THE HISTORY OF the internet in China is one of give and take, of punch and counterpunch, where the authorities are often surprised by the force and speed of online interactions but determined to keep them under control. The result has been a costly and diverse industrial complex of monitoring and censorship. Central-government ministries have invested in two pillars of control: the Great Firewall, a Western name for a system of blocking foreign websites, starting in the late 1990s, which some believe has cost as much as $160m (the details are state secrets); and Golden Shield for domestic surveillance and filtering, begun in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security and estimated to have cost more than $1.6 billion so far.

A number of other government departments have their own internet divisions. Many provincial and local governments, too, officially responsible for internet management in their area and keen not to be caught out by local unrest, have invested in their own tailored monitoring systems. More than 100 Chinese companies have made a total of at least 125 products for monitoring and filtering public opinion online, according to a Chinese government register. The most expensive of the publicly disclosed government purchases reviewed by The Economist was bought by Beijing’s internet-propaganda office for $4.3m. (One foreign supplier, Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy unit, devised an online public-opinion monitoring system for the Chinese market in 2006 and has had some takers in government.)

One of the suppliers to government, Founder, created by Peking University, describes to potential customers how it helps overworked government staff by monitoring hundreds of domestic websites and overseas Chinese sites. “The early-warning [feature] monitors sensitive information which needs to be dealt with immediately…such as June 4th [the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 and] Charter 08 [Mr Liu’s anti-authoritarian manifesto].” The authorities have learned to watch out for ingenious variants of June 4th, including May 35th, April 65th and March 96th. The Founder system also monitors material that may “prompt mass incidents in society and on campus”.

In addition, a number of black-market internet companies sell services to individuals, including the deletion of negative articles from websites, using connections in government and at the big internet companies, sometimes at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some 60% of the profits of one such company in Beijing, Yage Time Advertising, came from sales to local officials in smaller Chinese cities who wanted to delete negative reports about themselves, according to Caixin, a Chinese financial magazine. The software system for detection and filtering that Yage was offering these officials cost $64,000. Yage was busted by police in July last year, but the unofficial business of deleting posts—and of planting negative ones and of selling “zombie” followers and retweets of posts—continues to flourish.

Manual labour

Surprisingly, the machinery of control is far from monolithic, and rife with inconsistencies (especially from province to province: one study found that more than half the microblog posts in Tibet were deleted, compared with barely a tenth in other provinces). It is also much less automatic than might be expected. Academic studies of Chinese censorship show that for all the software and hardware involved in detecting and filtering content, much of the deleting is done manually, blog post by blog post, tweet by tweet. This system requires a substantial investment in people, perhaps as many as 100,000 of them. That includes internet police (20,000 or more), propaganda workers and in-house monitors at thousands of websites, from small discussion forums to behemoths like Tencent and Sina. A recent study reckoned that Sina Weibo, the country's main microblog, currently employs more than 4,000 censors.

This model seems to have a number of drawbacks. Humans make mistakes and can be overwhelmed, as they appeared to be after the crash in 2011 of a high-speed train near Wenzhou, when all of Sina’s censors (then numbering only 600-plus) were called in to help, according to Phoenix Weekly, a magazine. Such a crisis can put intense strain on these individuals. Some disgruntled or liberal-minded employees clearly view the system as flawed and are providing information about its shortcomings to overseas sites. China Digital Times, a blog run by a dissident exile, Xiao Qiang, from the University of California, Berkeley, regularly publishes transcriptions of propaganda directives under the heading “Ministry of Truth”.

For the most part, though, these workers accept the system, and not just because of Communist Party indoctrination and discipline. The party has cells inside most, if not all, of the big internet companies and makes sure that some key posts go to party members. Party leaders have also consistently worked on keeping the big web companies’ CEOs loyal. Since 2003, when Hu Jintao became president, the web bosses have been invited on annual “red tours” of historic communist sites. Baidu’s co-founder, Robin Li, and Sina’s CEO, Charles Chao, have been on many such trips. (Mao Daolin, a Sina CEO before Mr Chao, demonstrated his loyalty by marrying Mr Hu’s daughter in 2003.) Disciplinary sanctions also play a part. Internet companies that flout the rules, as some do in an effort to increase traffic, are suspended or shut down altogether. Companies that play by the rules can thrive, but have to budget for employing lots of censors.

For thousands of individual censors to do their jobs willingly and effectively, the system must have a fundamental logic. As it turns out, the party applies the same strict rules online as it has done on the ground since the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989: do not jeopardise social stability, do not organise and do not threaten the party. In a study of deletions of Chinese blog posts in 2011 and 2012, researchers at Harvard found that posts which were merely critical of government policies were tolerated. The ones most likely to get deleted were those that might trigger collective action such as protests. This was true even for posts that appeared to be pro-government.

The authorities have been strikingly consistent in applying this rule. The earliest significant act of domestic internet censorship, in September 1996, was to shut down an online discussion forum at Peking University, “Untitled BBS”, when nationalist students began agitating for demonstrations against Japan after a right-wing Japanese group had made a provocative display at the Senkaku, or Diaoyu, islands, Japan’s claim to which China disputes. The internet had been commercially available in China only since January 1995, and at the time it had fewer than 80,000 users in the country, but the fear of a “virtual Tiananmen Square” was palpable, writes Xu Wu, an academic.

At about the same time the government started blocking foreign websites, including Voice of America. By July 1997, writes Daniel Lynch at the University of Southern California, Chinese police were looking for advanced filtering software at a conference in Hong Kong. In December 1998 China held its first known trial for a purely internet-based political crime, imprisoning Lin Hai, a software engineer, for sending 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses to a pro-democracy magazine based in America. Since then China has often jailed activists either for posting pro-democracy messages online or for e-mailing sensitive material abroad, and continues to do so. In 2005 it took to using “web commentators” and “public-opinion guidance” to supplement censorship and targeted repression. That spring anti-Japanese protests had erupted in cities across China, organised in part through Tencent’s QQ chat groups and bulletin boards. In an internal party speech in 2005 Mr Hu gave warning of a “smokeless war” being waged by China’s enemies, and of the need to defend the party ideologically. According to Wen Yunchao, a prominent blogger, “the authorities had felt the internet was out of control and they needed to address it immediately. At the end of 2005 they had a meeting in Qingdao to study how to control the internet.” They started to hire online commentators to steer conversations in the right direction, who became known as the “50-Cent Party” because they were paid 50 Chinese cents per post. In January 2007 Mr Hu gave a speech to the Politburo calling for it to “assert supremacy over online public opinion” and “study the art of online guidance”. Controlling the internet was not enough; the party also needed to “use” the internet, said Mr Hu. The arrival of Twitter-like microblogging services in China, and particularly of Sina Weibo in August 2009, forced the authorities and their web commentators to become more active than ever. Officials have tried but so far failed to compel all users to register for online accounts with their real names. Social media also made the government even more concerned about the threat of “hostile foreign forces” online, which it took on with a will. As a white paper on the internet in 2010 put it, “Foreign social-networking sites have become a tool for political subversion used by Western nations.” The Chinese authorities reinforced the Great Firewall, their first line of defence against such sites.

Control freaks

These days, whenever something happens that the Communist Party sees as a threat to social stability, China’s internet managers set in motion a rapid, massive and complex response. The system has evolved with each new technology for online interaction. The nerve centre is Beijing, where most of the big internet companies are based. The Beijing Internet Information Administrative Bureau gets in touch with its contacts at the city’s internet portals and microblogs, telling them what is to be deleted from microblogs, blogs and news sites and what approved messages are to be promoted. If the story is very big, celebrity microbloggers (such as entertainers, billionaire entrepreneurs, media personalities and technology icons), each with many millions of followers, may be asked by minders at the internet companies to keep quiet, though most do not need to be told.

In cities around the country, local internet publicity offices will contact internet commentators to feed them the official guidance for their online bulletin boards and discussion forums. And at hundreds of local, provincial and national offices of the various ministries concerned, custom-tailored software helps authorities find “harmful” online postings and get internet service providers to take them down.

Compliance is expected within seconds. When censors at Sina Weibo noticed a flood of posts on a censored New Year’s Day editorial at Southern Weekly, a newspaper, they waited a few minutes before deleting them. One censor wrote in an online rant against complaining users that they should have been grateful for the slight delay. The censor’s rant itself was quickly deleted, but has been translated and re-posted by Global Voices Online, a free-speech pressure group based outside China. The tardy supervisors had to sit through a pep talk by the authorities, which deliver such lectures whenever they perceive resistance to “running the internet in a civilised manner”—and then tighten up controls further.

The government constantly worries about losing control when an incident captures the public’s attention. This happens quite a lot, despite all the precautions. Examples go back to 1999, when followers of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned by the Communist Party, organised protests in Beijing and, having been crushed, used overseas Chinese websites to spread anti-government propaganda.

In 2003 the authorities tried and failed to cover up the spread of the SARS virus. In 2005 anti-Japanese protests threatened to get out of hand. In 2007 opponents of a proposed chemical plant in Xiamen, in south-eastern China, organised protest “strolls”. In 2008 riots broke out in Tibet and in 2009 in the north-western region of Xinjiang. In 2011 a number of people tried to organise protests inspired by the “Jasmine” revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East. Later that year a high-speed train crashed, killing at least 40 people. In 2012 rumours spread of a coup attempt in Beijing. And so on. Each of these incidents, and many more, prompted new efforts at control. But until the system changes, it will be a never-ending task.