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First Letter: F

Free and Open Internet

Written by Katja Drinhausen on .

Brief

Over the past decades, the internet has become a global foundation for communication and trade. UN norms call for an open, free, and secure cyberspace where human rights are fully protected and advocate a multi-stakeholder governance system that includes civil society. However, states increasingly restrict information flows for various reasons, including privacy, data security, combating disinformation, national security, or to maintain political control. 

In international forums, China supports an open internet, emphasising its economic potential. Domestically, the government-driven rapid digitisation has brought significant benefits for communication, commerce, and public administration. But China has also created one of the most comprehensive censorship systems and heavily restricts information flows across its borders, to contain what the Party sees as ideological risks. 

Through exports, loans, and cooperation agreements, China’s government and its telecommunication firms are a major force in enabling connectivity, particularly in the Global South. While this helps countries expand access and reap the benefits of digitisation, China also shares its technologies and approaches for internet control. Cybersecurity and cyber sovereignty are key concepts in the PRC’s internet governance approach, indicating that a “free” internet is what remains after states have exercised their interests.

Analysis

In the 1990s, concepts of net neutrality reflected a utopian vision of the internet as a global public space free from government control. Though this proved unattainable, international norms still enshrine commitments to a free and open internet, including the 2024 UN Global Digital Compact. As home to over 1.1 billion internet users and many of the world’s largest digital infrastructure providers and tech firms, China is a major actor in defining global concepts and standards for internet governance.

China’s leadership recognised the internet’s potential early on, with government policies since the 1990s aiming to harness the potential of digitisation and (more recently) establish China as a “cyber power” (网络强国). With notable success: The digital economy is now a key driver of growth, even in rural areas. China’s communication platforms connect citizens and provide access to information, while the digitisation of public services has boosted efficiency.

But from the outset, the Party-state has been deeply concerned about ideological threats emanating from an untamed flow of information. CCP leader Xi Jinping has described cyberspace as a key “battleground” for ensuring “ideological security”, warning against “Western permeation” and extolling the importance of “winning online dominance”, both at home and abroad. During his tenure, cybersecurity and cyber sovereignty emerged as the key terms in internet governance. International appeals to internet freedom are lambasted as an effort to undermine China’s internal cohesion.

The government has spent decades building a sophisticated system of internet controls that uses a combination of technology and regulation to censor domestic information flows and block access to major foreign platforms. Increasingly, it also prevents foreign access to the Chinese information sphere. Regulations and campaigns to create a “civilised”, “clean” and “healthy” cyberspace target fraud and misinformation as well as political expression. While the internet in China remains a venue for public expression, with commentators often using allegories and wordplay to discuss social issues, the government has been largely successful in reining in political debates and online public mobilisation. As AI reshapes how citizens engage with the internet, China’s government is at the forefront of regulation, requiring developers to ensure content adheres to “socialist core values”.

In 2015, Xi Jinping introduced the vision of building “a community of shared future in cyberspace” (网络空间命运共同体). This term has become a cornerstone of China’s digital diplomacy, featuring prominently in its 2017 international cooperation strategy on cyberspace and a 2022 white paper. While China calls for international cooperation to prevent cyber-crime and conflicts, it envisions a state-led approach to global internet governance, in which corporations and especially civil society only play a complementary, supportive role. 

On the international stage, China regularly calls for efforts to bridge the global digital divide. Through agreements, loans and digital infrastructure built by Chinese companies, China helps countries expand internet access as well as digital control. And yet a growing number of countries impose restrictions on Chinese platforms and technology providers over data and national security concerns. All of these trends  contribute to a fragmentation of the global internet, subverting the vision of a free and open online space.

Friendship

Written by David Bandurski on .

Brief

All human beings understand friendship, and in today’s digital world, this concept spans cultures through virtual “friends” on social media platforms like Facebook and WeChat. The United Nations Charter speaks of developing “friendly relations among nations”, based on “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples”. The UN’s International Day of Friendship promotes peace between peoples, countries, cultures, and individuals.

Within Chinese Communist Party discourse, however, “friendship” has since the 1940s been narrowly defined to focus on the Party-state and its interests. Drawing from Soviet concepts, this understanding carries explicit political expectations of alignment with China’s positions. The Party-state fosters “friendship” abroad through institutional proxies – including associations and think tanks — that cloak state involvement while lending the appearance of grassroots consensus to state-directed exchanges. Friendship is highly ritualised, as with the “Friendship Medal” first awarded to Vladimir Putin in 2018, and emotively proclaimed through state propaganda. Yet beneath the veneer of mutual feeling, relationships remain conditioned on accommodating China’s core interests, making friendship more about managing perceptions than bridging differences.

Analysis

One of the five human relationships (五伦) identified by Confucius in the sixth century BCE, friendship has endured for centuries in literature and thought of China. The country’s current political adaptation of friendship, however, stems directly from the CCP’s engagement with the Soviet Union from the 1930s onward. In the Soviet context, Stalin’s “Friendship of the Peoples” (druzhba narodov) was introduced in 1935 as a metaphor for unified polity of diverse ethnic groups under Soviet Communist Party rule and was applied more broadly to deny dissent and difference. Externally, friendship described Stalin’s pursuit of transnational engagement, particularly with the developing world. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union actively cultivated “good friends” globally, generally pro-Soviet elites, to expand the USSR’s sphere of influence. For Soviet partners, often trained at its institutions, friendship meant “accepting and supporting the Soviet state and its foreign policy”. Those who did not offer support were regarded as enemies.

Before and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Soviet notion of friendship shaped the CCP’s international engagement. The PRC’s first bilateral friendship treaty, signed with the USSR in February 1950, was anticipated months earlier by the formation in Beijing of the China-Russia Friendship Association, joined by CCP elites who had studied in the Soviet Union. Mimicking a quintessentially Soviet practice seen throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the CCP established many such friendship associations from the 1950s. As in the Soviet case, friendship implied acceptance and support of China’s foreign policy line, which after 1954 focused on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. From then on, friendship became closely intertwined with non-interference in China’s internal affairs, which today remains a foreign policy keystone. In China’s official notion of friendship, the point is to project union and sympathy that supports China’s core interests and agendas — but beyond this concord, friends must mind their own business.

China’s present-day application of friendship is a continuation and elaboration of the older Soviet concept, and the CCP continues to use friendship associations and other exchange to advance international sympathy and accord with China’s goals, often to disguise state involvement. The country’s numerous sister-city relationships leverage cultural exchanges and local partnerships to advance broader diplomatic goals, with China Daily noting that they “hold the key to sound state-to-state relations”. On the diplomatic level, affirmations of friendship often signal China’s careful calibration of its relationships, not necessarily alliances, as it tries to maintain strategic ambiguity while advancing its interests. This is evidenced by the declaration of “friendship without limits” between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin — a relationship that, in practice, has clear boundaries, such as China’s careful refusal to accept Russia’s territorial claims in Ukraine.

Freedom of Speech

Written by David Bandurski on .

Brief

Article 35 of China’s Constitution states that “[c]itizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration”. Formally speaking, this language seems to accord with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression”.

In practice, however, the ruling Chinese Communist Party places substantial restrictions on the exercise of freedom of speech, which is regarded as potentially destabilising to the regime. This essentially negates the second half of the freedom of expression clause in the UDHR, which states that “this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. The CCP has developed a vast human and technological apparatus to ensure that it can monitor and control information through all channels, both online and offline, and this means constant, even real-time interference in Chinese nationals’ right to enjoy freedom of speech, even beyond China’s borders.

Analysis

The story of the media and freedom of speech in China since the 1980s has essentially been about the constant efforts of the CCP leadership to balance the imperative of regime stability against the priorities of reform and development, the latter having resulted in a more complex and diverse society that has often sought ways to assert its rights and interests over and against those of the Party.

As the reform and opening policy took root in China after 1978, there was some reassessment of the extreme state of press control that had prevailed throughout the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which all press content was dominated by Mao Zedong. The term “news reform” (新闻改革) was used more readily in the early 1980s, and there was a strong conviction as reforms took hold that strict controls over the press and ideology had contributed decisively to the painful political extremes of the previous three decades. It was in the context of this reform spirit that “freedom of speech” was included in China’s 1982 Constitution.[1] Though the CCP continued to control the press in the 1980s, and journalism and publishing were embedded within the Party-state, there were moves to reassess its role.

This reform trajectory took a dramatic turn with the events of 1989 that culminated in the crackdown on the democracy movement on June 4, resulting in a new regime of speech controls under Jiang Zemin around a policy of “public opinion guidance” (舆论导向). Essentially this reflected a renewed conviction in the leadership that regime stability, and avoiding a Soviet-style collapse, depended upon “guiding” the ideas and opinions of the public through robust CCP control of all channels of expression. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as economic development picked up pace, and as the rise of the internet offered new channels for expression, China went through an unprecedented era of media development. This resulted in a notable rise in professional activity among the Chinese media, and even the emergence of investigative reporting.[2] The mandate of “public opinion guidance” remained firmly in place, however, and journalists and media were constantly disciplined. Meanwhile, from the late 1990s, China developed a vast system of technical and legislative controls for the internet – collectively known as the “Great Firewall” – blocking access to the outside world, and censoring content domestically.

In the Xi Jinping era, controls on the press and the internet have intensified, as the CCP has sought to reassert its dominance over all channels of communication, including the internet and a new generation of social media. In large part this is due to a rise in more freewheeling media reporting and online engagement and criticism through the 2000s. In February 2016, Xi Jinping re-asserted the CCP’s supremacy over the media in a speech in which he reiterated that the media must be “surnamed Party” (姓党), and asking them essentially to pledge their loyalty to the regime. Under the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China, formed directly under the CCP’s central leadership in 2014, controls on the internet and social media have intensified. The mandate of “public opinion guidance” has been codified in legal guidelines and extended to all users. Facing criticism of its media control policies, China insists domestically that they are necessary to maintain stability as a prerequisite for development. Officials often stress that “[f]reedom of expression does not equal free expression”, by which they mean that speech must be curtailed in the interests of the general population.

[1] H. Chiu, “The 1982 Chinese Constitution and the Rule of Law”, Occasional Papers, Reprint Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 4, 1985, p. 143.

[2]S. L. Shirk (ed.), Changing Media, Changing China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Freedom of Religion

Written by Katja Drinhausen on .

Brief

Freedom of religion is protected in international human rights law and includes the right to manifest one’s religion or belief in worship, practice, and teaching. This freedom may be limited by laws to protect public safety, morals, or the rights of others. Countries take different approaches in regulation. The relationship – or degree of separation – between state and church, or religious organisations, is also shaped by the historical evolution of institutions.

In English translations, China’s official documents and statements often refer to “freedom of religion”. But the term used in the Constitution and regulations is more correctly translated as “freedom of religious belief” (宗教信仰自由). Citizens are free to believe but limited in their right to express their faith. Only “normal religious activities” (正常的宗教活动) defined by the Party State are protected. Laws and policies not only place religion under close supervision, but also require religious organisations to actively propagate CCP ideology through religious content.

Analysis

The Chinese state recognises five official religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestant faiths. Since the early 1950s, they have been organised and represented by official patriotic associations. According to a 2018 government White Paper, China has more than 200 million registered believers. This does not account for the plethora of traditional folk beliefs. There are also numerous underground churches and religious groups, despite repeated attempts to integrate them into the official structures or disband them.

The CCP itself is secular. Party members are forbidden from following religious beliefs. The Party’s relationship with religion has been fraught and tumultuous. Under Mao, religion was regarded as backward and something to be overcome by force. Practices and publications were banned, and many religious sites destroyed in political campaigns, such as those during the Cultural Revolution. From the mid-1980s, the reform era permitted new space for religious practice and numbers of believers rose significantly.

But the leadership upheld its Marxist convictions that religious beliefs were a “temporary phenomenon” and would fade with economic progress. These expectations were not met. Alongside rising membership in officially recognised religious organisations and unofficial house churches, new movements emerged, most prominently the Falun Gong. After attempts to restrict them resulted in large-scale protests, China’s government banned the Falun Gong in 1999, declaring it an “evil cult”.

The Party-state remained concerned that religious faith could fuel existential risks for the regime’s security. Some of the most prominent human rights activists and lawyers in the 2000s were Christians; advocates for more autonomy in minority areas were often practicing Muslims or Buddhists. From protests and violent clashes in Xinjiang to self-immolation by Tibetan monks and nuns after 2009, the Party identified “misguided” or “extremist” beliefs as root causes – not failed state policies and structural discrimination of minorities. Under Xi, “foreign-originated” Islamic, Catholic, Protestant and Buddhist beliefs have come under further scrutiny. The 2018 White Paper emphasises the need to ensure independence from foreign influence.

Ultimately, the secular Party State demands authority over key religious affairs, as when insisting that the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama follow Chinese law. The distrust in religion is reflected in the tight surveillance of places of worship, especially bigger temples, churches, and mosques. The Party State regards ethnicity and religion as indicators of potential threat in individuals or groups, leading to close monitoring and various restrictions. State policies highlight the arbitrary nature of what is treated as “normal religious practices”: While celebration of religious festivities, fasting and praying may be tolerated in other parts of the country and even lauded by China’s diplomats abroad, some of these expressions of Muslim faith were interpreted as signs of extremism and cause for deprivation of liberty in Xinjiang.

The past decade was marked by a fundamental change in approach. All religions must now “love the country and the Party”, support political stability and promote Chinese mainstream values and national identity. This ambition is reflected in various policy initiatives, from Five-Year Plans for the Sinicisation (中国化) of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, to Daoist education plans including Xi Jinping Thought. Since 2018, the State Administration of Religious Affairs has been placed under the Party’s United Front Work Department to strengthen guidance. Places of worship are required to promote Party ideology and policies with banners and by inclusion in sermons, including content shared online. The intention is clear: In today’s China, religion must spread the gospel of the CCP.

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