On August 15, 2017, Liu Xia had been missing for a month. The widow of China’s imprisoned Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died from complications of liver cancer on July 13, was last seen in a propaganda photograph showing his cremation, according to international news reports. Observers speculate she is being held in an undisclosed location to prevent contact with diplomats, journalists, and supporters, in a grave rights violation that only compounds the tragedy of her husband’s mistreatment.
The double injustice has prompted several responses from Washington, including a renewed push to rename the plaza outside the Chinese embassy in DC after Liu Xiaobo himself. But the U.S. government should focus on combating the censorship policies that caused him to be targeted in the first place. These policies hurt U.S.-China relations. They also perpetuate systemic abuses.
Between them, Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia have been subject to many of the tools that Chinese authorities use to suppress online speech. The breadth and intensity of these measures has placed China at the bottom of Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net rankings, which assess 65 countries, for the past two years. Dozens of Internet users face the same threats as the government continues to suppress Liu Xiaobo’s legacy in 2017.
What’s more, tactics used against Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, and others in the past have been intensified and refined, raising the stakes for activists on the ground. Here are five examples:
1. Prosecutors are mining online archives to imprison critics for longer.
Then: Though Liu Xiaobo was detained following the dissemination of a manifesto for political reform, other articles he wrote on overseas websites were used to justify his unusually long 11-year prison sentence in 2009.
Now: Activists Lu Gengsong and Chen Shuqing are serving sentences of 11 and 10.5 years in prison respectively, passed in June 2016 for writing about political issues on the Internet. Both had previously served much shorter sentences, indicating a harshening environment for perceived dissenters.
2. Censors are restricting VPNs as well as U.S.-based Internet platforms.
Then: The Great Firewall, part of China’s technical censorship apparatus, has long prevented people in China from accessing international social media platforms, but the impact was offset by circumvention tools that bypass blocking and filtering. When Twitter was blocked in 2009 some Chinese people continued to use it, along with other banned services, through virtual private networks or VPNs.
Now: WhatsApp is the latest communication tool to be disrupted in China, according to reports published less than a week after Liu Xiaobo’s death. And regulations in the past year have sought to restrict which VPN services remain available to Chinese consumers, with several providers blocked or forced to close.
3. Chinese companies are banning more content, even in private messages.
Then: Local social media companies police content on behalf of the state, so users who search for public mentions of known dissidents often get no hits at all. Long before news broke of his illness, “Liu Xiaobo” was blacklisted on the microblogging platform, Weibo, according to Radio Free Asia.
Now: Following Liu Xiaobo’s death, Chinese platforms stepped up content removal in an attempt to contain even the most oblique references to mourning. Weibo refined the blacklist to include “Xiaobo” alone, and WeChat censored images referring to Liu Xiaobo in private, one-to-one messages for the first time, according to Citizen Lab.
4. Internet users are bombarded with distracting government messaging.
Then: Liu Xia has been confined in her Beijing home by plainclothes agents without charge or trial since 2010, but official spokespeople continue to assert that she is free, even since her 2017 disappearance. “Her life looks very comfortable to me...no wonder so many people don’t really work,” one pro-government Internet commenter said of her situation in 2011, according to a translation by China Digital Times.
Now: Research published in April 2017 estimates that such commenters saturate government and social media sites with 448 million posts a year. Rather than challenging and drawing attention to dissenters, they tend to praise the government at strategic moments to distract attention from issues that could cause protests.
5. Targeted shutdowns are limiting individuals’ Internet access.
Then: Chinese authorities famously cut off Internet access for millions of residents of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous region following unrest in 2009, but have since targeted smaller communities or individuals. During her early days of house arrest, Liu Xia reported her Internet and phone connections had been deliberately severed to prevent her communicating with the rest of the world.
Now: In August 2016, the sister of another imprisoned activist, Guo Feixiong, told Radio Free Asia that her home Internet access was shutting down at the same time every day. Her service provider characterized it as a technical error, but the disruption coincided with her efforts to support her brother during his hunger strike in prison.
Liu Xiaobo called the Internet “God’s gift to China,” yet the authorities’ increasingly sophisticated controls are poisoning its potential to affect change. U.S. officials can resist those controls, and help other Chinese activists and citizens exposed to rights violations and content restrictions.
One avenue is diplomatic pressure. Chinese state spokespeople would not acknowledge as much, but the government has responded in the past when members of the international community raise cases of individual rights violations, like prosecution, house arrest, and forced disappearance. Liu Xia’s case is an urgent priority, but sustained engagement is needed on behalf of dozens more.
U.S. officials can also use trade measures to counter the barriers censorship entails for U.S. companies’ access to China’s market, and support independent Chinese-language media that can reach the mainland.
Both Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia have challenged censorship in China at huge personal cost. The U.S. must step up efforts to do the same.