This article was extremely interesting, I feel like I say that often when it comes to these readings, but every article brings something new to the table, or a different perspective. What I found most interesting about this piece is that I really did not agree with it at all. The assertion this article makes is that contrary to many other people’s research and commentary, the purpose of the censorship program is not to suppress the criticism of the state or the Communist Party. The purpose of the censorship program is actually to reduce the probability of collective action by clipping social ties whenever any collective movements are in evidence or expected. My feelings about this statement in itself is that don’t the two often go hand in hand. Someone who is criticizing the state or Communist Party is more then likely the same someone’s who would be looking to start a collective movement.

In the beginning it acknowledges that it is hard to distinguish between the state critique model and the collective action model, but it clearly states it believes the collective action model is accurate and then tries to back it up with a lot  of evidence. It claims”The Great Wall of China” mainly effects foreigners and those that interact with foreigners, but otherwise it does not  really affect  the Chinese people, but I feel like this is being underplayed a lot. I feel that the government and  Communist Party does not want the Chinese to be using anything that they cannot completely control. Then they say “keyword blocking” only has a limited effect on freedom of speech. However, I do not understand how a government prevent news, media, text messages, E-mails, or anything that it chooses not to send to be considered limited. Yes you can come up with codes for the censored words and such, but it seems that this form of censorship is a huge violation of freedom of speech. The study that they did on the censoring of websites and information in times of a crisis, it basically seems like they would  over censor because they wanted to make sure they covered all areas of the varieties of different manners of spreading information. I understand that back in the day the U.S. would do this during times of war as to make sure everyone was on board or it was not publicly displayed that the U.S. did not all agree on war time efforts, however, this level  of censorship and limiting of speech I do not think would ever take place in this day and age. Especially, when the government is censoring information just to make sure they are not looked at badly. When an event takes place in China today especially, regarding collective action, you can almost guarantee that majority of people’s information is being blocked. The article provides evidence of times that writers and bloggers did Critique the government and  get away with it, but I feel like these few examples do not convince me. Also, I could  be wrong, but with Xi Jinping as president the censors on the critique of government have increased.

Anyways, this article makes for a good argument and it has a lot of facts and evidence to support its hypothesis, but for some reason I just feel like its biased and I do not want to trust it. The weirdest part is that I do not even necessarily disagree with the article, because I do think that one of China’s main goals  is probably to prevent collective action movements.