本文音频及原文摘自杂志The Economist《经济学人》2016年第一期，China版块。

The Communist Party’s battle with social media is a closely fought one.

From the print edition

①ON DECEMBER 25th, some three years after taking over[接管] as China’s leader, Xi Jinping posted his first tweet[发了第一条微博]. For a man clearly rattled by the rapid spread of social media, and grimly determined to tame them, the venue was fitting. Uniformed military officials[穿制服的军官] stood around as he typed his message into a computer in the office of an army-run newspaper[军报] (see picture). His new-year greeting was not to China’s more than 660m internet users, but to the armed forces[军队; 部队]—most of whose members are banned from tweeting.

②It was clearly in part to intimidate feistier members of the country’s online community that the authorities arrested one of the country’s most prominent civil-rights activists, Pu Zhiqiang, in 2014 and eventually put him on trial on December 14th. On the basis of seven messages posted on Weibo, China’s heavily censored[严格审查] version of Twitter, Mr Pu was charged with “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble[寻衅滋事罪]” as well as “inciting ethnic hatred[煽动民族仇恨罪]”. The court handed down[正式宣布] a three-year suspended prison sentence[缓刑三年], which means that Mr Pu will not be allowed to continue his widely acclaimed work[广受好评/支持的工作] as a lawyer (less than three years ago, he was the subject of a laudatory cover story[封面故事;与封面图片有关的正文;要闻;(尤指掩饰身分或做某事原因的)托辞] in a state-controlled magazine). “It was not the worst outcome, but it set the most odious of precedents[先例;前例],” said a Weibo user in Beijing in a message to his nearly 57,000 online followers.

③Mr Xi is the first Chinese leader to come to power[掌权，上台] amid the rapid growth[迅速发展] of a middle class[中产阶级] whose members are equipped with[具有;配备与] a powerful means of airing[公开发表] dissent[不同意，持异议] and linking up with like-minded[具有相似意向或目的的; 志趣相投的] malcontents. He inherited[继承;接替] an army of internet censors, but despite his efforts to give them more legal muscle (the country’s first counter-terrorism law[反恐法], passed on December 27th, includes restrictions on the reporting of terrorist incidents[恐怖主义事件]), Mr Xi is still struggling. Support for Mr Pu both online and off has shown the scale of the challenge he faces. Some had feared that Mr Pu would be jailed for years. It is possible, in the face of huge support for the activist and a lack of strong evidence, that officials blinked.

Napping net nannies

④Social-media messages relating to Mr Pu were quickly purged from the internet. Yet it is likely that some were seen by many people before disappearing. Some sensitive postings were retweeted by users with large followings before they were eventually deleted, suggesting that censors occasionally failed to keep up. “If you can be found guilty[内疚的;有罪的;不安] on the basis of a few Weibo postings, then every Weibo user is guilty[内疚的;有罪的;不安], everyone should be rounded up,” wrote a Beijing-based journalist to his more than 220,000 followers. “I don’t understand the law, but I do know that [handling Mr Pu this way] was absolutely against the spirit of rule by law[有违法治精神],” said Zhang Ming, a politics professor[政治学教授] in Beijing, to his following of nearly 790,000 people.

⑤Mr Pu’s prosecutors also provided evidence of the censors’ weaknesses. They said one of his allegedly[依其申述;据说] criminal messages, which suggested that a terrorist attack in 2014 may have reflected failings in the government’s policies in the western region of Xinjiang, had garnered 1,930 retweets[转发]—remarkable given Mr Pu’s well-known propensity to criticise officialdom[官场，官僚作风].

⑥Outside the court, dozens of Mr Pu’s supporters defied a heavy police presence, which included the deployment[部署; 调度] of thuggish men in plain clothes[便衣] (oddly wearing smiley badges during the trial). Several protesters were dragged away, some after chanting “Pu Zhiqiang is innocent”.

⑦Internet users showed similar disdain for the censors on the anniversary[周年纪念日] on December 26th of the birth of Mao Zedong (“He wreaked greater destruction on human civilisation than any other villain,” one businessman told his more than 106,000 followers). They piped up, too, after an avalanche of construction waste on December 20th in the southern city of Shenzhen that killed at least seven people and left more than 70 others missing. One Weibo user with nearly 75,000 followers lamented how effective a modern city like Shenzhen was at downplaying such news. “What’s frightening is that this is the way China as a whole will be,” he said.

⑧Mr Xi need not worry about his own social-media pulling power. By the time The Economist went to press, his first post on Weibo—sent through the account of an unnamed journalist at the newspaper he visited—had been retweeted[转发] more than 380,000 times and had garnered⑤ more than 50,000 comments. Most of these are fawning—of those still visible, at least.

以上言论不代表本人立场，摘自《经济学人》杂志，仅外语学习之用。查看来源请点击“阅读原文”。