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2.6.1 Independence movements
The independence movements in China are mainly contained within the Inner Mongolian Regions, the Tibetan region, and the Xinjiang region. These regions contain people from ethnic and religious minority groups such as the Uyghurs.

The Chinese government has had strained relations with these regions since the early 1910s, when the first president of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-sen, suggested a plan to move large numbers of Han people from Southeast China to Northwest China in an effort to assimilate the ethnic minorities in the area. While Sun Yat-sen lost political power before he could enforce this plan, his sinocentric, assimilationist attitude was adopted by future leader Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang Kai-shek enacted educational policy that encouraged cultural assimilation and discouraged self-determinism until 1945, when Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist party became more lenient towards the various ethnic minorities. From this time until the establishment of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, ethnic minorities experienced great independence from the Chinese government, with Mongolia becoming an independent state and Xinjiang being named an autonomous region.

This independence was suddenly removed by the Communist Party in the 1940s, with the forced annexation of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang back into mainland China, leading to many protests and riots from the ethnic and religious minorities in the autonomous regions. From this point onwards, there has been a sustained outpouring of secessionist and independence movements from China's autonomous regions.

The largest independence effort comes from the Muslim-Turkic population in Xinjiang, which shares minimal cultural, lingual, or historical similarities with the Han population in China. While the Chinese government promises certain advantages to this population such as affirmative action in universities, greater liberties within China's one-child policy, and an increase in government subsidies to the region, the government also discourages and restricts the Muslim-Turkic ethnic population from freely practicing their religion, expressing their faith through head scarves, fasting, and facial hair, and building mosques freely. Furthermore, because of the advantages that the Chinese government grants to these ethnic minorities, there is a certain prejudice against these minorities by many Han Chinese, as well as a widespread belief that the government unfairly grants minorities preferential treatment.

One noteworthy event is the Feb 1997 riots in Yining, a county between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, during which 12 independence movement leaders were executed and 27 were arrested and incarcerated. Moreover, almost 200 Uyghurs were killed and over 2,000 were arrested. Riots such as these are supported by neighboring Muslim Turkish countries including Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan in a show of pan-Turkic nationalism. There have also been recent riots in 2008 within Tibetan regions such as Lhasa, as well as anti-Han "pogroms" in Urumqi, Xinjiang in 2009. In response to these riots, the Chinese government has increased the police presence in these regions.

2.6.2 Political abuse of psychiatry
Political abuse of psychiatry began in China near the start of the Cultural Revolution during the 1950's and continued in different forms from then until the late 1980s. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, the practice of psychiatry in China saw legitimate improvements in the breadth and quality of treatments. However, as Communist ideology grew stronger under the direction of Mao Zedong and the campaign of ideological reform was implemented, psychiatric diagnoses were used as a way to control and incarcerate Chinese citizens who didn't subscribe to Maoist ideologies. The main demographic of Chinese citizens being targeted and placed in mental asylums were academics, intellectuals, students, and religious groups for their capitalist tendencies and bourgeois worldview. The justification for placing those who didn't comply with Maoist principles in mental institutions was that non-Maoist political ideologies such as capitalism caused extreme individualism and selfishness, which contributed to mental disabilities such as schizophrenia and paranoid psychosis in the individual. Maoists supported this claim that anti-Communist beliefs caused mental imbalances with the positive correlation between the wealth and class of a group of people and the amount of "mentally ill" people within that group.

Political abuse of psychiatry in China peaked around the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. During this time, Chinese counterrevolutionists and political dissidents were placed into mental asylums, where they were treated with psychotherapy (xinli zhiliao) resembling political indoctrination sessions. During this time, statistics indicate that there were more political activists being held in mental institutions than the number of rapists, murderers, arsonists, and other violent mentally ill people combined. The human rights activist Wei Jingsheng was among the first to speak out about the misappropriation of psychiatry for political purposes in the winter of 1978; however, in response to his advocacy, he was imprisoned and subjected to involuntary drugging and beating by the Chinese government.

After the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes continually diminished until the 1990s, when there was a resurgence in politically motivated psychiatric diagnoses towards political dissidents and minority religious groups. During this more recent wave of Chinese forensic psychiatry, political dissidents and practicers of non-mainstream religions were sent to Ankang (meaning peace and health) hospitals. These hospitals, built to hold the criminally insane, are managed by Bureau No. 13 of China's Ministry of Public Security. Ankang hospitals have been the target of much scrutiny by human rights activists and organizations both inside and outside of China, and reports indicate inhumane treatment of patients inside these hospitals. Patients in these hospitals are forced to work at least 7 hours a day and are subjected to torture including acupuncture with electric currents, forced injection of central nervous system damaging drugs, and physical abuse with ropes and electric batons. Furthermore, reports by Chinese surgeons at these hospitals report on the use of psychosurgery on patients who were involuntarily placed in these hospitals to reduce "violent and impulsive behaviors". One of the most targeted groups of Chinese citizens to be placed in Ankang hospitals are the practicers of Falun Gong, who have what is termed "evil cult-induced mental disorder" or "xiejiao suo zhi jingshen zheng'ai" by Chinese psychiatry. Over 1000 practitioners have been incarcerated in mental asylums across 23 provinces, cities, and autonomous regions.

One of the most famous cases of politically motivated psychiatric diagnoses took place in 1992, when Wang Wanxing was arrested for displaying a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square. After Wang's arrest, his wife signed a statement confirming his mental instability, because police told her that doing so would ensure Wang's immediate release. However, Wang was instead placed in the Beijing Ankang hospital, where he is still being held to this day.

2.6.3 Political prisoners
The Chinese government has a history of imprisoning citizens for political reasons. The number of political prisoners peaked during the Mao era and has been decreasing since then. From 1953 to 1975, around 26 to 39 percent of prisoners were incarcerated for political reasons. By 1980, the percentage of prisoners incarcerated for political reasons was only 13 percent, and this figure decreased to 0.5 percent in 1989 and 0.46 percent in 1997. 1997 is also the year that the Chinese Criminal Law was amended to replace counterrevolutionary crime with crimes endangering national security.

During the Mao era, one notorious labor camp located in the northeastern Heilongjiang Province called Xingkaihu was in operation from 1955 to 1969. During this time, over 20,000 inmates were forced to work on irrigation, infrastructure construction, and agricultural projects for the government while being subjected to ideological reform; a significant percentage of these inmates were incarcerated for being counterrevolutionaries and political dissidents. The conditions in Xingkaihu were so poor that many inmates eventually passed away due to malnutrition and disease.

More recently, since spring of 2008, the Chinese government has detained 831 Tibetans as political prisoners; of these 831 prisoners, 12 are serving life sentences and 9 were sentenced to death.

Nobel Laureate Liu Xiabo was also imprisoned in 2009 after advocating for democratic reforms and an increase in freedom of speech in Charter 08. He died in prison at the age of 51 from late stage liver cancer.

Other political prisoners include journalist Tan Zuoren, human rights activist Xu Zhiyong, and journalist Shi Tao. Tan Zuoren was arrested in 2010 and sentenced to 5 years in prison after publicly speaking about government corruption as well as the poorly constructed school buildings that collapsed and led to the deaths of thousands of children during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. Xu Zhiyong was sentenced to four years in prison in 2014 after gaining a significant social media following and using it as a platform to express his sociopolitical opinions. Shi Tao was sentenced to 8 years after publicizing the list of instructions that the Communist Party sent journalists regarding how to report the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

2.2.2 Control Over Information
The Chinese government spreads propaganda to the Chinese citizens through many platforms. Some of the means that the government spreads propaganda are through public education, textbooks, museums and monuments, television shows and films, newspapers, and other forms of mass media.

More recently, under current president Xi Jinping, there has been a big push to improve information technology and use the improved technology as a means to further promote propaganda and the Communist Party agenda[10]. This initiative has been successful, and by the end of 2015, almost 700 million Chinese citizens were on the web[10]. However, with this improvement in technological access, there is now much more efficient communication regarding current events and government issues through social media, resulting in broader discussions amongst Chinese netizens on government policies and affairs; the government has implemented rules and preventative measures to counter the spread of negative public opinion regarding the Communist Party and governmental affairs[10]. For example, Article 246. Section 1 in Criminal Law states that unlawful posts that are shared over 500 times or seen over 5000 times will result in the poster being charged with up to 3 years in prison.

The regulation of public opinion was tightened after the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference in August of 2013. At the conference, President Xi Jinping underscored the importance of "ideological work" in strengthening and uniting China; more specifically, he strongly emphasized the need to suppress controversies, mistaken viewpoints, and rumors on every public platform. Shortly after this conference, a nationwide Internet Cleaning-up Campaign (净网行动) was implemented, during which there was a widespread deletion of blogs containing viewpoints deviating from those of the Party. That same month in 2013, the government also made a concerted attack against "Big V's" (verified social media celebrities with large public influence) who had a history of online activism and rumormongering. Yang Qiuyu, Zhou Lubao, and Qin Huo Huo are three "Big V's" that were arrested between August 21 and August 23 of 2013 on charges of rumormongering and slander. In that same month, Chinese-American investor Charles Xue (Xue Manzi), one of the most popular liberal social commentators on Chinese social media, was also arrested, on charges of hiring a prostitute. Three weeks after his arrest, he was featured on CCTV (a Chinese broadcast channel) confessing to irresponsibly posting rumors about political and social issues online and commending the new Internet regulations passed under Xi Jinping's administration. These arrests served as an example to the rest of the "Big V's" as well as other Chinese internet users to be careful of what they expressed online; in fact, even five months after these arrests in August, there was a noticeable decrease in the amount of posts and discussions from prominent online figures. On popular microblogging site Weibo, opinion leaders decreased their posts by around 40% from the previous year.

The Chinese government also employs people as “black PR” to remove information from the Internet and criticize those who speak negatively about the government. Network operators are obligated by the Cyberspace Administration to assist the government in monitoring and removing illegal information online. Moreover, the Cybersecurity Law that went into effect on June 1, 2017 forces internet providers to identify internet users by their real names and informations, increasing control and monitoring of public expression online.

The State Council has the right to cut off network access or shut down internet access in response to incidents it deems a risk to national security. For example, in response to the 2009 riots in Xinjiang, the Chinese government restricted Internet access in the region and shut down the social media platforms Twitter and Fanfou.

The Communist Party also often employs teams of writers (xiezuozu 写作 组) to write articles under pseudonyms for The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as other journals. These writing teams are most often employed under the Central Propaganda Department, the Central Organization Department, and the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee. The main purpose of these writing groups is to spread the opinions and political thoughts of the Chinese Communist Party without these ideas being perceived as propaganda. Writing teams consistently use the same pseudonyms to write about specific topics that they specialize in. For example, Ke Jiaoping is the pseudonym for a writing group that publishes articles about technological education and He Zhenhua is the pseudonym for a writing group that publishes articles opposing separatism.

4.3 Circumventing Censorship
In this section, I will write about how Chinese netizens circumvent Internet censorship on social media platforms through several popular methods.

Chinese netizens frequently use many techniques to circumvent Internet censorship in order to discuss social and political current events on online platforms and gain access to web pages blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

Public relay severs such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and The Onion Router nodes (Tor nodes) are widely used by Chinese netizens in order to visit blocked web pages. Typically, Internet Service Providers can view an internet user's traffic and data; however, virtual private networks connect internet users to a server through an encrypted connection. This prevents Internet Service Providers from being able to access the internet users' IP addresses, data, activity, and physical location. As a result, the internet user can access blocked websites through this external server. VPNs are so widely used by Chinese netizens that many journalists, both within Party-sanctioned media outlets and private media outlets, are instructed by their editors and supervisors to use VPNs in order to access international news.

Chinese netizens also use the method of "tunneling" to access blocked webpages. Tunneling is when information is transmitted using a different communications protocol than the usual. One example of tunneling is if internet user "A" in China emailed internet user "B" in America asking for the contents of a blocked webpage. Internet user "B" could then respond with an email containing the contents of that blocked webpage, allowing internet user "A" to access the censored information. This method can be generalized by Web-page-by-mail services; for example, if an internet user emails web@cnn.com with the URL of a CNN webpage, that internet user will receive an email containing the contents of that specific Webpage

Mirrored web pages are another way to circumvent Internet censorship by the Great Firewall of China. A web page can be mirrored simply by recreating that page under a different URL. Because of the large scope of the Internet, it becomes near impossible for internet filters to identify and block all of the different mirrors of blocked webpages under their various non-specific URLs, increasing public access to censored information.

Netizens also have methods to express their opinions online without being censored by the government. The primary method is in the form of code words, metaphors, or plays on words. For example, the phrase "Grass Mud Horse" (Cao Ni Ma) is commonly used by netizens as a pun on a homophonous profanity; this phrase has been broadly used to signify a subversive means of broaching topics not permitted by the government, and it has been used by netizens advocating for greater freedom of speech. The rise of online satire and code words used to mock or criticize the government or sociopolitical issues has formed a subculture on the Chinese Internet called "egao", which translates literally into "evil doings" in Chinese. These code words and phrases allow netizens to discuss topics ranging from government corruption to health and environment scandals to everyday society and culture. Through this subculture, Chinese netizens can broach sensitive issues on social media with less risk of government censorship.

Chinese citizens also find ways to circumvent censorship on media platforms besides the Internet. As news organizations in China try to move away from the reputation of simply being mouthpieces for Communist Party propaganda, they face a difficult challenge of having to report the news objectively while remaining on good terms with the government. Journalists do their best to resist government censorship by maintaining a relatively neutral balance of positive and negative tones in articles, reporting on officials who have already been officially removed from their positions, disparaging the Communist Party as an entity instead of targeting individual officials, and focusing blame on lower-ranking officials. News organizations encourage their journalists to report on more sensitive yet risky articles by promising journalists compensation even if their articles get cut by government officials before publication. Editors also try to ensure job security by continuing to employ a journalist under another position even when told by the Communist Party to fire that journalist for disobeying Party protocol.