After China lifted its COVID-19 rules, leading to surging cases, social media censors relax some rules, allowing criticism of protestors but not the government
Austin Ramzy / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @joshchin , @orsoraggiante , and @crehage Tweets: Josh Chin / @joshchin : As Covid-19 sweeps across China following the end of its strict pandemic controls, sparking a run on fever drugs and swamping hospitals, some people in the country are looking to cast blame. One clear target has emerged. Latest from @austinramzy https://www.wsj.com/... Jaideep A. Prabhu / @orsoraggiante : China has found someone to blame for its Covid wave: https://www.wsj.com/... | Not who *is* to blame, of course Christoph Rehage / @crehage : God this is dark... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Censorship in China has repeatedly been stress-tested by the pandemic: in early 2020 the sheer volume of government criticism overwhelmed censors during the first outbreak, and last spring Shanghai's internet-savvy residents again swamped propaganda limits during lockdown outrage. The pattern now repeats from the other direction — with zero-COVID ended and hospitals swamped, a furious argument over the ending of zero-COVID is taking over Chinese social media, and censors are responding not by deleting everything but by steering blame.
First-order effects
- Chinese social media users gain a sanctioned outlet for anger: posts blaming protestors or other non-government targets for the fever-drug runs and hospital crushes can circulate, while criticism of the government itself stays prohibited.
- Censors shift workload from mass deletion to narrative management, deciding which targets of public blame survive online as cases surge.
Second-order effects
- The selective tolerance echoes the earlier dynamic where criticism volume overwhelmed censors — if blame keeps redirecting toward officials despite the relaxed rules, enforcement costs rise and the permitted-lane approach may collapse back into blanket deletion.
- Users who test the boundary face the same legal exposure seen when a citizen was prosecuted over a critical WhatsApp message likely obtained by hacking or an informant, raising the personal risk of misjudging what the new lane allows.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across outbreaks, Chinese information control settles into a standing playbook: crisis-era censorship flexes to channel public anger toward safe targets rather than suppress it outright, making the censor's role less a delete button and more a steering mechanism.
- Each cycle of overwhelmed censors followed by recalibrated rules hardens the distinction between tolerated grievance and prosecutable dissent, narrowing what citizens can say about governance even as apparent openness widens.
The trend: Pandemic crises are turning China's censorship from blanket suppression into targeted redirection of public blame, with each outbreak testing how long the steering holds.