Freedom House To human rights organizations: Human rights groups from trading partners, the most prominent of which operating from the safety of democracies should be is the state's right to determine what its people can more aggressive in publicizing the plight of political read, watch, or circulate via social media. The Chinese prisoners. The defense of jailed dissidents was a major leadership expects the rest of the world to accept its factor behind the rise of the modern human rights brand of censorship as the normal state of affairs in movement. Political prisoners became a lower priority China, and it is increasingly extending its demands as their numbers declined after the Cold War, but beyond its borders, affecting the information available today there are more than a thousand in China alone, to global audiences. and many others in Venezuela, lran, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere. It is past time for the phrase “prisoner of Chinese censorship practices should be challenged at conscience’ to again become an important part of our international forums and in bilateral meetings. Demo- regular political vocabulary. cratic governments should speak out when their own academics, artists, media companies, and corpora- Furthermore, human rights organizations need tions are subjected to censorship or blocking by the to develop strategies that address the varied and Chinese authorities. As long as Beijing maintains its sophisticated methods of repression used by mod- current policies, democracies should take measures ern authoritarians. There should be better efforts to to prevent their own media, entertainment, and other identify individual perpetrators of abuse, document information-related corporations from falling under their culpability, and expose their actions. Among oth- the control of Chinese companies that support or er benefits, such work would feed into governmental benefit from censorship. mechanisms for imposing sanctions, like the United States’ Global Magnitsk