The framework of control has been in place for a long time, it's just that they've been tightening down the (already-in-place) screws over the past couple of years.
The basic mechanism is control of ISBNs: the supply of these numbers is tightly restricted, and a book cannot be published without them. A fixed number of state-owned publishers is able to issue ISBNs, though privately-owned publishing companies can buy the numbers or work with a state-owned house to publish their books.
An ISBN acts as a chain-of-custody token for the publication of books. While some books are subject to approval before publication, the vast majority are not, and publication is done at the publisher's discretion. Should a book cause problems after publication, however, the consequences are catastrophic. The ISBN (and a "responsible editor" whose name appears on the copyright page of the book) allows the government to track down everyone who was involved in the production of the book, and squash them. People lose their jobs, in some cases publishing companies are suspended or dissolved outright.
It's a system carefully designed to make writers and publishers more cautious than they would actually need to be.
Publishing, while highly controlled by the government, isn't really an area where people end up in prison, or you see televised trials. The worst that usually happens is the ruining of a career, or in extreme cases the dissolution of a company (in journalism, by contrast, people get put in jail, or disappear). I've written about this distinction before[1], which I think is lost on most international observers.
Well, I feel for any form of censorship, the essence is to disrupt the communication among the people in the society. The goal of this disruption is to prevent a formation of synchronization in the population. It could be carried out on all kinds of communication media and for all their different stages.
A system of censorship could be much easily implemented when one has the visibility over the entire society and the access to all its social resources. Before the age of internet, their focus was on book/newspaper publishing; and in our current age of internet, the focus was on internet as well as book/newspaper publishing.
And in terms of their practical methods, you can just imagine what you would do when you want to disrupt the information flow and when you have the absolute control of every sub-system in a society (i.e. the courts, the police, all the newspapers/websites/tv channels/radio stations, as well as the ability of not needing to worry about your livelihood when you do not work on anything else...)
It's almost an impregnable castle, as long as it does not crumble from inside the ruling system itself...
The basic mechanism is control of ISBNs: the supply of these numbers is tightly restricted, and a book cannot be published without them. A fixed number of state-owned publishers is able to issue ISBNs, though privately-owned publishing companies can buy the numbers or work with a state-owned house to publish their books.
An ISBN acts as a chain-of-custody token for the publication of books. While some books are subject to approval before publication, the vast majority are not, and publication is done at the publisher's discretion. Should a book cause problems after publication, however, the consequences are catastrophic. The ISBN (and a "responsible editor" whose name appears on the copyright page of the book) allows the government to track down everyone who was involved in the production of the book, and squash them. People lose their jobs, in some cases publishing companies are suspended or dissolved outright.
It's a system carefully designed to make writers and publishers more cautious than they would actually need to be.
Publishing, while highly controlled by the government, isn't really an area where people end up in prison, or you see televised trials. The worst that usually happens is the ruining of a career, or in extreme cases the dissolution of a company (in journalism, by contrast, people get put in jail, or disappear). I've written about this distinction before[1], which I think is lost on most international observers.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/opinion/the-real-censors-...