[jamesli]

The first paragraph of the section Results basically sums it up. In my personal experience, it is true, not only in the Internet, but also in everyday conversations. People can criticize the party and its leaders freely in their conversations, without any concern to be arrested.

"Criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are routinely published, whereas posts with collective action potential are much more likely to be censored—regardless of whether they are for or against the state (two concepts not previously distinguished in the literature). Chinese people can write the most vitriolic blog posts about even the top Chinese leaders without fear of censorship, but if they write in support of or opposition to an ongoing protest—or even about a rally in favor of a popular policy or leader—they will be censored."

[tokenadult]

Another Hacker News reader recommended in a thread a month or so ago the book series by historian Richard J. Evans on the Third Reich. In the second book in the series, The Third Reich in Power, Evans points out that the Nazis had a law against making jokes about the regime leadership, and many neighbors informed on neighbors to the Gestapo about jokes they heard. But few of those cases were prosecuted, and even people in the Nazi leadership, according to archival records, thought it was important to let people blow off steam about the Nazi leadership.

Yes, what a dictatorial regime most fears is concerted, fearless action, not just talk. Taiwan's largely peaceful transformation to free and fair elections, a free press, and general protection of civil rights came about only after there was an organized opposition (the 黨外 movement) counteracting decades of attempts by the former dictatorship to suppress the development of independent civil society organizations. The eventual transformation in China will most likely take the same form. The regime is trying to delay that transformation.

[porpoisemonkey]

It sounds like this attitude can be summed up as "It's alright to complain, but don't talk about doing anything about it."

[thaumasiotes]

This isn't exactly a new idea. Private clubs were banned in the Roman empire specifically because of the risk of collective action (they didn't want clubs to be the seed of a rebellion). We have correspondence from a governor to the emperor where the governor says (paraphrased, obviously), "a bunch of the men locally have put together a firefighting group, so if a building catches fire everyone shows up and helps put it out. This seems like a decent idea to me, is it OK?" The response is "absolutely not".

[notahacker]

The government is not so much concerned about desire to "fix" things as people's desire to politically organize in ways they don't control, hence the perhaps more surprising aspect of the earlier post: they're less keen on individuals organizing rallies in support of a leader than they are on those individuals voicing a personal criticism of that individual.

Reading on what demonstrations of popular support for specific figures within a notionally unified establishment became during the Cultural Revolution is helpful in understanding the present leadership's paranoia here.

[kazinator]

Or maybe: don't communicate knowledge about some event where crowds are assembling (which spreads the word, and causes more people to show up).

[kazinator]

In other words, the communists pretty much have granted their people nearly USA-style freedom of speech, after having observed for many decades that it is no threat to the power structure there, and probably in some ways helps to preserve the status quo.

That last bit of censorship they have there just helps to curb some protests; the USA version of that is to let people communicate about the protest, so it blows larger, but then bring in the National Guard.

[mentat]

Or one can just use the DHS to illegally coordinate crackdowns like they did for Occupy.