How Do Toothless Tigers Bite? Extra-institutional Governance and Internet Censorship by Local Governments in China

China's local censorship operates through 'extra-institutional governance' (EIG) — practices that transgress the official identity and authorized means of the CAO system, including outsourced private surveillance, unpaid personnel secondment, and mass reporting via personal accounts — which upper-level offices tolerate but do not formally authorize, preserving plausible deniability when practices are ethically or legally questionable. The paper documents these as widespread implicit norms across China, not isolated to District T.

§Discussion and Conclusion policy keyword-filteringml-classifier cn

A county-level CAO in east China (District T, ~500,000 residents) operated with only 7 formal employees yet was tasked with monitoring more than 60 social media platforms, detecting unwanted voices in text, image, video, and audio formats, and submitting hourly reports to upper-level offices — a workload the authors characterize as a 'mission impossible' for a county-level office.

§The case: the CAO in District T deployment keyword-filteringml-classifier cn

The District T CAO's 'Cavalry Team' of approximately 100 members used coordinated mass reporting — timing reports within 5–10 minutes of a post appearing, using different IP addresses and devices, and submitting long complaints invoking phrases like 'threatening social stability' — to achieve a documented weekly takedown success rate of 95.01% (286 of 301 targeted posts removed).

§Coping strategy 2: organized mass reporting evaluation keyword-filtering cn

The District T CAO outsourced surveillance to a commercial SaaS platform ('Public Opinion Assistant') capable of scanning 180 million social media posts per day, processing 20 million posts per minute, and using supervised learning to classify 'negative voices' with performance comparable to human moderators. The platform generates ready-to-submit bureaucratic reports and maintains localized keyword lists that include euphemisms and homophones of censored terms as netizens update evasion strategies.

§Coping strategy 1: outsourcing surveillance to private service providers deployment keyword-filteringml-classifier cn

Chinese social media platforms detect and downweigh accounts that over-use the reporting function, reducing their future report credibility. The CAO's counter-response was to recruit 'fresh accounts' from visitors, borrow civilian accounts from seconded staff, and store credentials in an unencrypted Excel file circulated via WeChat — indicating the censor relies on high account turnover rather than persistent infrastructure to maintain reporting effectiveness.

§Coping strategy 2: organized mass reporting detection keyword-filtering cn