Nectar Gan and Sidney Leng – Silence of the Fans: China’s G20 Censorship bBlocks Social Media Praise of First Lady Peng Liyuan’s Stunning Banquet Dress

My first thoughts on this article are: this has to be a joke. I understand two explosions took place in Tianjin and the G20 summit was being highly censored, but you have to think if the first lady Peng Liyuan’s blurbs about fashion could not even make the media and were being censored, that no media, news, or events were being published at all. This connects to what I was discussing earlier with the “keywords search”, by making keywords so general as; “summit”, “country”, “airport”, and “Hangzhou” you are not allowing for anything to pass through the censor. This makes me question the collective action theory. What about  the first lady’s fashion has anything to do with collective action, or critiquing the state for that matter of fact confuses me. So this tells me the government is not doing a good job processing the censorship program and it is looking  to do more then just prevent collective action. I do believe that this is a very serious problem. As times goes on the amount being censored seems to be increasing which is only repressing the Chinese people more. I do not know if China is looking  to head in a direction of democracy, or if Democracy would even be the best thing for China, but this is moving in the opposite direction of democracy and I feel like any direction that China would actually want to go.

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