In the global struggle for freedom, democracies do not have the luxury of squabbling among themselves. This is because a far greater, global censorship threat in the form of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is already chugging along with exceptional force – using the full weight of its repressive and coercive apparatus to undermine the foundation of free speech across the world. 

In this contest with China, the democracies better get their act together quickly. This urgency is needed because advanced technologies are propelling the CCP’s capabilities for suppressing speech to an entirely new level, both within and beyond China’s borders. Therefore, Beijing’s censorship juggernaut should be the main target of concern.

A New Environment for Censorship

Today’s censorship challenge is a far cry from the era in which China scholar Perry Link, writing a quarter century ago, shrewdly dissected the CCP’s approach to censorship. At the time, Beijing’s speech control approach was not pursued chiefly through blunt or universal repression, but rather in a subtle, complex way that leveraged fear and uncertainty to preserve what mattered most to the party’s top leaders: staying in power.

Using the metaphor of an “Anaconda in the Chandelier,” Link described the particular nature of censorship in the People’s Republic of China. He used the image of a powerful and often silent predator to represent the pervasive way the Chinese government tended to exert its influence. Even when the anaconda was not actively aggressive, its mere presence typically would be sufficient to create a climate of fear – a “psychological control system” – to induce self-imposed restraints not only among Chinese citizens, but also among foreigners who did business with Beijing. 

In the period since, Beijing’s projection of censorship has expanded, influencing the education and research sectors, entertainment industry, major professional sports, and any number of other powerful institutions – outside China’s borders.

Beijing’s “charm offensives” often fall flat. It is not winning any popularity contests. But as Link suggested, being “loved” is not the Chinese leadership’s principal objective. Rather it is to be feared. The “anaconda effect” should be understood in this context of intimidation. Censorship worked through a combination of active, seemingly arbitrary repression against select targets, and the vague sense of threat this created for others contemplating expression that might cross the CCP.  

Today, the global expansion of digital platforms affords far more opportunities for censorship innovation, a development with massive implications for free speech globally. China’s leaders, like Russia’s, are viscerally hostile to independent thought and expression. In their hands, new digital tools present global risks that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. 

A Proliferation of Snakes and Chandeliers

China’s approach to censorship has evolved. Rather than relying on selective repression tactics for punishment as a deterrent – “to encourage the others” – the CCP now has a toolkit for more comprehensive forms of manipulation and control. 

The first key element is surveillance. In 2013, Xi Jinping remarked that “whoever controls data has the upper hand” and over the past decade Beijing has kicked into high gear the flow of data to the party through a range of sources, from mobile chat or payment apps to facial recognition cameras and other forms of biometric surveillance. China’s rapidly developing compute capabilities allow the CCP not only to collect massive amounts of data but to compile, analyze, and attribute personal information at an exponential speed. These methods have yet to hit peak moment as AI capabilities continue to produce new breakthroughs. 

In August 2025, reports surfaced that the Chinese government is using companies with expertise in artificial intelligence to monitor and manipulate public opinion, giving it a new capabilities to manipulate what information is showcased or hidden. 

Meanwhile new analytical tools, particularly those powered by AI, enable authorities to make sense of an increasingly comprehensive record of people’s activities. “Smart kindergartens” monitor children’s attendance and behavior, while “city brains” process data for urban governance. Together, these systems are more powerful than any single part on its own. They feed into an integrated model for tech-enabled social control, what might be understood as a growing trend toward data-centric authoritarianism. 

In part, these data-driven technologies ensure that there is, in effect, a separate mini-chandelier over everyone’s home, and within their smartphones. Chinese citizens have more reason than ever to watch their words because they know it is likely that they, themselves, are being watched. 

But the psychological impact is not the end of the story. Authorities are also using the granular maps of society that data provide to actively incentivize regime-complaint behavior, and penalize deviation. As part of this integrated structure, innovations such as the “social credit system” make it more technologically feasible to efficiently identify low-level infractions – including those that involve dissenting speech. In effect, the ground is now carpeted with a host of small vipers slithering around people’s digital worlds in ways that can paralyze free speech. 

A second element of the CCP’s digital assault on free expression involves authoritarian curation of information — a critical threat at a moment when China-sourced technology has global reach. 

Beijing has long used its “Great Firewall” to restrict Chinese netizens’ access to global information sources, while domestic platforms like WeChat are required to censor locally generated user content in keeping with the CCP’s ideological guidelines. 

The advent of AI technologies that work increasingly adroitly with natural human language is bolstering these curation efforts. For instance, Beijing is developing a large language model system designed to automatically detect and suppress politically sensitive content, significantly expanding its digital censorship capabilities. As people increasingly rely on large language models as information gateways, there will also be new opportunities for the CCP to censor outputs – as we have already seen in the case of DeepSeek – and ensure in advance that they align with its preferred narratives, in effect preemptive censorship at scale. With the release of DeepSeek’s next-generation AI model V4, concerns are growing that this model will further strengthen censorship capabilities on topics the CCP considers sensitive.

CCP Censorship Goes Global

Beijing’s censorship juggernaut is not simply a local concern. Crucial elements of China’s surveillance and information control system are being exported globally and are indeed in high demand. 

Long before the advent of AI chatbots, China began to export its model of data centered repression to interested buyers. AI is supercharging these capabilities while lowering the cost and threshold for access. A 2024 report highlighted how China’s “Digital Silk Road” – which includes the export of fiber optic and satellite systems, 5G infrastructure, smart city technologies, and digital economy tools across the Indo-Pacific – can facilitate data access and information control. China’s promotion of surveillance technologies like “Safe Cities” allows Beijing to tutor other governments in and equipping them for restricting the flow of information online. 

Finally, the CCP can use globally popular platforms owned by China-based companies, such as TikTok or Deep Seek, to gather massive amounts of data, place curated limits on information available to the public, and shape global discourse. These mechanisms – many of which create dependencies by other governments on Chinese vendors – both provide other governments with instruments to control speech that displeases them, and create levers the CCP can use to suppress its own critics on a global scale. 

Combatting Chilling Effects at Global Scale

The Chinese leadership’s censorship ambitions are vast and intimidating. But the sheer effort invested in these extraordinary speech-suppressing practices suggest a deep-seated fear on the CCP’s part that upon closer inspection reveals a competitive disadvantage. Censorship creates an environment where the veneer of stability covers over deepening social erosion, quelling competing ideas that could help improve government policies and the lives of ordinary people. Democratic societies, by contrast, accept dissenting speech as a natural and necessary part of the give-and-take of politics, helping to directly confront societal problems and ultimately come out stronger. 

Unlike in open systems, in China there is no such debate over the protection of expression rights. These technological developments are part and parcel of Beijing’s concerted effort to shift the center of gravity globally toward authoritarianism, which also includes transnational repression tactics and other sharp power techniques aimed at intimidating and silencing critics overseas. 

In what is a fierce competition over global free speech standards, democracies should take the opportunity to reaffirm their own principles. They need to vigorously defend those within their borders who are targeted by Beijing’s sharp power, a crucial step that can check the outward-facing side of the CCP’s “psychological control system.” This includes the defense of free speech at home, especially for diaspora communities and journalists targeted by Beijing’s transnational repression, a vivid example of the CCP’s resetting of rules beyond its borders.

Democratic systems should also show solidarity with those internationally who are challenging the CCP’s self-assumed prerogative to write the rules for everyone else’s speech, and advance values of free expression by supporting, for instance, circumvention technologies and independent media that shine some light through the cracks in the Great Firewall. 

More fundamentally, transparency and accountability requirements on China-linked platforms operating internationally are needed.

From a global vantage point, the most consequential threat to freedom of expression today comes from the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping. In the intensifying contest over information and ideas, the CCP exploits what it sees as its core advantage: a sophisticated, disciplined toolkit for restricting, manipulating, and silencing speech in order to shape the information environment and advance its strategic aims.

To respond to the unique and growing threat to freedom of expression the Chinese authorities pose, the United States and other democracies will need to manage their internal disagreements. Doing so is essential, because only by working together can they effectively counter this broader, global challenge to free speech.