chickens to scare the rhetorically inclined monkeys. A second type is the quiet, subtle censorship that influences ideas in the public domain that you never here about. This is the informal guidance to editors that is never revealed, the changes to school curricula to ensure contentious ideas are removed, and the stories and books that never make to the public in the first place and that thus don't have to be noisily suppressed later.

I wonder about whether China's censorship mechanism has caught up with the changes in China's media environment. There's no doubt it's on top technologically, but is it on top socially? There is something reckless and clunky about the newspaper supplement closures, high profile editorial housecleanings and book withdrawals that seems drawn from an age when China's media environment was simpler and the channels for public discourse were limited to explicitly state-controlled media. But the China of 10,000 periodicals and 140 million Internet users isn't one in which the memory hole is as easily employed. So perhaps Long Xinmin's sin was that he brought an inelegant, ham-fisted approach into an era that demands a subtler touch. He was, I think, a little too old-school.

So to answer Liang Jing's rhetorical question, "What can a clever news censor change?", he can change a lot, especially if he can be invisible, and leave you wondering where his fingerprints are. He can steer publishing houses and newspapers further away from topics the government finds objectionable without you ever hearing about it, and ensure that controversial opinions never even see the light of day. He intimidates outside of the public view, where no one but the victim ever knows about it, he can make sure the memory hole isn't actually needed. He can shift the direction of public discourse without you ever seeing his hand on the wheel. He can make sure we're all self-censoring.

And, if he's really good, he can make us all wish the old censor was still in charge.