Digital censorship in the People’s Republic of China operates as a condition of uncertainty: posts disappear without warning, visibility shifts without explanation, and creators are left to infer boundaries from outcomes rather than articulated standards. This thesis argues that such uncertainty is not a secondary effect of censorship but one of its central mechanisms. By withholding clear criteria while enforcing content restrictions, platforms compel creators to reason inductively, anticipate sanctions, and revise expression in advance, reshaping creative practice from within rather than through overt prohibition.
For online creators, censorship is therefore experienced less as the application of known rules than as an epistemic problem: how to act, create, and communicate in an environment where the limits of permissible expression remain opaque and unstable. Scholars of digital governance have noted that such indeterminacy amplifies regulatory power by shifting the burden of interpretation onto users themselves, encouraging precautionary self-restraint in the absence of explicit guidance. What emerges under these conditions is not compliance with clearly stated norms, but a field of anticipatory adjustment in which creators learn to infer what is “safe” or “risky” through repeated encounters with deletion, warning, and survival.
Thesis-Final-Version_Cui-1Cleo (Zhiming) Cui is a freelance illustrator and part-time translator/editor based in Beijing. She has a background in state-run institutions, having interned at CCTV and the National Museum of China. Cleo also worked as a full-time editor at Luxopus publishing house, where she published one translation work and has another awaiting review. Spending most of her life in Beijing, she observed and gathered stories of how the younger generation adapts to the cultural and social nuances of this city and the broader “collective”. This observation led her to explore how social norms and “unspoken” criteria impact the younger generation since the founding of the PRC.
Cleo received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Pitzer College, focusing on contemporary Chinese artists in the diaspora during the 1980s. She furthered her education by obtaining a Masters degree in postwar East Asian history from Kings College London. With her writing-based background, she seeks to develop different approaches at OHMA to record and document stories, continuously exploring the formation of “popular norms” in modern Chinese society and how the youth struggles to pattern after these trends to fit in.