No Facebook. No YouTube. No Twitter. And with Google throttled back to a snail’s pace, the indignity of searching on Bing.com. It was the start of eight weeks’ travel in China; I was being censored and I didn’t like it at all.
Young Chinese have grown up with censored internet. Photo: Reuters
Not having had a massive desire to see The Blair Witch Project before my 13th birthday, I had never really been confronted by censorship at home. It was immediately frustrating. The tools I use to stay in touch with people while I’m on the road were gone. But more than that it felt intrusive – an unjustified limitation on a freedom I have come to expect.
It took me 12 hours to struggle free, thanks to a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a tricksy programme that makes it seem like you’re actually browsing from elsewhere. But the VPN wasn’t perfect and when it didn’t work I found myself back at Bing, and angry again. I resolved to figure out more about how Chinese Internet censorship works, and whether Chinese web users are irked by it in the same way I was.
Estimates say that 40 per cent of China’s population uses the Internet, making it home to the largest online population in the world, the world’s two largest internet companies, and a social network with 700 million users. It also has the broadest and most sophisticated project to censor human expression in the history of the world – an amazing monument to the power of the Chinese state.
The censorship project is colloquially known as “the Great Firewall”. The name’s a nod to the wall that used to protect China’s northern borders from barbarian hordes. But the firewall’s purpose is to protect China’s ruling Communist Party from internal enemies sharing information to undermine its authority. The Party’s judgement is that limiting free speech is justified to ensure China’s ongoing stability.
China’s managed to create the modern equivalent of the panopticon, the nineteenth century prison designed to play with light so prisoners always felt they were being watched and behaved as if they were. Photo: Reuters
The censorship basically works in three ways. First, whole websites are blocked if the Party doesn’t like the content they produce (that’s you, New York Times), or their owners refuse to submit to censorship of the material on them (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). If you try and access these sites you’ll get an error message implying the site is down.
Google continues to dance with the Chinese over whether its search product can be censored. When I visited it was available, but incredibly slow. Throttling, some say, is to create Chinese leverage in ongoing negotiations.
Second, specific material is blocked by fiat, or a technology called Deep Packet Inspection that searches pages and shuts down those with offending text. You’re idly browsing through descriptions of your next destination and then bam: your browser suddenly displays an indecipherable collection of Chinese characters.
The list of banned text is supposedly secret, but sometimes instructions come to light. In April this year, for example, the State Council Information Office advised all websites to remove a video called: “Actual Footage of Chengdu Police Surrounding and Beating Homeowners Who Were Defending Their Rights”.
Finally there’s the 50 centres, so named because of how much they are paid each time they steer topics in social forums in a pro-Party direction. A 2012 study suggested they censor as many as one in eight micro-blogs.
The censorship straitjacket can be loosened or tightened depending on the political situation. Western news sites have been known to magically reappear when there’s a major trade convention in town, or disappear when their reporting is critical.
The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square violence in 1989 tends to crank up censorship each year as censors race to outlaw new code words being used to mark the occasion. To keep Tiananmen forgotten censors have variously banned “4 June”, “35 May”, a little candle icon you might use to mark a vigil (or to celebrate a birthday) and once, without any hint of irony, they banned the phrase “the truth”.
Because the limits of the censorship change frequently, it doesn’t feel like the kind of Net Nanny you might have experienced at high school or uni, where you pretty much knew what was out of bounds. Instead it feels like someone is watching over your shoulder, tracking your every move, and making a judgement in the moment. This feeling is intensified when your Internet connection is turned off for a few minutes when you search for a blocked term – you’ve done something wrong and this is your punishment.
Whatever my frustrations about a Facebook-free world for eight weeks, the far greater worry about the Chinese Internet censorship apparatus is this: it works.
China’s managed to create the modern equivalent of the panopticon, the 19th century prison designed to play with light so prisoners always felt they were being watched and behaved as if they were. It’s a smart approach. Censors can’t expect to keep up with the whole Internet, so they get web users to censor themselves instead.
The language barrier meant it was hard to have a conversation about how the Chinese people I met felt about censorship. But my wife had spent a year doing graduate study in Paris in a programme with many Chinese classmates, and we met with them in Shanghai. They’d “seen the light” in Europe – opening Facebook accounts that were abandoned on their return to China.
I asked whether censorship riled them up, and whether they consider agitating for change. It didn’t, they said, and they don’t. They’ve grown up with censored Internet and were blasé about its restrictions. They could get themselves a VPN as easily as I did, but none of them had. After all, their friends are on QZone and Weibo, not Facebook and Twitter.
The acceptance of censorship was part of a broader mood of political apathy. There’s an implicit bargain with the state: keep making us richer day by day and we’ll forgive the restrictions of our freedom. The only real critics of government I came across were in the pages of books, and they were full-blown dissidents. Political action is discouraged because it’s dangerous. In English we might say “the early bird catches the worm”; in Chinese there’s a proverb that goes “the bird that sticks its neck out gets eaten for lunch”.
Whatever my frustrations about a Facebook-free world for eight weeks, the far greater worry about the Chinese Internet censorship apparatus is this: it works.
The yo-pros I lunched with in Shanghai didn’t know that Mao Tse Dong is not considered a great leader in the West. They didn’t know there was a genuine case for the independence of Tibet. And they’re not alone. According to Louisa Lim in The People’s Republic of Amnesia, 85 per cent of Chinese uni students cannot correctly identify the picture of a man standing in front of a tank bearing down on him in Tiananmen Square, the most iconic representation of Chinese state power and violence for the rest of the world.
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