Two Decades Walking the Lines of Self-Censorship
Twenty years ago, I wrote a post on this old China blog, “Sanitized for My Protection,” in which I discussed my approach to self-censorship. The post was prompted by a reader comment asking me how I thought about the risks to myself as a resident foreigner blogging about China. The truth was, I hadn’t thought about it systematically, and it was interesting to give some shape to the risks and decisions that defined my writing.
I never felt like I had the luxury of shooting my mouth off with complete abandon. This was mostly professional caution. As I wrote last September, in the post inaugurating this Substack, my boss at the PR agency I was working for was not a fan of my blogging. She was a former Chinese diplomat, well attuned to Chinese government sensibilities, and conservative in matters of public expression.
I did get her into trouble once, in 2008. This was not through a blog post, but through a quote I gave to a reporter from The Guardian on China’s “50 Cent Party” (五毛党) of Internet propagandists. This is what ran in the story:
According to popular lore, and a number of Chinese bloggers, each post made pays 50 Chinese cents or five mao. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a lucrative occupation. William Moss, an account director at the public relations agency Burson-Marsteller, calculates that a post needs to be made every four minutes during a gruelling 72-hour working week if you are hoping to earn the bare minimum wage in one of the country’s bigger cities.
“Pocket money? Maybe. But I wouldn’t plan on sending the kids to college that way,” says Moss.
Sounds like me.
My sin was to imply that China’s nationalist astroturfers might not be receiving a living wage for their work in the service of the state. CIPRA, the government-linked China-International Public Relations Association, gave my boss an earful and she, in turn, gave me an earful. I probably laid low for a while after that, but, idk. It was a long time ago and I’m a fool.
Imagethief 