UMW Regional GeogBlog

Guangzhou

When I last visited China in January 2009, I was unable able to post entries to or read this blog from anywhere in the country. The reason was that access to my website, regionalgeography.org, was blocked by the so-called Great Firewall of China, the electronic filter that supposedly shelters Chinese internet users from salacious and subversive material.

This put me in the company of Amnesty International, The Huffington Post, Penthouse Magazine, and the companion website to the PBS documentary The Tank Man, all of which had also incurred the opprobrium of the Chinese state.

But it appears that I have now redeemed myself in the eyes of the authorities and their censorship algorithms; I can now access my site and post entries such as this one. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered or insulted at this change in status: does this mean that I have been officially declared to be innocuous?

Censorship is one of the most insidious weapons of an authoritarian state. This is because, unlike bullets, tear gas, arbitrary imprisonment, or disenfranchisement, censorship’s victims seldom know that they are victims, except in the most general sense.  After all, how can you possibly know what you don’t know? Of course, the people of China are fully aware that their media are censored. But they don’t know what is being censored, or when.

Today’s edition of the government-controlled English language newspaper China Daily is a case in point. The paper carries a front-page story on a dispute between the government and Google.  The search engine, it appears, has been insufficiently diligent in removing undesirable materials from the search results it delivers to Chinese users.  “Google’s English language search engine has spread large amounts of vulgar content that is lewd and pornographic, seriously violating China’s laws and regulations,” the paper reports a government official as announcing yesterday. Authorities had therefore “summoned representatives of Google in China and urged them to remove the content immediately.”

There are several interesting aspects to this story. First, it is notable that it was published at all, highlighting as it does the issue of internet censorship. One must therefore conclude that the authorities want the public to know that their web searches are being screened. But notice the emphasis in the story: it’s not the Chinese government that is reported as blocking access to undesirable materials, it is Google that is “spreading” this information around China. Nowhere in the article is government blocking of internet access mentioned.  Second, the article reports that the government is concerned about “lewd and pornographic” material, a concern probably shared by most people in this socially conservative society. There is no hint, however, about the government pressure on Google to remove politically sensitive sites from the search results it delivers in China.  So the average Chinese newspaper reader, after perusing this article, might be forgiven for failing to recognize it is not pornography that is the government’s main concern, but rather the much broader and pervasive censorship of politically sensitive information.

2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. On June 5, anniversary of the brutal crackdown on the protesters, news media worldwide carried stories commemorating the event. China Daily did not mention the anniversary or the event itself*.  This omission isn’t unique to the government-controlled media: enter the words “Tiananmen Square” in the search box of Chinese version of Google and you will see links to articles on architecture, tourism, and monuments, but not on the 1989 protests.

I tried entering the words in the English language version of Google here this morning, and a strange thing happened.  At the top of the list of results was a Wikipedia entry on the protests. I clicked on the link, and was taken to the Wikipedia page, which included the iconic photograph of the young man standing in front of a convoy of tanks leaving the Square after the crackdown. But before I could read anything on the page, it disappeared, and was replaced with an ambiguous error message:

The sad truth about censorship is that, to a surprising extent, it works. When the PBS program Frontline showed a group of Chinese students the famous photograph of “Tank Man,” none of them recognized it or knew what it was.  I had a similar response when describing the photograph to young Chinese friends recently. The events of 1989 had been mentioned in their history classes, but only briefly; they had no idea of the brutality of the crackdown, the extent of the protests, or the worldwide response to it.

A diligent researcher in China could, despite the Great Firewall, find lots of information about the protests online, and perhaps even a photograph of Tank Man. But that presupposes that he knows what to look for.  If you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you look for it?
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*You can’t easily go back and check this. As far as I can tell, China Daily doesn’t have a searchable online archive. Journalism is, after all, the first draft of history. Official histories are polished drafts, palimpsests at best, purged of those inconvenient elements which do not conform with the approved narrative.  Allowing people to go back and read the initial draft would subvert the whole process.

Update, July 1, 2009. I was in a hotel today, watching BBC News as a report came on dealing with the twelfth anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China. Apparently demostrations took place today in Hong Kong demanding a greater degree of democracy in the territory. But as the report began, my television screen went blank, and came on again only when the report was drawing to a close. When the report was repeated an hour or so later, the same thing happened. (It’s worth noting that BBC, CNN, and other foreign news channels are available in some hotels, but not to most Chinese television viewers.

Another update, July 9, 2009. Four days ago, protests by Uyghurs in China’s western Xinjiang Province turned violent, and the Chinese authorities responded by cracking down hard on both the protests and information about them.  Apparently as a part of this crackdown, access to several websites was blocked. On July 7, when I was in Yunnan Province, I found that I could not access either Facebook or Twitter. Today I am in Guangzhou, and both sites are still inaccessible from here. I have had no problems, however, in finding news stories about the situation in Xinjiang on major US and UK news sites.

In the process of investigating the blocking of web access in China, I cam across the very useful and informative site Herdict.org. The site reports on internet accessibility issues worldwide. I was able to find out that Facebook has recently been reported to be inaccessible from China by 37 other uers, and I was able to submit my own report.