Chinese censorship following the death of Li Keqiang

Chinese censorship following the death of Li Keqiang Chinese censorship following the death of Li Keqiang By Jeffrey Knockel and Emile Dirks NOVEMBER 21, 2023 RESEARCH REPORT #172 Copyright © 2023 Citizen Lab, “Chinese censorship following the death of Li Keqiang” by Jeffrey Knockel and Emile Dirks. [...] We found that the presence of some keyword combinations in search queries triggers hard censorship, i.e., the censorship of all results, whereas the presence of other keyboard combinations triggers soft censorship, i.e., the censorship of results from all but whitelisted sources. [...] The general secretary of the CPC, the senior most role in the party-state, is not directly elected but is instead elected by the Central Committee. [...] Suppressing natural search results on the web and social media when searching for content concerning Li’s death presents a distorted narrative for users attempting to discover information pertaining to Li and the CPC more broadly, impacting the integrity of the online information environment. [...] This work builds on our greater effort to automatically track real-time censorship in response to significant political events in China, including Tibetan Buddhist events, the “709 Crackdown” on legal practitioners, the death of Nobel Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, and the initial outbreak of COVID-19 as well as its continuing spread across the globe.