As a reviewer, I find political scientist Margaret Roberts a very frustrating author. Lest the reader get the wrong impression, I mean this as high praise. The difficulty I have with Censored is in dividing it up into parts that seem worth concentrating on and parts that seem okay to ignore, something I sometimes end up doing with works I'm reviewing. Her theoretical sections are as good as her more empirical ones. The chapters in which she zooms in on specific Chinese phenomena are excellent. But so, too, are those in which she employs more of a wide-angle lens approach and compares the PRC with other authoritarian states.
As a reader, by contrast, I find Roberts anything but a frustrating author. She writes clear and forceful prose. Censored is so well organized that it is hard to believe that it is her first book. Even its brevity – 236 pages of main text – feels appropriate. Busy people in the tech and policy worlds can benefit from what she has to say, and her book's short length increases the chances that some of them will pick it up.
This doesn't mean Censored is a perfect work. The section on the Maoist past comes across as too hurried, and regional variation is shortchanged – a point I'll return to below. It is also not a completely novel work. Parts of Censored are highly original, but others should be seen as building on and extending good work on the Chinese internet previously done by others, such as, to name a few, Yang Guobin, Han Rongbin, David Bandurki and Xiao Qiang, as well as Gary King and Jennifer Pan, the pair of scholars with whom Roberts has collaborated on several influential papers.
What stands out about Censored, though, and makes it so hard to parcel up into central and peripheral parts is its tight construction and the way it meets so beautifully the goals its author sets. This includes explaining to readers how the Party-state has addressed the difficulty of controlling the internet by developing a “porous” as opposed to totalistic censorship system – something that we will be unable to understand if we think of the PRC as a place where a purely “Orwellian” approach to the management of information is the order of the day. She also strives to convince readers that the system's partial nature and use of techniques very different from blocking content is one of its strengths. One thing she stresses to back this up is that heavy-handed censorship can lead people to be curious to learn more about a topic, while subtler methods fool them into imagining there is nothing temptingly taboo to uncover.
I'm left feeling it would be wrong to either go through all the chapters in the book or present a summary of its highlights. I know from my own case that when a critic does either of these things, a busy scholar can feel that tackling the actual book is unnecessary. And Censored happens to be one of those rare books that I feel not just some but all the readers of this journal I know would benefit from reading.
So, instead of taking either of those standard approaches, I will do two things. First, describe one of the book's main and most memorable formulations: what might be called the FFF Theory of Fear, Friction and Flooding.) Second, discuss an opportunity Roberts misses to do even more than she does with this formulation.
The concept of Fear requires little special explanation. We know that authoritarian governments use punishments or the threat of punishments to limit what is published and read. When it comes to the Chinese internet, the blocking of sites can negatively affect a company's bottom line; people can be arrested for posting things; and some web surfers limit what they do because of a worry that searching out some kinds of information could get them into trouble. These phenomena all fit into the first F category.
What does Roberts mean by “Friction”? Censors can cause a site to load slowly. This does not prevent access to it, but leads some to lose patience and go elsewhere for comparable – or what seems to be comparable – information. They do not necessarily think they have been denied access to anything. Another example of Friction is when a site can only be reached using a VPN, but the authorities look the other way to VPN usage.
As for Flooding, a classic example of what Roberts has in mind is when the comment section of a site is filled with posts that reinforce an official line, some of which are contributed by people paid to express the loyalist position. These seem to be spontaneous expressions of opinion and can lead the casual visitor to the site to think that nearly everyone has the same take on a topic. Another kind of Flooding takes places when, in order to minimize discussion of a subject that the Party-state feels is troubling, the internet and newspapers are suddenly filled with stories about a totally different topic.
Roberts stresses that this tripartite distinction between strategies should be seen as of heuristic value rather than marking out completely separate domains. Fear can blur into Friction, and Flooding techniques can be combined with both of the other two modes. The FFF formulation remains, in spite of this, both elegant and useful.
It is worth noting that the most strikingly original part of the book is its treatment of one part of the triad. Not Fear, which routinely comes up in work on censorship. Not Flooding either. Roberts is far from the first to discuss paid commentators (sometimes called the “50 Cent Army”), and when she quotes from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World near the end of Censored, in a section on the ways authoritarian states use distraction to limit dissent, she is going to a literary well that others (myself included) have drawn from before her. It is in her sensitive and nuanced handling of Friction where she excels and breaks the most new ground.
What then of the missed opportunity? This has to do with variation across the PRC, something Roberts is aware of but does not emphasize, choosing in most places to treat the Chinese internet as a single entity. This glosses over the contrasting nature of the mix of Fear, Friction and Flooding in specific locales. In Xinjiang, for example, where the internet has been shut down completely as it never has been in Shanghai and where being known to use a VPN can lead to repercussions not felt in Beijing, there is an unusually high, for China, reliance on Fear.
In Hong Kong, meanwhile, there has tended to be far less use of Fear or even Friction to control information than in Xinjiang, Beijing and Shanghai, or even just across the border with the mainland in Shenzhen. Recently, though, as the kidnapping of the booksellers illustrates, while this contrast has not been obliterated, it has been altered. The Fear-inducing side of that event is easy to appreciate, but it also had a Friction-related impact. Some books that Beijing would like to see disappear completely are still for sale in Hong Kong, but now may require more effort to find due to stores run by proprietors who are cautious or have ties to the authorities refraining from putting them on display or no longer stocking them at all.
It feels uncharitable to end on even a partially critical note. It is just that Roberts makes such insightful use of comparisons between multiple countries that I could not help wishing she had a little more to say about variation across the PRC, a country she understands so well and about which she sheds such important new light in her carefully researched debut book.
