Google Pulls Out of China Part 2
Cited: MSNBC.com
Continued in “Google Pulls Out Of China Part 1”
After 100 years of British control Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997. However, it still operates under different rules than the mainland with almost complete press freedom and unfettered access to the Internet as well as multiparty elections. As material enters China’s domestic Web network, Internet companies in Hong Kong are treated like foreign companies that are subject to filtering and blocking by the “Great Firewall” of China.
Business as usual
To be sure, most of China’s 384 million Internet users log on for mundane reasons that don’t challenge the limits of free speech. A lot of Chinese citizens also accept the notion that stability and continued economic growth depend on government controls, including censorship.
And Beijing has been largely successful at keeping a lid on sensitive information while using the Internet to fuel economic development.
“Lack of free information will catch up with China in the end, hobbling the spirit of free inquiry at the heart of science and of innovation,” said Kaiser Kuo, an American writer and independent tech consultant in Beijing. “The indirect effects, and the long-term impact, are profound, but I think it’s only fair to point out that the direct effect is relatively small.”
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Blog madness
Even with censorship, the free-wheeling Internet— especially user-generated content — is a dramatic departure from tradition inside China, where the state has controlled news and information with an iron grip for decades. Under that system, the central government disseminated the party line to state-owned newspapers, radio and television, which reported accordingly. Circulation of foreign papers in China was restricted.
As the Internet became available to the public in the early 2000s, at first through cybercafé’s that proliferated in cities, and then through widely available in-home and office connections, the government’s ability to control the flow of information began to unravel. When Web 2.0 arrived, allowing ordinary citizens to publish independently, Chinese people jumped at the opportunity.
The first blogs in the country appeared in 2004, and there were 47 million Chinese bloggers just three years later, according to official statistics.
The way blogs are handled suggests that the blog-hosting sites have broad discretion over censorship, apparently by using various combinations of keyword flagging and human monitoring, according to MacKinnon, the Princeton fellow and former journalist.
On some blogs, politically sensitive posts are blocked at the publication stage, she said, while others are delayed for “moderation” and then posted — or not. Some are posted only in private view, so only the author can view them.
In 2005, in one display of “self-discipline,” the staff of Microsoft Live Spaces in China deleted the entire blog written by Zhao Jing, under the pseudonym Michael Anti, sparking an international outcry over the move.
More commonly, single blog entries disappear 24 hours or so after they are posted. That has created a tendency among knowledgeable Chinese Web surfers to quickly squirrel away potentially sensitive information that they encounter.
“People who have been around Internet in China will quickly save an item offline, because the link might disappear,” said MacKinnon. “The same goes for photos and so on.”
In some cases, Beijing turns from the high-tech to the blunt old-fashioned instruments of censorship — arrest and intimidation, as it did in the case of writer Liu Xiaobo.
In 2008, Liu co-authored a manifesto calling for democracy in China, which was signed by 303 prominent Chinese intellectuals. Police arrested Liu at his Beijing home just as the document was released on the Internet. Censors quickly went to work expunging material about Liu and the document from the Internet, but not before the manifesto circulated widely and garnered some 10,000 signatures of support.
In December, after Liu had spent a year in prison, a Chinese court convicted him of subversion and sentenced him to 11 years in prison.
The digerati fight back
Free speech advocates, human rights activists and liberal intellectuals in China have developed a bevy of ways of getting around Internet controls.
In posting comments and blogs, they alter spellings, substitute acronyms for sensitive words, or substitute Chinese characters that sound the same but are written differently than the sensitive term they are trying to use. As the censors catch on, they move on to new strategies.
Using VPNs (virtual private networks) and proxy servers, tech-savvy Chinese users also can access materials that are otherwise blocked by the Great Firewall.
Despite being barred in China, Twitter is growing fast among people who can circumvent the firewall. According to Zhao Jing, the journalist and former blogger, he had 3,000 followers on Twitter before Twitter was officially blocked in July. Now, he said, he has 17,000. Throughout China, he said, there are 50,000 Twitter users, including many activists, liberal lawyers, professors and journalists.
Meanwhile, he said, even the domestic micro-blog services, though subject to controls, are delivering unvarnished news so quickly that it is difficult to censor. What’s more, news from remote parts of the country that once could have been easily suppressed now finds its way into the state-run press, he said.
“In 2009, we saw that many local events, protests, complaints were conveyed by cell phones and text messages and email from ordinary people, from non-profit organizations … to friends, and then Tweeted and reTweeted,” and sometimes picked up by reporters in the state press, said Zhou. “A local protest can easily become a national issue.”
“The Internet was the Gods’ first gift to China,” he said. “Twitter is the second.”
In the hands of a few Chinese, Zell believes it Web 2.0 may pave the way for the birth of a free press and democracy in China.
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My Take: Just because they get democracy doesn’t mean they get a free press to go with it. The Chinese government has had control of the press for too long and may be reluctant to let go. However, I do agree that it is wrong that businesses can search the Internet for promotional products like poly bags and the average citizen is restricted in what they can search, read or post on the Internet.
The Internet has so much to offer people, even the Chinese. I wonder if the Chinese can even avail themselves the services of a remote backup service that is not within their own country, probably not. I just cannot understand how a government can restrict people from getting personalized shopping bags on the Internet. Maybe that is because I live in America.
We Americans take for granted what we have! That is true! We have the ability to get hard drive recovery were ever we want, even if it is in China. But the opposite is not true; the Chinese cannot get data recovery wherever they want. They must go to government approved businesses where such things. I bet they even have their new and used copy machines rigged so that they can tell where the copies were made and by whom. One thing is for sure, if they need Canon copier accessories, they do have to search the Internet and will probably have to go outside China to get them.
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