Negotiating censorial power and its legitimacy: a case study of the second face of state censorship

ABSTRACT

This article proposes the ‘second face of censorship’, emphasizing how states use censorial institutions to reinforce their value system and moral authority. It argues that censorship involves an interactive power dynamic between state censors and society, posing the question of legitimacy in censorial power dynamics, which is crucial for authoritarian resilience. To investigate this interactive process and the possibility of legitimacy, this article conducted a case study of public reactions to the takedown of a drama series in China. It examines how public sentiment and state responses intertwined in censorial practice, revealing the construction of descriptive legitimacy through negotiation.

KEYWORDS:

• State censorship
• legitimacy
• authoritarian resilience
• social media
• machine learning

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Muyang Li, Juan Wang, Zitian Sun, Helene Piquet, and participants at the CLSA session on ‘Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in the Rise of Authoritarianism in China’ for their insightful comments at various stages of this manuscript. I am also grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. Any remaining errors in the manuscript are solely my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2024.2370813

Notes

1. Moral panic is defined as volatile societal hostility towards entities or behaviors that are perceived as morally deviant and threatening (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2010).

2. Some clarifications are needed here. As quoted from Schauer in the introduction, censorship is a term so heavily loaded with negative moral connotation that ‘praising’ it is close to ‘committing a linguistic mistake’ (from Freshwater 2004, p. 237). Indeed, many censorship scholars have argued against any conceptualizations that may diminish the term’s capacity for criticizing and mobilizing against repressive state power (Freshwater 2004, Bunn 2015). By proposing the second face of censorship, this article does not oppose or diminish the mobilizing power of this term in its social and intellectual usage. Rather, it enriches the critical reflection upon the enduring presence of censorship and authoritarianism by advancing the understanding of the interactions between the censorship institutions and the public.

3. People’s Daily is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

4. Global Times is an international news publication sponsored and published by the People’s Daily.

5. Guangming Daily is a newspaper affiliated with the Central Committee of the CCP.

6. Almost all TV stations in China are run by government agencies at the corresponding administrative levels.

7. The impact of this takedown extended beyond the series for the lead actor, who was the main target of criticism due to his multiple roles in the production of this series (including that of lead actor, producer, and screenwriter). Following this takedown, his screen time on another reality show was notably reduced, indicating that he may have been blacklisted. Such blacklisting typically happens behind closed doors and can last for months or even years, depending on the ‘severity’ of the matter.

8. A note should be made on my operational definition of state censorship. Although we know that censorial authorities were involved at least twice in this case, it is difficult to pinpoint the decision-maker(s) of the final takedown, raising a question regarding whether this constitutes a case of state censorship. Recently, researchers have been rethinking the concept of state censorship, as they have discovered that private censors, such as media companies and social media platforms, also played an active role to assist state censors (Beazer et al. 2022). In this study, however, I argue that a distinction between state and private censors is not relevant because the state centralizes the power of coercion and delegates it to private censors through legal and administrative means, and the power (and responsibilities) of private censors derive from their subordination to the state. Without this subordination, censorship would operate under entirely different logics. Therefore, in this study, I treat state censors and their private delegates (i.e. streaming sites) as actors of the same state censorship system with relatively coherent goals.

9. The discussions of the takedown erupted in the first two days of this action and then scaled down. But I gave it one week to ensure a comprehensive coverage of this discussion.

10. The list of words used for filtering include: shencha, shenhe, shenpian, guoshen, guodeshen, guobuliaoshen, shenguo, shenyishen, sheleyoushen. Note that the keyword-based approach of filtering is a strict and conservative approach, which restricts the results within documents using explicit language.

11. Although 9% constitutes a small proportion of the complete dataset, it is notable because censorship was not the primary focus of the overall discussions about the show. Instead, it spontaneously emerged as a topic when some participants began criticizing the content. Moreover, this percentage likely underestimates the proportion of Weibo users concerned with censorship, as many may avoid discussing a sensitive topic, and the content itself is subject to incomplete censorship (Zhang and Pan 2019, Roberts 2020). This makes Dataset B more valuable for understanding the public’s expectations of state censors.

12. The paired keywords used to collect Dataset C do not include a ‘#’ as in the keyword search for Dataset A. On Weibo, the ‘#’ is a symbol used to specify a topic, same to its use on Twitter. The trade-off is that while using the ‘#’ can yield more search results, those results might be less focused on a topic.

13. Data preprocessing is explained in Appendix 1.

14. The third wave on September 17^th and 18^th was triggered by the news that despite negative reviews, Gentlemen was one of the most watched drama series on streaming websites in September 2022. Critics of the series on Weibo outcried the economic success achieved by this poorly made cultural product. The fourth wave on September 23^rd was mainly driven by complaints of Gentlemen’s quality of production following one episode.

15. This scene happened in an office building’s café, following a serious conversation between the two, whose relationship was business-oriented at that time. When she was about to leave, her high heels slipped on the floor, causing her to stumble backward. As she fell, he pulled her bra strap and caught her in his arms. It remains open to interpretation as to why this behavior of pulling the bra strap was necessary if he only intended to help her not falling on the floor.

16. Initially, the word ‘greasy’ was used primarily to describe men who appeared unattractive or overweight. However, in recent years, it has increasingly been used to describe decent-looking celebrities exhibiting ‘greasy’ behaviors.

17. Some may interpret this post as mocking the censors, while others may see it as a critique of the system’s inconsistency. This reasonable difference in interpretation does not undermine the analysis, as my focus in this subsection is to understand the mutual expectations in the censorship relationship, according to Schoon’s operationalization of legitimacy (2022).

18. Document ID: A7282.

19. The op-ed by the Commentary Department of Guangming Daily most echoed the criticism from the People’s Daily, targeting content producers for ‘reproducing stereotypical ideas of women’ without mentioning potential responsibility of state censors.

20. Document ID: A10887.

21. The airing on the TV channel was also uninterrupted and ended as scheduled on September 20^th.

22. Document ID: A10042.

23. Document IDs: C146, C216, C3756.

24. Document ID: C21.

25. Document ID: C748.

26. Document ID: C1539.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhifan Luo

Zhifan Luo is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Concordia University, Canada. Her research investigates discursive power, digital public sphere, and digital authoritarianism. Her work has appeared in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Armed Forces & Society, China: An International Journal, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Global Health Promotion.