Rethink your take. Censorship is when the government prevents you from saying or publishing what you want. The government's ability to do that ultimately stems from the threat of force/violence.

China's ways of doing this might seem crude to somebody in the US or EU, but boil down to the same thing.

If you continue to disobey either of those government's orders to stop doing something, they will send men with guns to pick you up and lock you in a cage, literally preventing you from traveling anywhere.

That's why censorship is a terrible thing in a purportedly free society, and discussions like this are why mis-application of the word "censorship" to mean things like "waaaah walmart.com refused to broadcast my tweet about how trans people should be beaten up" is also bad.

Agreed that private entities not posting your tweets is not censorship.

But I will stick to my guns that there is much more at stake for people in China that don't behave in the way the government wants them to than just being censored. 'to stop doing something' is doing the heavy lifting in your comment and what the 'something' is can be limited to media expressions and then I would agree it is censorship. But this goes much further than that: it is not just what you write. It is also how you behave, and about what your ancestry is, which activities you are allowed to engage in (and which activities you have to engage in).

Censorship is just about expression. This is full-on coercion, anti-LGBT policy and racism. To make it explicit.

OK, I see what you are saying, and agree.

The set of injustices perpetrated by the Chinese government includes far more than just censorship.

You should read the Wikipedia article on what censorship is:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

"Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies."

You are wrong. Having a gun pointed at you isn't nonviolent just because the trigger wasn't pulled.

Threatening someone to make them censor themselves is a means of censorship.

I said 'it goes beyond censorship', that means that censorship is a part of it but that it goes well beyond that point.

Here is the dictionary definition: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."

If we follow your logic then killing someone or jailing or intimidating them is just censorship. But the bar for what is censorship is much lower than that. So if the bar for censorship is met by just targeting the media (for instance: youtube, to tell them to pull the account and not to let her back in) then that would be censorship and it wouldn't require threats of harm or restrictions on movement. That's active and possibly violent intimidation. Xi's government gets a free pass from the West because (1) we like the goodies and (2) he's not as bad as some of his predecessors. But meanwhile he's a thug and his government is acting in very thuggish ways to achieve their goals and the casualness with which censorship escalates into other forms of abuse is telling. And that's why we have different names for those other abuses. Those abuses are not there in the service of censorship, censorship is just one of the elements from a palette of abuses that a state can visit on a person.

More telling is how apparently a fragment of the HN audience insists they see nothing more than the control of information. Trust me on this: if your internet connection is severed and/or your online writings are officially erased that's bad enough, having goons come to your house, threaten you and threaten your significant other that's another level altogether.

Censorship doesn't require guns, does not require goons and in general doesn't have a prerequisite of violence. But threats of harm, or being sent to a 'reeducation camp' (I hate that term) especially in a country where people tend to just disappear aim to influence not just your writings and your media expression but your general behavior and serve to cow an individual completely, apparently successful. So censorship is only a sub-goal, and a minor one at that. This is all about behavior and coercion, hence the travel restrictions and targeting of groups of individuals.