This page is a work in progress; I was originally collecting information for up doctorate thesis on the subject but since I have abandoned the project I decided to put my research results online.
China's Propaganda System
Censorship in China is part of the propaganda system; propaganda doesn't work effectively until alternative voices are silenced
The subject of propaganda is somewhat murky but there are some good books and research papers available online. The best book I have read to date so far is Anne-Marie Brady's Marketing Dictatorship which is available in snippet view from Google books and reasonably priced on Amazon. Brady has accessed documents produced by the central and provincial propaganda departments. She argues strongly that China's propaganda system has been invigorated rather than weakened by the influx of money and market forces in recent years. She argues that propaganda has effectively convinced Chinese people that dictatorship is the only option, but on this point her evidence is somewhat weak and I would argue for a more nuanced picture in which certain important sections of society remain antagonistic towards the party State. I also think that acquiescence is a better word than support, because after all citizens have no real choice and I think their views would change rather quickly if an alternative became available
If you live in China, you will be subject to censorship, which may influence your opinions without you even being aware of it. All the newspapers which you come across and all the TV you see are carefully regimented by the State. You may go months without seeing an imported newspaper or watching the BBC or CNN. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and lots of other sites are blocked. Worst of all, you may feel that it's impolite to voice your own opinions about dictatorship, and self-censorship your self until it becomes second nature, and you start to believe the things you say to be nice. Lot's of foreigners come back from living in China sounding even more pro-dictatorship than the Chinese. They will tell you without irony that China is too big for democracy to work there. Or they will tell you that democracy is just not suitable for some cultures... Scary.
Luckily, there are antidotes to this quandry. To start with, you can get across the Great Fire Wall of China without signing up for an expensive VPN, just download Freegate from dongtaiwang.com to a PC with a Chinese operating system. It is constantly updated and seems to crack all the latest GFW updates.
To get freegate, get a gmail account and then email freeget.two@gmail.com, or add dongtaiwang to your skype - not the China Skype version.
Note that if you try to download skype from skype.com in China, you will be redirected to tom.skyp.com, and the version of skype downloaded from there will have surveillance and censorship built in. Luckily lots of other sites also offer the skype download so go there instead.
Once you have installed freegate, sign up to the email list of chinadigitalnews.net, which gathers more good stories on China than just about any other site, and features the best of the non-censored media reports on China. It's a powerful antidote to CPC propaganda, and not surprisingly it is blocked in China, but you can read most of the stories on your email.
Encryption or using https instead of http is another way around the GFW which is gaining traction; Google now has an encrypted search page https://www.google.com. All you need to do is add an 's' in front of http and your searches will be encrypted. Your connection will not be cut when you do sensitive searches in China. You won't be able to open all the pages, but at least you'll know what's Google has even introduced image search too, but this works only partially, because the images are hosted on other people's non encrypted servers. An image with a name like "tiananmen-massacre.jpg" will get blocked. On the subject of images, they can be used to upload text which would other wise be auto-blocked in China. To do convert your words to images, press Print Screen on the keyboard, open Microsoft Paint or another file, edit->paste and save as jpeg.
Check greatfirewallofchina.org to see whether a website is blocked in China.by the great firewall.
There doesn't seem to be a good online directory of books banned by China, so I have started one, again a work in progress.
List of some of the top Propaganda-busting works in English:
The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Li Zhisui
The Party: the secretive world of China's rulers, Richard McGregor
Mao's Great Famine Frank Dikotter
Tombstone Yang Jisheng (only in Chinese so far)
The Long March Sun Shunyun
Will the Boat Sink the Water? Chen GUidi and Wu Chuntao
Prisoner of the State, Zhao Ziyang
Wild Grass, Ian Johnson
Poorly Made in China, Paul Midler
来生不做中国人 钟祖康 (only in Chinese so far)
Red China Blues Jan Wong
Of course, any discussion of propaganda/censorship in China should start with the 1989 June 4th massacre, which was when the hardliners took over and created the present day propaganda system. One of the biggest lies produced by the system was also the cover up of the massacre; the Party-State claimed that counter revolutionaries had attacked the Army. One of the best documents on the massacre is Hinton's video Tankman.
Prisoner of the State,
the English translation of Chinese Premier prison diary, is a unique document which describes the internal power struggle which preceded the crack down. It refutes the often heard propaganda argument that the demonstrators went to far or were used by the Western; if anything, they were used by reformers within the Party.
Twenty years, a powerful interview with Ding Zilin tells us what happened to the families of the victims.