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March 18, 2005
misconceptions of misconceptions
Last Saturday I did a panel presentation at SXSWi. The panel was called Blogs and Blockades. The plan was for me to talk about the forces of evil (internet censorship in China) and for my partner Hossein Derakhshan to talk about the forces of good (Blogs in Iran). Now, the main reason I went to China was to do some recordings that would enable me to do a radio piece on a research project called the OpenNet Initiative. I am not a researcher, I'm a radio producer. But, that said I was shocked to discover that even though I did not speak Chinese and I was only there for two weeks: the data I collected did not jive with what I have been reading in the western press for the past few years. In fact one morning when I was in Beijing I walked into this cafe where a bunch of journalists hang out and a woman flagged me over to tell me that there was a big article on the internet and china in todays NYT, and when I checked it out the dissonance was tangible. So for my part of the presentation I did something I called "the five misconceptions about the great firewall of China" and I played a sound clip for each one from my interviews. I have found quite a few blog entries that misquote me or misinterpret.. but I have no time to correct them individually so I am going to make a post here.
At first I wanted to include the metaphor of the great wall itself, but when Elise filled me in on the history of the great wall and how it totally failed to keep out the invading hordes and how it was always added to not during times of external danger but rather internal strife... well I'm ok with it now (even though Jeremy Goldkorn's term the great net nanny is better)
1. Most discussions of Internet Censorship in China will leave out the word PORN. This denies the legitimate right the Chinese government has to involve itself in internet space, in fact the biggest net crack down of the past year has been in regards to porn. But I think that the main reason the western press tends to airbrush out this issue is because it skews the story it wants to tell, the story about the big bad government making it impossible for Chinese internet revolutionaries to find out the truth.
2. I have a friend who has actually attended a high profile board meeting of a prominent human rights group who regularly sends digital information into China. He said this organization could not accept the idea that their emails were being blocked by anybody other than the government. But the truth is, for most Chinese users, these emails are spam, and they end up being filtered at the user level, by spam filters - the article I link above spins this fact as well.
3. Fons Tuinstra, a Dutch journalist living in Shanghai has been tracking this notion of the 30,000 Chinese Internet Police. He has noticed that the figure has recently jumped to 50,000. Where these numbers come from he does not know. Of course there are Internet Police, but these numbers are clearly Propaganda. I mean if there was a room filled with this many internet police, they would be playing counterstrike anyways.
4. I did not speak with a single person who did not know how to use proxies. And my friend Isaac Mao was adamant that there are few people in China who are unfamiliar with these back door operations. In fact on the official BBS of one of the universities, there were many threads devoted to proxies, including programs that could be downloaded (surely 50,000 internet police could shut this down). "I give up" was a common answer to my question: what do you do when you cant get to what you are looking for on the internet - But Isaac says this answer should be understood in the laziness sense not the technical sense.
5. There is VERY REAL censorship taking place on the Internet in China. But the majority of this censorship takes place at the user level. Of course this is due to the fact that there are very real nasty consequences if the officials get involved - but still, if we are interested in studying how this system works than the very real self censoring must to be taken into account. especially if we want to study how filtering and blocking methods are changing as the Chinese Blogosphere emerges.
As I was setting up for my presentation, Kevin Wen and Liang Lu introduced themselves to me. They both work for BlogChina, the largest blog hosting provider in China and they were both friends with Isaac Mao, who I worked with in Shanghai. This put a lot of pressure on me, but they had nothing but good things to say about my presentation, in fact at one point I brought Kevin up on the stage to talk about BlogChina's censoring methodologies (very much in line with the tape I played from users).
update
I just got this from my fren at the university I talked about above:
i am terriblely sorry that our university bbs system is totally been blocked to non-students. all the ip outside the campus were blocked from the day before yesterday. the decision is made by the department of education which requires all the university bbs systems to be so-called inside inter-act system while no body outside the campus can log in. the washington post has already reported this event yesterday.
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Here is a news article:
China tightens rules for online chat rooms:
[World News]: BEIJING, March 18 : China's most popular online chat room, hosted by Beijing's Tsinghua University, has been closed to non-students to limit the exchange of ideas on the Internet. Operators of the chat room at the Shuimu Tsinghua website (www.smth.org) posted a message saying that non-students would no longer be able to log on, the South China Morning Post reported Friday.
The university is China's foremost for science and technology, and the chat room has become famous for its intellectual debate and social commentary, as well as updates on information technology. Its popularity is comparable to that of Beijing University chat room, which had 30,000 users before it was shut in September. New rules from the Ministry of Information Industry go into effect Sunday, and will hold chat room operators liable for any "objectionable content" on their sites.All Tsinghua users were required to register under their true identities by Tuesday of this week.The Ministry of Education has issued a circular on strengthening "political thought" at universities, and the Communist Party's Propaganda Department has increased its monitoring of cyberspace for subversive trends, the report said. As a result, Weblog portals have discouraged their users from discussing political or sensitive topics.
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FURTHER UPDATE
There is a lot more press on the closing of the smth.org BBS that I got a tour of when I was in Beijing. This is a very interesting development. I think we are going to see the transition to Blogs be accelerated because of this. It will be very interesting to see what happens next. I think had this happened before I did my presentation points #3, and #4 would definitely have been worded differently, I really was blown away by what I saw on SMTH - it is important to figure out what they are changing on the BBS as well..
Posted by bw at March 18, 2005 08:21 AM