April’s fool | The Great FireWall is down! What?!
+8* China ThoughtsPublished April 1, 2008 at 4:57 pm No CommentsWhen our colleague peaked in our office and said that, we thought “Come on! It’s April 1st…”. Then we opened all: YouTube, BBC, Flickr, Blogger, WordPress and… Wikipedia! All responded beautifully, even BBC to a search on “Tibet”.
Damn. Not a joke.
Internet censorship in China is a long-time favorite topic of Western media and it is quite difficult to have a discussion about Internet innovation without having it become the center of the debate. Google has 255,000 entries on [ "internet censorship" AND China ], whatever that means (only 77,500 with USA – including an entry on Wikipedia mostly on sexually explicit stuff – which is censorship too). Most Chinese do not really care, or sometimes think it is actually the government’s job.
This surprise was enough to trigger a post and some questions:
- Why is this happening? No idea. Especially at a moment where things are not especially quiet.
- Until when will it last? No idea either.
- Who is in charge? Jingjing and Chacha, the two Internet police mascots might have taken a day off, but answering to the Government on this must be somebody’s job.
This was entertaining enough, but thinking again about the discrepancy between Western and Chinese points of view might be worth clarifying some elements.
- First, China has never had so much media activity, and the Internet is the most open of all.
- Second, Chinese are not used to express political views, so it is like a muscle that is not trained.
- Third – and most interesting – the framing of the topic is very biased and confusing.
What framing?
It is when you use “religious zeal” for “fanaticism” (from Schopenhauer’s “Art of Controversy“, circa 1830). Or using “parental control” for “censorship”. The very question used in the survey of Chinese netizens is biased “who should control the Internet” – what would be the answer in the US of A? The CIA? Nobody? Everybody?
The “control” can be understood in many different ways: from “guarantee that the content is not illegal or harmful to minors” to “delete the content that is not aligned with the ruling party’s views”. Re-reading Orwell’s 1984 is also a great source of inspiration on media and politics management.
If you’re interested to learn more about the technicalities of internet filtering, it’s actually quite a tricky thing according to this pretty detailed country study.
Last: who cares?
As we sit in our office browsing Wikipedia and BBC with the joy coming from avoiding a 3-steps process of going to www.anonymouse.org then copy/pasting the URL, we cannot help but wonder about all the mystery of this. Foreign media might even report about it (as foreign correspondents probably like Wikipedia as much as we do). But it is likely Chinese netizens will not even care 1% of what foreigners in China, or overseas do: why would they care about sites in English that they likely never used. Wikipedia? Just go to Baidu Zhidao or Baidu Zhishi. BBC? Sounds interesting… what is it?
Foreign media care about freedom, openness, etc. with often very idealistic views on their own markets (is there really no filtering outside China?). What we can tell from the inside is that there is certainly significant damage done in forging people’s views and identity by holding a mirror showing only one side of their face. Would an open Internet (i.e. combining the Chinese-filtered and the Western-filtered) actually change something is another question.
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