WSJ – China Realtime Report: China’s hardliners take aim at a new target

Here comes the hard line again.

Back from their working break at the summer resort of Beidaihe—and with no major decisions about the economy materializing in the wake of the those meetings–the Chinese Communist Party leadership has evidently decided that it’s high time to reaffirm its control over society.

And this time, there’s a new target: the social media.

After weeks of taking jabs to the chin from an angry microblogging public, leading forces in the Party have decided to punch back. Politburo member Liu Qi visited the Beijing offices of Sina.com’s popular microblogging service Weibo earlier this week and impressed upon the staff there the need for “the Internet’s healthy development”—code words for staying away from topics which attack the rule of the Communist Party or hold officials up for public ridicule.

It’s not clear why the Party leadership took so long to issue this warning to Weibo. If there were previously any doubts in Beijing about the threat the service poses to the government’s ability to control public discourse, they would have been eviscerated weeks ago with the unprecedented outpouring of rage on the site over the July 23 high-speed train collision near the city of Wenzhou.

Of course, the Wenzhou accident illustrated how Weibo functions as a safety valve for some in society, and so refraining from interfering might have been seen as the smart choice, lest outrage at further media controls spill from cyberspace into the streets. Weibo also provides Party overseers with a good sense of what netizens are dissatisfied about—a pulse-taking when the conversation gets political.

The most likely explanation, however, is that the upper echelons simply could not agree on how to manage a situation where indignation at the authorities appeared so forcefully. Bogged down in Beidaihe trying to sort out a consensus on economic matters, leaders were probably wavering then over what could and should be done in the wake of the Wenzhou train tragedy.