China Again Ranks as ‘The World’s Worst Environment for Internet Freedom’: Report

By Dorothy Li

China has again been ranked as the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom by a rights advocacy group, which also reported the communist regime has long sought to push its repressive model abroad.

“For the eighth consecutive year, China remained the world’s worst environment for internet freedom,” Freedom House said in its latest report published on Oct. 18.

Out of the 70 countries surveyed, the report described China’s internet as “the world’s most repressive.” The Washington-based nonprofit organization found that information about the 2022 Beijing Olympics and the COVID-19 pandemic has been heavily restricted.

Furthermore, the watchdog said the Chinese regime yielded its power over the tech industry through regulation and rules. The authorities drafted rules to punish companies that help internet users to bypass the internet firewall, according to the report.

Having successfully controlled the flow of information at home, China and Russia are turning outward, promoting a repressive cyber model with larger state controls. Researchers from Freedom House warned that Beijing and Moscow had led the efforts to reshape internet standards and rules by exploring their roles in international bodies.

“Authoritarian powers, like China and Russia, have made inroads [towards international forums], and this is particularly true at a U.N. agency, known as the International Telecommunications Union, or the ITU. Authoritarians are trying to transform this body into a global internet regulator that advances their interests,” said Allie Funk, research director for technology and democracy at Freedom House.

Domestic Censorship

By surveying developments in human rights online between June 2021 and May 2022, Freedom House researchers found that Beijing further tightened censorship during specific times.

For example, content related to women’s rights was under intensified censorship after tennis player Peng Shuai made sexual assault allegations against a retired top Communist Party official, Zhang Gaoli, on the Twitter-like platform Weibo.

Peng’s post was immediately taken down from her verified Weibo account, and she disappeared from the public eye, raising international concerns over her well-being. Peng later denied the claim when she reappeared.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also launched an aggressive campaign to suppress information about the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when Shanghai residents shared their experiences amid a strict two-month lockdown that began in late March, according to the report.

The prolonged lockdown of China’s most cosmopolitan city caused shortages of food and daily necessities. Non-COVID patients struggled to obtain medicine or emergency care. Residents, including the elderly and children, were separated from their families and sent to quarantine facilities. Many residents took to Weibo to plead for help, while others expressed anger and frustration on the tightly-controlled internet. But numerous posts were taken down by China’s censors, Freedom House said on its China page.

Chinese residents who shared information about COVID could face harsh punishment. The report cited Xu Na as an example. Xu was detained after she shared information and photos with the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times during the early COVID-19 outbreak in Beijing. In January, Xu, who is also an adherent of the persecuted spiritual group Falun Gong, was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Reshaping the Global Internet

Freedom House warned that authoritarian powers, like the communist regime in China, have long sought to displace the current global internet governance model with “one that promotes cyber sovereignty, or greater control by states.”

The report highlighted that China has been making overtures into ITU, a United Nations agency responsible for developing and determining global standards for new technologies. ITU has been headed by Zhao Houlin, a Chinese telecoms engineer, since 2014.

As ITU’s secretary-general, Zhao calls for “a shift of control over the setting of technical standards away from multistakeholder bodies, where civil society and other nongovernmental experts have more sway, and toward the ITU itself, where only governments have input,” according to the report.

During Zhao’s tenure, Chinese tech giant Huawei, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly proposed a new set of standards called “New IP” (internet protocol) in 2019. The plan, the report said, would “fundamentally alter the interoperability of the global internet’s infrastructure by redesigning common protocols to facilitate greater state control over domestic networks.”

The initiative was voted down, but analysts at Freedom House noted that rebranded elements of the proposal have since reappeared in various standards bodies.

Meanwhile, the CCP morphed its annual World Internet Conference into a permanent organization in July 2022. According to the report, the body is designed to “serve as a ‘shared’ global community that would determine technical standards and governance.” Through the organization, the CCP could “promote and incentivize other governments to adopt its authoritarian model of digital control.”

“At home and on the international stage, authoritarians are on a campaign to divide the open internet into a patchwork of repressive enclaves,” Freedom House said in the report. “More governments than ever are exerting control over what people can access and share online by blocking foreign websites, hoarding personal data, and centralizing their countries’ technical infrastructure.”

“As a result of these trends, global internet freedom has declined for a 12th consecutive year.”