After the violence in Tibet began on March 14, it became very difficult within China to obtain outside information, even as there was a flood of uninformative content reiterating distilled talking points from the government. The Chinese Communist Party reframed public perception of the riots, suppressing any discussion of ethnic conflict and instead drawing a connection between the violence in Tibet and China’s history of oppression by foreign powers. This framework conveniently distracts from any governance failures and depicts the Party in its favored role, standing in solidarity with the people against a hostile foreign world. This narrative is potent, as the CCP came to power through its heroic fight against the Japanese.

The events in Tibet have brought into high relief the form of public theater that can only loosely be termed censorship, for China is the one major country in the world for which censorship is not merely, or even principally, a matter of suppressing undesired messages. Instead, Beijing has created a fact-value fusion: There are no facts that exist independently of their significance in the social contract.

Thus, residence in China is not unlike working at a strongly cultured company, e.g., a Disney or Starbucks. Residents agree to support the “brand values” defined for China by the CCP. They are rewarded for doing so, penalized for abstaining from the general effort and punished severely for actively taking a contrary stance.

In demanding this sort of fealty from its residents, China insists that both individuals and organizations conflate their social, economic and political roles, creating significant inefficiencies and distortions for businesses. Meanwhile, the mingling of positive official messages, suppression of alternative narratives and amplification of approved reactions make it almost impossible to understand what the average Chinese person might “really” think.

A key principle that makes the whole system work is uncertainty about what is or is not aligned with the “feelings” of the people. Citizens know that local security and Party officials exercise broad latitude in enforcing the center’s line. And they understand that pressures to maintain the correct line from the center and specific interests of local officials creates a broad zone of potential risk to steer clear of.

The authorities’ legal tools are surveillance, arrest and imprisonment. But often the “legal” apparatus is deployed as a form of intimidation rather than law enforcement. This is because indiscretions against the ruling ideology are offenses against the CCP, not the civil authorities; civil law applies only imperfectly. So offenses against the “feelings of the Chinese people” are met with house arrest, incognito detention, assault by unidentified authorities and physical intimidation.

Administratively, the government uses processes like approval of business licenses to keep information channels within trusted hands. Traditionally, all businesses that involve a channel of communication with individuals—media, telecommunications, posts, retailing and distribution, transportation—have been required by law to be owned by the government or else by domestic Chinese companies, which are viewed as more accessible to government control.

Technically, the means of control differ depending on the medium. In print, the government controls the bar codes that printers must have in order to print legally, and nothing may go to press without the bar code. Nor may any book or periodical be distributed without the CN or ISBN code owned by a government agency. Television and live performances must be approved by propaganda authorities before airing, and there must be a mechanism available for ceasing performances midstream.

The Internet has posed a particular challenge to Chinese authorities, because it grew up outside the bureaucratic system created to manage traditional media outlets, periodicals and free-to-air television. Regulation of the Internet, which was originally viewed as a form of telecommunications service, came under the purview of telecom authorities at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Before the Chinese Internet had developed, MPT merged with the ministry that managed information technologies and electronics. Partly as a result of this bureaucratic link, the Internet censorship system has shown a bias toward technical means of control.

Those technical means fall into three broad categories: blocking and redirects, filtering, and covert attacks on specific sites, groups, or individuals. These forms of interference are propagated across a four-tier structure. On the top, Tier 1, are the telecommunication operators that control the main interconnection points between China’s backbone networks and the gateways to the international communications system. At Tier 2 are somewhere between 15 to 20 large data centers operated by telecom operators. Tier 3 include the licensed service providers, of which there are hundreds, and Tier 4 is all the local office and housing networks and Internet cafes, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Depending on the level at which they occur, blocks and redirects are determined by inter-agency committee and implemented at the direction of the Ministry of Information Industries by data centers operated by the (state-owned) telcos.

Like everything in China, decisions about censorship are made at different levels for different portions of the Internet. Generally speaking, the authorities prefer to push controls down as far as possible toward the end user, because this creates the least disruption to the whole system. They would be very unlikely, for example, to close off an international gateway just because the BBC Web site had an article about the Taiwanese independence movement; instead, they would be more likely to block the address of the particular article or block the whole BBC Web site.

What tends to create Internet delays in China, however, is not so much the technical demands of blocking, filtering, and attacks but instead the fact that information control commands a higher priority than commercial efficiency. Network administrators may create all sorts of problems in the transmission of normal communications just through incompetence. Additionally, the extravagant amount of human intervention required to implement all the rules boosts costs for China’s Internet. This partly explains why telecommunications costs roughly 10 times the amount it does in the United States and Europe.
The final, most potent, and most fascinating layer of the propaganda system is the political one. This operates something like a fraternity, a group of childhood friends, or an extended family, for which there are no rules but only shared normative values. Thus, the suggestion that Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang or another ethnically differentiated region might be better served by more autonomy from China proper is the cardinal, excommunicable sin. Discussion of government leaders’ personal lives is next on the hierarchy of heinous crimes.

Companies of any size are recruited into the enterprise of promoting these points of view via the withholding of key licenses, withholding of permission to list on public markets or become eligible for loans, or sometimes via proactive persecution in terms of directed legislation, government-sponsored lawsuits, spurious trade actions, sponsored boycotts and other measures. Growth opportunities are given to companies in accordance with their willingness to cooperate.

Some of the simplest examples come from the media. When Rupert Murdoch wanted landing rights in Guangdong Province for his Xingkong Satellite tv, he was required to provide U.S. cable system carriage for Chinese video. Foreign magazines seeking publishing partners in China have been informed that they must provide coverage of China—sometimes positive coverage, sometimes simply space.

The inducements may not be so explicitly requested. The “hard” requirements for a company to go into business come along with a suite of “soft” inducements added over time—government grants and awards for cooperative companies, a coveted license, or perhaps a whirl at Party School for company executives. There need be only a few examples, meanwhile, of what happens to those who do not comply voluntarily and proactively. Powerful corporations are humbled—just ask Rupert Murdoch.

Ultimately, to succeed in China, businesses must assume the goals of the Communist Party as their own. One of the first steps into the market for a major multinational is to hire a government-relations director who will interpret China’s policies and articulate the company’s fealty to those policies as its “commitment to China.”

In fact, conflating the interests of the Chinese Communist Party with the interests of businesses operating in China is what makes China Inc. work. For the last 30 years, China has been building a social system that establishes an identity between business and broader political or social interests.
Does this work well in promoting the kind of stability so cherished by the Party leadership? It may be that, in China’s diverse social system, forcing companies to act like cabinet ministers—and cabinet ministers to act like company executives—is a necessary cost of social harmony. Or, it may only be a necessary cost of prolonging the political life of the Chinese Communist Party. As we know from our political catechism, continuing one-party rule and maintaining social stability are really exactly the same thing.

Mr. X is a foreign media entrepreneur based in China. His identity is concealed because of the certainty that publishing this essay under his name would lead to the loss of his livelihood.