Censorship and the Chinese Communist Party: Sustainable Progress?

The Communist Party of China despite the perceived benefits of Internet freedom has gone to great lengths to censor information and electronic communication of its people. Spending billions of dollars and a staggering amount of manpower, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to filter its Internet causing human rights activists and political dissidents to cry foul. However, the CCP has successfully found an impossible balance between censoring content they deem subversive while taking away the opportunity for horizontal mobilization against the party all the while still taking an approach that doesn’t completely ban access to the internet allowing China to not fall behind other internet oriented countries.
Although many argue that electronic censorship of any kind is detrimental to human and political rights at the expense of the regime’s power, the CCP’s approach in selective censorship of the Internet while maintaining the growth of the Internet as a budding industry has proven largely successful. The Communist Party’s recognition of the Internet as one of China’s greatest assets paired with its selective censorship of its content and its users continues to solidify the CCP’s power as the single party of China. Its continuation of censorship bears positive implications for China politically in strengthening national sovereignty, economically in improving economic prosperity, and socially in protecting its user base as China continues on its path to becoming a world superpower amidst Internet boom.
For centuries autocratic regimes around the world have gone to great lengths to reduce and remove the risk of uprising by taking away the opportunity for horizontal collaboration. In modern day China the single greatest risk that threatens the Chinese Communist Party is the ever-expanding