From behind the Great Firewall
The censorship of the internet is one of the most frustrating things about spending time in China. Every time I am here I experience it, and each time I forget the scope and persistence of it. It is actually a moving target since each time, the list of things that work changes and is different depending on what internet connection you are using. This time for the first time, I have been forced to employ a VPN to try and access various sites I use outside of China and even that has been only marginally effective. Without the VPN, I can't reach Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, many news sites, and my RSS reader full of news and blogs also doesn't work. Google's myriad of sites including the search engine, Maps and Gmail are unpredictable. Sometimes they work, other times they do not. Even with the VPN, I can still not reach any site hosted on Blogger including my own which means for my friends in China, being able to read this in any easy way is doubtful.
Without mentioning anything else about the Chinese government, the restriction of access to the open internet is deplorable. Here in a place where people could benefit so much from access to information and education, access to the greatest body of it in the history of mankind is restricted for the ostensible purposes of preserving the social order. I'm pretty sure the idea is that if people had access to the internet, they would then have access to sites critical of the government and the ability to express those ideas themselves, which would then lead to the downfall of Chinese society and social disorder on a mass scale. So to avert that disaster, the censors play this cat and mouse game of figuring out how to block each site in turn and prevent people from being corrupted by subversive Western thinking or god forbid, a critical statement about the government from one of its own people. Preventing people from accessing information, from teaching themselves new things, and therefore from improving their circumstances is offensive and though it's arguable whether or not it's the worst offense of the government here as I sit surrounded by pollution that is normal here but would be considered an ecological disaster in other countries, it's certainly something about which the government should be ashamed and embarrassed.
My impression is that at least some people I know are aware of this and in some cases express it, but my idealistic view is that without the door being open except to those with the wherewithall and computer knowledge to bypass the restrictions (to the extent it is even possible) then it's going to substantially slow down the rate at which things here improve for a lot of people. If not directly as a result of this censorship of information, then because of the underlying attitude that keeping people from information and education is good for society which seems to pervade the government who implement these policies. I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the countries who keep their peoples from learning because it contravenes some religious edict. Those people are at least operating without the benefit of reason which explains if not excuses their lack of reasoning, but in this case you have a government who has rationally decided to dumb down its society for the ostensible sake of preserving social order or at least keep themselves in power.
Maybe nobody cares that much and maybe if the door were open it would just mean more Facebook and more Twitter, but ideas and thinking change slowly and although we may mock lack of substance on Youtube in the US and elsewhere, we still have the choice and opportunity to access anything of interest we want in an instant while here I am trying to drink from a slowly dripping faucet instead of a firehose.
Without mentioning anything else about the Chinese government, the restriction of access to the open internet is deplorable. Here in a place where people could benefit so much from access to information and education, access to the greatest body of it in the history of mankind is restricted for the ostensible purposes of preserving the social order. I'm pretty sure the idea is that if people had access to the internet, they would then have access to sites critical of the government and the ability to express those ideas themselves, which would then lead to the downfall of Chinese society and social disorder on a mass scale. So to avert that disaster, the censors play this cat and mouse game of figuring out how to block each site in turn and prevent people from being corrupted by subversive Western thinking or god forbid, a critical statement about the government from one of its own people. Preventing people from accessing information, from teaching themselves new things, and therefore from improving their circumstances is offensive and though it's arguable whether or not it's the worst offense of the government here as I sit surrounded by pollution that is normal here but would be considered an ecological disaster in other countries, it's certainly something about which the government should be ashamed and embarrassed.
My impression is that at least some people I know are aware of this and in some cases express it, but my idealistic view is that without the door being open except to those with the wherewithall and computer knowledge to bypass the restrictions (to the extent it is even possible) then it's going to substantially slow down the rate at which things here improve for a lot of people. If not directly as a result of this censorship of information, then because of the underlying attitude that keeping people from information and education is good for society which seems to pervade the government who implement these policies. I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the countries who keep their peoples from learning because it contravenes some religious edict. Those people are at least operating without the benefit of reason which explains if not excuses their lack of reasoning, but in this case you have a government who has rationally decided to dumb down its society for the ostensible sake of preserving social order or at least keep themselves in power.
Maybe nobody cares that much and maybe if the door were open it would just mean more Facebook and more Twitter, but ideas and thinking change slowly and although we may mock lack of substance on Youtube in the US and elsewhere, we still have the choice and opportunity to access anything of interest we want in an instant while here I am trying to drink from a slowly dripping faucet instead of a firehose.
posted by Dan at 1:07 AM
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