Shut down: Major Chinese-language portals including Sina, Sohu, Netease and iFeng have closed some of their freewheeling political and social news sites and social network accounts after Beijing
A swathe of the world is adopting China’s vision for a tightly controlled Internet over the unfettered American approach, a stunning ideological coup for Beijing that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.
Vietnam and Thailand are among the South-East Asian nations warming to a governance model that twins sweeping content curbs with uncompromising data controls – because it helps preserve the regime in power. A growing number of the region’s increasingly autocratic governments watched enviously the emergence of Chinese corporate titans from Tencent Holdings Ltd to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd – in spite of draconian online curbs. And now they want the same.
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