![]() This rise from service platform to infrastructure has allowed WeChat to become an easy one-stop shop for a large portion of the government’s censorship, fulfilling its role as an authoritarian technology. On top of granting subsidies to Tencent, Beijing has globally banned or heavily handicapped virtually all of WeChat’s foreign competitors, making it the only logical choice for practical use. However, it has not become a backbone of Chinese lifestyle simply because of its usefulness as long as it continues to align with the CCP’s values, it will receive plenty of help from the government. As mentioned, WeChat is indispensable in today’s China. 9 This is made evident by WeChat’s unprecedented rise and the ways that it censors information. WeChat’s model fits political theorist Langdon Winner’s outline of an authoritarian technology: It is “system centered” and “immensely powerful,” a technology that leads society toward authoritarianism. WeChat defines its mission as seeking to “improve the quality of life through internet value-added services,” but in reality, its work is to “reflect the party’s will, safeguard the party’s authority, and safeguard the party’s unity.” 6,7 This is legally echoed in WeChat’s privacy policy, which offers no protection against government surveillance. Under his leadership, both traditional and newer internet media are being tightly regulated in order to avoid “potential subversion of authority,” going as far as jailing dissenting “journalists, bloggers, and activists.” 5 With the emergence of WeChat, the CCP has a new medium, with cooperative developers, through which it can maintain its stranglehold on the availability of information. Two millennia of emperors, wars, revolutions, and bloodshed after Qin Shi Huang, General Secretary Xi Jinping sits at the head of the CCP. In particular, it is the social dimension of WeChat that has allowed technology to become a powerful weapon in tightening censorship and state control in China.Ĭensorship has had a long and unfortunate history in China. As cybersecurity journalist Patrick O’Neill detailed in a 2019 MIT Technology Review article, Beijing heavily pressures Tencent to implement effective real-time censorship of not only text, but also images posted to WeChat users’ Moments (analogous to Facebook’s timeline) and even in group chats and one-on-one conversations. 4īeyond its surface-level ease and accessibility, however, is a darker side, a side strictly monitored and regulated by the CCP: censorship. Though it may sound like an exaggeration to someone who has not used the app before, “leaving WeChat means leaving life in China,” not to mention missing out on the convenience of all of its other functions. 3 As its monopoly continues to expand, the app has become indispensable in Chinese citizens’ lives. 2 The list of uses includes public social media, ordering food delivery, Uber/Lyft-like functionality, sending money to friends, making doctor’s appointments, paying bills, communicating in the business world, and even using government services. ![]() However, hand in hand with its popularity, WeChat quickly grew into a “mega-platform,” boasting a massive number of practical features. 1 Released by the state-sponsored company Tencent in 2011, it started out as a simple messaging app. One such service is WeChat, a smartphone app that boasts “over 1.1 billion users”. In their place, China has developed its own domestic internet and affiliated services. ![]() As a result, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other services such as Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon are not available. All rights reserved by Lexington Books.įearing the free flow of information on the internet, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has banned all foreign internet services in China and built the Great Firewall to deny the Chinese people access to outside online sources. This excerpt is adapted from the forthcoming book Democracy in Crisis around the World.
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