The censor cannot hold: The pressure of controlling China’s internet

As a teenager in rural China, Zeng Jiajun used his internet know-how to watch a banned documentary on the bloody military crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

A decade later, he was part of the sprawling censorship machine that suffocates China’s cyberspace, tasked with stopping the spread of anything the Chinese Communist Party does not want its people to know about.

“At first when I worked on this I didn’t think much bigger because a job is a job,” he said.

“But deep inside I knew it was not aligned with my ethical standards. And once you work in this field for too long … the conflicts become stronger and stronger.”

Now living in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Zeng is an affable 29-year-old who wears the weight of his past experience lightly.

Few people who have worked inside China’s propaganda apparatus have told their stories. Even fewer are prepared to do so openly.

Zeng came of age with the internet.

Born in 1993 in southern Guangdong province, his first experience of computing was during elementary school, when his father brought home a PC.

What he found when he went online was astounding.

“There was just like a whole new world that was waiting for me to explore,” he said.

The Chinese government’s early attempts at web censorship were imperfect; VPNs provided access to subjects and information not discussed publicly.

In among the forbidden fruit was “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” a three-hour documentary on student protests in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

What Zeng saw — tanks and semiautomatic weapons wielded against unarmed students in a violent crackdown that left hundreds, perhaps thousands, dead — was profoundly shocking.

“It’s such a huge, significant, historic event, but nobody ever told us about it, and you cannot search for it on the Chinese internet; that content is all erased,” he said.

“I just felt like there was a huge lie. A lot of history is covered up.”

Like other bright Chinese of his generation, Zeng spent his undergraduate years abroad, and returned to China with a degree in business administration from Estonia.

His tech savvy ultimately made him an attractive prospect for ByteDance, an upstart Chinese social media company whose global-facing TikTok and inward-facing Douyin were taking on the might of Twitter and Facebook.

“At first I was very excited because ByteDance is the only company that had a successful business outside of China,” he said.

“They have TikTok, which ruled the internet in the U.S. and in Europe, so we were very proud of that. Most of the time only U.S. internet companies ruled the world.”

And it was a good job. Intellectually stimulating work with a $4,000 monthly salary that was well above the average in Beijing.

Zeng said he was part of a team that developed automated systems to filter content the company did not want on its platform.

These systems incorporated artificial intelligence to look at images, and to examine the sound that accompanied them, transcribing commentary and scouring for off-limits language.

If the system flagged a problem, Zeng said it would be passed to one of the thousands of human operatives who could delete the video or halt the livestream.

Mostly they were looking for the kind of thing any social media company might balk at — self-harm, pornography, unauthorized advertising — but also anything politically sensitive.

Some imagery was always off limits: pictures of tanks, candles or yellow umbrellas — a symbol of protest in Hong Kong — along with any criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Communist Party leaders, according to Zeng.

He said guidance was handed down to ByteDance from the Cyberspace Administration of China, but supplemented by the company itself, ever wary of overstepping purposefully vague rules.

“In China the line is blurred. You don’t know specifically what will offend the government, so sometimes you will go beyond and censor more harshly,” Zeng said, describing the company’s position as “like walking a tightrope.” The Japan Times