SHENYANG, China -- The administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping is tightening its regulation of online speech ahead of next month's National Party Congress. The Chinese Communist Party wants to contain criticism of the administration ahead of the congress, which is expected to confer on Xi a third term as China's leader.
The number of netizens in China has doubled from 10 years ago to more than 1 billion. Since 2019, the country's cyberspace regulator has removed more than 20 billion postings of what it has deemed as inappropriate information and shut down nearly 1.4 billion accounts.
In a recent case, the Weibo account of Lao Dongyan, a criminal law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, "had been wiped clean."
