I was on Alan’s favourite website this morning, (picking just one is a victory in itself, as he surfs the news obsessively day and night, and on his cellphone when out and about), and I came across a news story that really made me sit up. It turns out, China has quietly started reblocking the websites that they had, under immense pressure, reopened during the Olympics Games this last Summer.
So I did a little digging into the life of an internet surfer in other parts of the world. What I learnt was that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China are all believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other countries in the world. Most of the blocked or blacklisted sites in Saudi Arabia are about sex, religion, women, health, politics and pop culture. Did you know that they even block access to websites that sell swimming or bathing suits?! In China, websites that talk about sex, Tibet or even democracyare blocked. Social sites that are often blocked include Google News, Typepad, ebay, Blogger blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Orkut, MySpace, Pandora, Bebo, Photobucket, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, Flickr, and last.fm. Oi, I would not survive!
The Golden Shield Project (a.k.a. Great Firewall of China) started in 1998. The escalation of the government’s effort to neutralize critical online opinion cames after a series of large anti-Japanese, anti-pollution and anti-corruption protests, many of which were organized or publicized using instant messaging, chat rooms, and text messages. Now get this, the size of their Internet police is estimated at more than 30,000-40,000! Critical comments appearing on Internet forums, blogs, and major portals are erased within minutes. Censorship is apparently quite the industry in China, and every village has spies to watch their neighbors, while mail and the poster boards are watched.
Now at the end of March this year, in preparation for the Olympic games, China unblocked access to some Internet Web sites, including non-politically sensitive parts of English Wikipedia, after immense international pressure. The International Olympic Committee protested that ongoing blocking “would reflect very poorly” on the host nation. For one of only a handful of times, they listened. Historically, the blocks have only ever been lifted for special occasions. For example, The New York Times was unblocked when reporters in a private interview with Jiang Zemin specifically asked about the block and he agreed to look into the matter. During the APEC summit in Shanghai in 2001, normally-blocked media sources such as CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post suddenly became accessible. According to a Harvard study, at least 18,000 websites are blocked today from within mainland China
In fact, the regime not only blocks website content but also monitors who is online and what they are doing. Amnesty International notes that China “has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world.” The “offences” include communicating with groups abroad, opposing the persecution of the Falun Gong, joining online petitions,and calling for reform and an end to corruption.
According to Wikipedia, research has shown that censored websites included, before the 2008 Summer Olympics:
- Websites related to the persecuted Falun Gong spiritual practice
- News sources that regularly cover some taboo topics such as police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, and Marxist sites. These sites include Voice of America, BBC News, and Yahoo! Hong Kong
- Media sites which may include unregulated content, social commentary or political commentary. The Chinese Wikipedia and Livejournal are examples of such blocked sites.
- Sites hosted by Taiwan’s government and major newspaper and television media and other sites with information on Taiwanese independence
- Web sites that contain obscenity, pornography, and criminal activity
- Sites linked with the Dalai Lama and his International Tibet Independence Movement, including his teachings
According to the Herald Times, at a recent news conference, Liu defended China’s monitoring of the Internet by saying that others also restricted access to some websites. The Chinese government “needs to do the required management of Web sites based on the law, just as what other countries are doing,” he said. It is true. In recent days, Britain and Australia have both moved to limit the sharing of online child pornography. Germany requires search engines not to show links to Web sites linked to Nazi activity.
This all reminds me of an experience I had meeting a Chinese girl on a train heading to Sapa in Vietnam. Our passengers in this 4-soft sleeper included a chain-smoking, over-drinking, buddha-like, aging American expat now based in Beijing, and his youthful Chinese girlfriend. We learnt from this duo the defences of a modern day China that denies the existence of all STDs to its citizens, causing women to use terminations as everyday birth control. She counted on average a Chinese woman can have anywhere from 3-4 abortions in a lifetime, and as many as 10. Stories were swopped of the Chinese government infecting entire villages with HIV, but that this is “all fixed now” as they started testing blood for HIV two years ago. And of course we were thrilled to learn that (in her own words) “pollution doesn’t kill people”. Whew, what a relief. But really it was their comments on Tibet that enlightened us the most, and that questioning your leader is not ok. End of discussion. I left feeling sorry for a people where foreign satellite is illegal, “chai” allows the government to give me only 24 hours notice on demolition of my home, and CNN is interrupted during shows on poverty in the homeland.
Today, I am eternally grateful for the freedom to write this blog.
