for China, the suspension of the social network in the United States legitimizes its own censorship

Every year for a decade, Wuzhen comes alive for a few days in the fall. This small water town with its postcard canals, located about a hundred kilometers west of Shanghai, is hosting the World Internet Conference. Chinese executives responsible for cyberspace receive Chinese and foreign tech giants and digital officials from all over the world. This is to promote the regime’s vision of how the Web should be managed and to emphasize a particular concept, “cyber sovereignty”. It opposes the vision of a universally open Internet, a place for the free circulation of information, which the Chinese government sees as a characteristic of Western societies and a potential threat to its control.

Even if she has continued to denounce in recent months the “bandit logic” of the United States to want to suspend TikTok since the application met with success, China considers that its own vision is reinforced, legitimized, by the decision of the American power to also resort to blocking foreign social networks. The ban has been in effect since Saturday January 18 at the end of the day.

During the weeks preceding the adoption, in April 2024, by the American Congress of the law threatening to block TikTok if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, refused to sell it, the official press and social networks had covered themselves of articles and comments denouncing American “double standards”. “Let me tell you a joke: American society is liberal and democratic and it is a full market economy”wrote in March 2024 a user of Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of X, whose message would be reposted thousands of times.

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