There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the Chinese government's acts of censorship. On any given day, in even one of mainland China's more enlightened cities, Web users might find a site they had visited on a daily basis has been blocked or disabled, without notice or explanation. Since 1998, China has spent billions of dollars on the most advanced and comprehensive network of Internet controls. The Chinese government claims there are more than 30,000 human censors trolling the forums, message boards, chats, emails and blogs throughout the Middle Kingdom.
Last October, the Chinese government implemented a two-week block on the English version of YouTube. Some bloggers speculated that the measure coincided with the convening of the National Communist Congress in Beijing, an annual Communist Party meeting that invariably provokes increased control of Web access. Others surmised that Beijing was punishing Google, the owner of YouTube, for launching a Chinese-language version of the user-generated video site two days prior to the outage. But as with any censorship measure, the YouTube blackout of 2007 was never justified nor even acknowledged by government officials and Web users just waited patiently for access to be restored.
Over the last decade, similar "random" blockages have been imposed on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo!, Flickr, all Blogspot sites and, of course, Wikipedia.
China's on-again, off-again relationship with Wikipedia has come to symbolize the unpredictable nature of internet censorship there. Since 2004, when Wikipedia was originally shuttered during the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, the online encyclopedia has been blocked and unblocked nearly a dozen times, sometimes for a day and sometimes for months. At times only the English language version is disabled; more often, the Chinese version is down; and almost always, pages that refer to sensitive topics, such as Tibet or the Falun Gong, are closed to view.
Last Wednesday, internet users in China reported (there is never an official report) that the English version of Wikipedia had been unblocked in mainland China at the urging of the International Olympic Committee. An IOC executive met with Beijing Olympic organizers early last week and insisted, "the press (should be) able to operate as it has at previous games,'' with unfettered access to all news and informational sites. Not coincidentally, the next day, both Wikipedia and BBC News, a site blocked in the mainland for years, had been unblocked.
While it appears that this major loosening of internet control signifies a positive step by the Communist Party to extend freedom of information to the over 200 million Web users in mainland China, as with everything in China, it's not so simple. First, it's important to remember that the Chinese language version of Wikipedia is still off limits nationwide. Second, Web pages that contain words that the Ministry of Public Information deem "sensitive," like "Tibet" and "Tiananmen" are currently blocked and will remain blocked throughout the Olympic Games. And third, the one step forward to allow access to the English Wikipedia was overshadowed by two steps back last week in a much bigger censorship story -- a story that reinforces to the world that freedom of speech and information are still non-existent in China.
On April 3, a day after Wikipedia was unblocked, a Beijing court sentenced Hu Jia, arguably China's most famous activist and critic of China's human rights violations, to three and a half years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power." In September, Hu penned and distributed a manifesto, translated this week in the Washington Post, on the state of human rights in China. And in November, he testified in a European parliamentary hearing on human rights abuses in China stating, according to the New York Times, "It is ironic that one of the people in charge of organizing the Olympic Games is the head of the Bureau of Public Security, which is responsible for so many human rights violations. It is very serious that the official promises are not being kept before the games."
For these two acts principally, Chinese authorities arrested Hu in his home on December 30 and sentenced him Thursday. As the Washington Post wisely pointed out in an editorial Saturday, "The louder its propaganda machine seeks to trumpet manufactured evidence against Buddhist monks or to convince the world that Hu Jia is a dangerous criminal, the less confident it looks."
And this is what it has come to in these months leading up to China's coming-out party this summer. Rather than admit and deal with the mounting and very real tensions regarding human rights and basic freedoms, Beijing seems to prefer the idea of jailing anyone who challenges Communist policy. Just ask the 2,300 Tibetans arrested last month.
The fundamental problem with China's policy toward both controversial internet content and political dissent is the notion that reactive measures, like site blockages and arresting protesters, will somehow put an end to China's most enduring political struggles. Blocking access to the Tiananman Square Wikipedia page will no more stifle one's curiosity on the subject than arresting a Tibetan protester will stifle the Tibetan Freedom movement.
It's a notion steeped in archaism, paternalism, and in the case of Hu Jia and other political prisoners sitting in Chinese prisons, barbarism.
This is a place in the comparison wherein the parallels. Even as the people of China stand behind the CPC, the same CPC that dragged the nation through ideological madness, the American people and pundits still regard the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility and sensible military policy. Nationalism is a disease that stems from collective cognitive dissonance.
The CCTV hosts lay out their propaganda pieces because that is how the system has always worked. Institutional momentum is hard to deflect; meanwhile, the MSM cannot but uncritically parrot US motives as noble. The simple truth is that few Chinese citizens have ever heard of Hu Jia. But how many Americans listened to Scott Ritter and how often was he hosted as an expert leading up to the war Iraq? His analysis turned out to be completely accurate.
I watch with interest and hope as the PRC remakes itself into the next dominant nation for the next 100 years or so. Yet I watch with anger and pity as the US slides into its own subsidized destruction.
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Why with hope? My hope is that there will be a level playing field in the world based on social justice and an economic system that takes into account the efforts of those upon whose backs those fortunes are made. Isn't it time we began moving away from the idea of Empires, of any stripe, and Corporate Royalty? Isn't it time that The People were really the power, and the corporations and governments their servants, and not the other way round?
As for the PRC's future, it could be 100 years, or it could tank in 5, just like Japan did. With the power that the international banks exert everywhere, my bet is the tank. It is truly time for the idea of a "dominant nation" to be put to rest, and the notion of Freedom for all people to replace it.
For the sake of all humanity let us hope that the PRC does not 'tank'. I am no fan of the nation state either but until this country sorts through its accelerated development, the nation state is what there is.
Did Japan tank in 5 years? The Yen still holds its own. The biggest challenge to Japan is in it demographics. If the whole world only had such troubles.
I think you ought to distinguish better between the PRC and the CPC.