ABSTRACT
In the first three decades of China’s post-reform era, the Communist Party’s control over the press alternated in cycles of control and relaxation; years of relative openness were followed by periods of renewed restrictions and crackdowns. The rise of the internet and market-based journalism in the first years of the twenty-first century brought fundamental changes that seemed to hold the promise of greater liberalization. However, there is now a general agreement among China media observers that press freedoms have experienced an alarming erosion in the years since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012. The government has coordinated an unprecedented wave of new and disturbing assaults on free expression in journalism, academia and social media news sources. Facilitated by the new information technology, these attacks have extended beyond the measures taken by Xi’s predecessors, and to seem to portend a more permanent and totalistic digital information control system in China.
