CNN employee,is going to leture students
of HongKong Universtiy next semester.
Above is a slide show that Chinese blogger Isaac Mao created last year to illustrate his belief that free speech is
not truly possible without free thinking. Social norms, politics,
religion, fear, and prior knowledge, he believes, all block our ability to
think freely. I would add that nationalism further blocks the ability of
people everywhere to think freely – and that goes for Americans or any
other nationality. Not just Chinese people or other people living under
non-democratic governments by any means.
Ann Condi’s recent post at Danwei.org is a clear
illustration of Isaac’s point. It is also a reminder that apathy and pride
are a strong complement to censorship in preventing the emergence of a free
political discourse in China. She describes how she showed some Chinese
colleagues a website that they could use to circumvent Internet censorship,
and was greeted with overwhelming lack of interest. She then concludes:
"What Internet activism there may be in China, it is not coming from the
upwardly-mobile Chinese white-collar workers. One sometimes wonders why the
government bothers to censor the Internet at all." I won’t excerpt her post
in further detail here because you need to go there and read the whole thing.
This is exactly why people who think that the Internet – merely by
virtue of existing in China – is going to bring significant political
change any time in the near future are smoking something pretty good. At
the beginning of this year I wrote an academic book chapter examining why
this is in a bit more detail. You can get a draft PDF here. [UPDATE: the link is now working -
sorry it wasn't earlier today! ] (Unfortunately academic publishers
are so slow, the book hasn’t come out yet, but they claim it will
eventually..)
Condi’s post also reminds me of a
blog post written by my friend Nina Wu when her brother Hao was held in
detention by Chinese police for nearly half a year without charges or
access to a lawyer:
After Haozi disappeared, browsing the Internet and searching for related
information became a mandatory daily class. I have googled a great
deal of information on “Hao Wu,” but I can’t visit many of the search
results, especially addresses with .org suffixes. Eight or nine out
of ten will return “Impossible to display this webpage.” I don’t
know what kind of sensitive information these websites contain.
Before, I did not believe in “Internet censorship.” This was
because I used to visit mostly finance and investment websites, which
rarely have problems. Only when I faced a serious predicament did I
discover that this was a real problem.
Last year on Global Voices, when I asked Chinese bloggers how many people they know
regularly use proxy servers to get around Internet blocks, most answers
reflected my own impression which is that very few people bother – and that
the percentage is likely in the single digits. A 2005 survey of Chinese Internet use in five cities (PDF)
asked respondents whether they use proxy servers to circumvent censorship
and got the following response: “never”: 71.2 percent; “seldom”:
19.7 percent; “sometimes”: 5.9 percent; “often”: 2.5 percent.
It’s true that China’s Internet censorship is a "failure" in the sense
that there is always some technical way around it if you try. However, most
people don’t try. They aren’t interested in trying, or don’t realize the
extent to which their information environment has been warped in the first
place, and thus have no idea what they’re missing by not trying, or they’re
not interested in being made uncomfortable by certain kinds of information.
Thus you could make the case that censorship when combined with apathy,
nationalism, and a bit of fear here and there, is actually very successful.
Reacting to Condi’s post, Andrew Lih and Ethan Zuckerman are both concerned that apathy is not
taken sufficiently into account by most international human rights and free
speech activists. Andrew asks: "would life without censorship necessarily “
free” Chinese minds? Would they start clamoring for the truth?" As Ethan
puts it: "While Internet users in China may lack access to some topics,
Internet users in the US often lack interest in topics, a barrier that’s
just as difficult to permeate in ensuring that topics enter the popular
consciousness."
Some facts about your government’s behavior can often make you feel
uncomfortable and ashamed – feelings that nobody likes to have. Better just
to avoid those facts so that you feel happy and proud to be American, if
you’re American; or happy and proud to be Chinese, if you’re Chinese. Ethan
and Andrew agree that we need to acknowledge how apathy creates a
less-than-freethinking environment even in ostensibly democratic countries
like the U.S. – despite the fact that the government is not systematically
or formally censoring the Internet and news media. This is reinforced
by a commercial news environment that tries hard to give audiences what it
believes they want in order to stay in business.
I agree it is arrogant to act like we live in an ideal free speech
environment and that we don’t have a lot of work to do at home in order to
have a truly healthy democratic discourse. On the other hand, standing back
and saying nothing while
Western companies contribute to Chinese Internet censorship isn’t
acceptable to me either. Companies need to stop using the excuse that effectively says "the
Internet will make them free in the long run so it doesn’t matter so much
what we do in the short run." But meanwhile Americans should not act
as if our own country is some kind of free speech gold standard – as,
unfortunately, some people especially in Washington have
been prone to do. Such attitudes make those Chinese Internet users who
were predisposed to nationalism and apathy even less inclined to take
outside reports of Chinese Internet censorship seriously, because they
perceive that these reports are part of a big nationalistic argument about
who is better than whom. We need a discourse about these issues that gets
beyond nationalism, ideology, catch-phrases and over-simplifications on all
sides – somehow.
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