It is a ritual for Chinese officials to wrap up the year with long, statistics-studded speeches about their departments’ achievements over the past 12 months and an outlook for the next, writes Kathrin Hille in Beijing.
Wang Chen, as deputy head of the Communist party’s propaganda department and head of the State Council Information Office – one of the country’s chief censors and internet regulators, is no exception.
But the year-end balance Mr Wang presented to the media on Thursday counted success by a peculiar measure. Side by side with figures about the growing number of press conferences held in the past year – cited as evidence of the government’s increasing transparency – he boasted about the amount of internet content censored.