Thoughts on Facebook from China

(I tried to post this from China last week, but the Huffington Post was blocked there from every computer I could find.)

Two weeks ago the Chinese government shut down Facebook in response to the uprising in Xinjiang. According to state media, the decision came after a Facebook group appeared called "Global protests. Support Uyghurs to seek independence."

The Facebook ban was just one part of the government's campaign to stifle information coming out of the Western region where clashes between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese have left hundreds dead and many more injured.

In the aftermath of the violence, the government swiftly cut Internet access for the entire region. Chinese censors also began quickly stripping search engines of any references to the violence. They had already shut down other social media and networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube in weeks prior, hoping to quiet the conflict.

It's not news that the government actively works to prevent the free flow of information, but what I did find surprising were the mixed emotions about it amongst the Chinese I met. I had expected to hear outrage, indignation and the type of simmering dissent that Western media play up, but the majority of people I spoke with were not too concerned.

In Shanghai I met a witty local tour guide named Agnes, 40, who spoke English very well, and made dirty jokes with ease. She could not, however, give me a clear sentence on what she thought of the internet restrictions. Every attempt I made to broach the topic was ushered away with nervous laughter and a change of topic.

Agnes was determined not to concede a single negative point about the government. Instead she gave my friends and I a snapshot of her life story in which she expressed overwhelming appreciation for China's economic growth, the improvements in infrastructure and correspondingly, her steadily increasing quality of life, from a childhood that began without toilets. As a tour guide she was likely vetted for her loyal views, but her discomfort with criticism spoke for itself.

Agnes, like many other Chinese her age, seemed unfazed about the loss of some freedoms, in exchange for a government that can perform.

In Beijing a Chinese businessman in his 30s told me over dinner that the restrictions were a bit of a nuisance, but he pushed the point that China was just so enormous that the government did actually need to take these type of measures -- that might seem repressive to me -- because the populous as a whole (with more than 300 million Internet users) was just too unwieldy to govern effectively.

The younger generation was slightly more forthcoming with criticism, but still nothing close to outrage. A 22-year-old woman who just returned home to Beijing after getting her degree in Australia said she was a little disappointed she couldn't keep in touch with her school friends via Facebook, but quickly pointed me to other similar Chinese sites which are more popular, and she says, much more fun: Xiaonei.com, Kaixin001.com, or Douban.com.

The same woman explained to me that everyone knows the government monitors these sites, but she didn't mind because in fact that makes them more reliable than the Western ones which get frozen.

"Actually I used Facebook for several months. It was really slow here, I could not upload many pictures of mine. So closing Facebook didn't impact my life cause I deleted my account before the government blocked it," said Ge Huina, a journalist also in her 20s working in Shanghai. Ge also told me that some of her friends expressed frustration at first on their MSN pages, but have since taken those comments down.

I don't mean to say that the people I spoke with are representative of the patchwork public mood of a nation of 1.3 billion people. But I can say that comparatively, I was very surprised by the complacency of my Chinese counterparts, i.e. graduate students going to school in the West.

One American-born Chinese student from Harvard, doing a finance internship in Shanghai, mused to me at a cocktail party, "Isn't it funny how China is so developed, and yet so backward?" referring to the Facebook ban. She also described to me the alternate, groomed search results yielded by China's most popular search engine "Baidu," versus Google, the most popular search engine in the rest of the world. Afterward, she, like everyone except Ge, asked me not to use her name.

The fieriest response I found was from a Chinese man heading to business school in New York this year.

"What we are paying for is not the internet," he railed, with an almost comic focus on the economic injustice. "We have a brain," he added angrily about the nannying-like manner of information restriction. "We can think for ourselves."

Regardless of how frustrated he seemed about the censorship in China, it certainly was not a sticking point for his intentions to build a life and fortune here.

When I asked him if I could use his name he let out a big laugh. "Oh no!" he said, "I want to come back."

On a final note, it's worth mentioning that both Facebook and the Huffington Post were sporadically accessible from my Blackberry, but so agonizingly slowly that I thought I'd wait till I got home.

Comments

[ConcernedCitizen78]

To some, it may seem the government wanted to stifle the "free flow of information".

BUT does incitement to further violence, whether that incitement is direct and deliberate, or from inadvertent inflaming of passions, pouring more oil onto the fire, constitute "free flow of information"?

Imagine a racial riot occurring in Harlem: posters, some naive, some with sinister motives, then post pictures and videos of African Americans killing whites, including women and children. Some other posters post pictures and videos of whites killing African Americans, including women and children. And we know some of these pictures, photos, and videos can be very easily fabricated.

Will these posts contribute to further killings or will those affected who see these pictures and videos educated and law-abiding enough to control their passions, even if they have no sinister intent to start with?

Can incitement to kill and destroy, deliberate or otherwise, ever be considered "free flow of information"?

[LMPE]

As long as they censor Fixed News, Boss Limbaugh, etc, that's fine with me.

Bill Orally's anti-Cuba pronouncements make it practically a requirement for China to block him (China and Cuba are allies every step of the way).

[Wyss]

I had much the same experience in China. Perhaps the cost of dissent coupled with their newly acquired luxuries would be enough to silence most of us.