Name: How China tightly controls its internet - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2025-12-25T09:49:38.000Z
Duration: 14 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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If everything in China could potentially be monitored, do people have, like, intimate conversations?

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Peppa Pig, which is such an innocent cartoon character, it was scoped off the Internet as well because they were saying that this is not good for the Chinese youth.

Loads of Hollywood films get censored in China.

Remember Top Maverick, There was huge controversy when the Taiwanese and Japanese flags were quietly edited away from Tom Cruise's jacket in the trailer.

And Bohemian Rhapsody, pretty much all the gay scenes were cut out.

And it was the same with that scene from Fantastic, the Secrets of Dumbledore.

So going to the cinema in China is a whole different experience.

It's the same for the Internet, Foreign music, video games.

So today you're going to hear why censorship is so tight in China.

This is what in the World from the BBC World Service.

And with me here in the studio is Sean yuan from the BBC's Global China unit.

I never really noticed there was censorship.

And for example, Here they have TikTok and they have Instagram, they have YouTube, they have Google, all those things that be readily accessible to them.

But for me growing up, we didn't have those things even up until now.

There's still no Instagram, there's no Google, There is no YouTube and there's no Facebook.

There's pretty much all the social media apps you can think of right now off the top of your.

We don't have that in China and we have the Chinese equivalent of those apps.

But that just comes and shows that how tightly controlled the trans Internet is and how effective has been in a way that people don't even think about censorship anymore because it is the way of life.

Was there anything that you really wanted to see, like a movie or a hit song that you were desperately trying to get hold of?

What was the one thing that you remember being like, I can't get hold of this.

She was viral, you know, back in the days, and everyone was talking about her.

And I remember having to find out how to evade the other censorship in order to watch this video.

And Lady Gaga, that's because of her links to the Dalai Lama.

She met with Dalai Lama a few years ago, you know, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism who is in exile right now.

And it's obviously one of the more sensitive topics in China.

And the fact that Lady Gaga being international star, met with Dalai Lama, that sort of triggered the Beijing's response.

And let's talk about some of the other big topics.

Taiwan, the Tiananmen Square protests, all of these major topics that you just can't talk about at all.

For example, the protest in Hong Kong back in 2019, the Anti Extradition bill.

And you have the Taiwan issue, of course, Tiananmen Square, for example.

It was one of the events that had been scrubbed off from Chinese online and textbook memory, which was the protest, a student protest back in 1989 that ended up with a massacre on Tiananmen Square.

That's one of the more important topics that are being censored on Chinese Internet.

What is China trying to achieve with this level of censorship?

Obviously, it's trying to rewrite history.

I think the most important thing for the Chinese government to do is to assert some sort of dominance in order to sort of restore stability.

It's his instability as the core reason why Soviet Union fell, for example, and Xi Jinping himself.

He went through those periods, he understood exactly what instability could do to the society.

And that's the reason why he personally was very invested in making sure that the entire country stayed the way it is.

And the Internet is just the most amazing tool for planning protests.

There have been countless movements, governments that have been toppled because of protests and movements that have been organized online.

Are there any topics that you think you know would have been banned, but

Like, for example, we're just talking about, you know, like stability.

We're talking about how he wants to assert dominance, how he wants to make sure there's no massive movement.

I'm not saying that criticism towards the government is completely out of reach and it's completely not tolerated.

Actually, most of the times your criticism towards local government, for example, is not just tolerated.

Sometimes it's been promoted in a way that.

Yet direct your anger towards this specific official at a very low level government.

So, for example, we've had a lot of examples in the past few years where local government officials being accused of corruption, for example, bribery and all those things.

The Chinese Internet would actually actively encourage Chinese netizens to talk about them.

But if your criticism is targeted towards like for example, Xi Jinping itself or central government, and

that runs the risk of mobilizing a bigger population, then sure, that would be censored.

And especially if, you know, there is low level government corruption and then the high level government comes and cuts it off, then they seem to be doing the right thing.

And on a daily basis, can you talk me through how this censorship actually works?

I mean, like, let's start with the Great Firewall of China.

That is one of the, the most important inventions that the Chinese government has put out when it comes to Internet censorship.

It was put out many, many years ago already and more than a decade.

And every year has been not just every, almost on a daily basis being upgraded to filter out more content, to block more VPNs, for example.

What it does essentially is that they block all the major websites that the government would deem to be a cause for concern for them when it comes to instability and all that.

BBC for example, is blocked now, as I said earlier, all meta related websites, Facebook, Instagram, for example, WhatsApp, we cannot use either.

Literally, quite like if you look at your phone right now, if I pull out my phone right now, the first screen, all the apps I'll be using right now, none of them will work in China with this great firewall.

Chinese companies got this opportunity to promote their own products.

So you don't have Google Maps, but we have Baidu Maps, for example, we have Gao Dun Maps.

And we don't have WhatsApp, but we have WeChat.

It's also part of the tool of censorship because WhatsApp, for example, @ least it's end on end encryption, whereas WeChat is not.

And everything could be monitored on WeChat.

So by banning those apps and introducing local apps, they're giving people alternative for sure.

But those tools are also giving them a chance to kind of have back channel, to assert more censorship as well.