Head of China’s top internet regulator Lu Wei quits

Head of China’s top internet regulator Lu Wei, who brought in a severe curtailing of internet freedom during his tenure, has stepped down. It is a known fact that China censors online content that it deems are politically sensitive, along with blocking some western media websites. The top social media websites including Facebook, Twitter and Google are also blocked in China.

Wei will be succeeded by Xu Lin, a deputy from the same department who joined in 2015 and previously served two years as the minister of propaganda for the city of Shanghai. Xu has also worked alongside China’s president Xi Jinping in Shanghai in 2007 when the latter was the city’s communist party chief.

Wei, who had been in charge of supervising controls on online expression since taking over as head of the Cyberspace Administration of China in 2013, was named as one of the world’s 100 most influential people last year by Time magazine.

“It’s impossible for outsiders to know what Lu Wei’s departure might mean, but it’s clear that the space for open expression in China continues to shrink,” Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at thinktank the Atlantic Council, said.

Roger Cliff, a Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council believes that Wei’s exit is unlikely to open up the internet in China. “If anything I would expect to see a further increase in the Chinese government’s efforts to monitor and control the internet within China as well as to influence the content of the internet outside of China.”

Last year, a report by the American pro-democracy thinktank Freedom House found China had the most restrictive internet policies of 65 countries studied, ranking below Iran and Syria.