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Tag: Information Control

Whitelist Wipeout

Written by Tian Jian on . Posted in Flash Reports. No Comments on Whitelist Wipeout

Last month, China’s top internet control body, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released its latest “whitelist” of approved news sources from which internet platforms are legally permitted to repost news content — a system that has become a cornerstone of information control under Xi Jinping. Journalists over at our Chinese-language sister publication Tian Jian (田間) combed through the list last week to compare it with the 2021 version of the roster. What did they find?

The most noteworthy change was the omission of a more outspoken news outlet, Sanlian Life Weekly (三聯生活周刊), a respected news magazine that had recently published sensitive investigative reports, including coverage of Beijing flooding and a rare story about cross-regional arrests. Both stories were subsequently deleted from Chinese internet platforms.

The scrubbing of Sanlian from the roster echoes the 2021 removal of Caixin Media, another respected outlet that has struggled over the past decade to maintain professional space. The updated 2025 list grew from 1,358 to 1,459 approved sources, with most additions being local government platforms — likely reflecting Beijing’s strategy to strengthen propaganda capabilities at the local level. Guangdong province alone added 59 new government-affiliated outlets.

Walls Within Walls

Written by Alex Colville on . Posted in Flash Reports. No Comments on Walls Within Walls

From the outside, China’s so-called “Great Firewall” (GFW), a network of regulations and digital controls the Chinese government uses to restrict content in cyberspace, can appear monolithic — uniformly blocking global websites within the country. But there are wheels within wheels — or rather, walls within walls. An investigation published this week by a team of US researchers, including from the censorship monitoring platform GFW Report, concluded that Henan province has erected its own additional firewall that blocks up to 10 times more websites than filtered by the national firewall.

The team followed a trail of breadcrumbs from Chinese developers, who posted on coding forums like GitHub that they had spotted websites openly available in the rest of China that suddenly went down if they were in Henan. The report tests website access on servers in multiple regions, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Jiangsu. The report notes that whereas the national firewall disproportionately targets websites surrounding pornography and news, business and finance received the largest share of blocks within the Henan firewall. The report surmises this could be because the province has previously been hit by a number of corruption scandals in state-controlled banks that have jeopardized social stability, such as the Henan banking crisis of 2022. “It is very probable that the state wants to limit access to information that is relevant to the economy of the area,” the report suggests. Information control targeted to particular provincial sensitivities is an interesting development in China’s digital censorship.