Surfing the Chinternet

Last week, the Chinese government issued a new propaganda piece in the form of a policy paper on its Internet control policies. It serves as a typical example of Beijing’s Orwellian use of language and formalism to dress up its authoritarianism as legal and rational. In Beijing’s alternate universe, the Chinese people have exactly as much Internet freedom as they need, and the real threat to their optimal online experience comes from spam, pornography, and “illegal information” that endangers state security.

A broad swath of what would be considered normal online speech in the West is proscribed like this in the piece’s section on Internet “security:”