This article details the doctrines on online public opinion formulated by the Chinese authorities from the late 1990s to the present day. Through these doctrines, one can analyze the choice of the Hu administration to use a duly channeled online public opinion to set up a technocratic government, and to instrumentalize it to discipline the Chinese bureaucracy. More recently, censorship of online public opinion has been more openly justified, in line with the movement of concentration of power by President Xi Jinping, and with his more conservative policy regarding the media sector.