Whoa, there has been quite a stir on the web about the comments made by a Chinese official that China does not block the Internet:
I don’t think we should be using different standards to judge China. In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I’ve heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it’s blocked. I’m sure I don’t know why people say this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all.
This is not an uncommon statement as I have heard many different Chinese academics and business make similar claims about how they have the “largest offices,” the “best beer in the world,” and can say “whatever they want.” These are obviously interesting statements, which I can’t deny outright, but more anchor my own response in trying to understand the mindsight of the people who make these statements.
Also, Patrick is posting about his dilemma with getting his employer, Beijing University, to pay him for teaching (even though he has been doing so for the past month). He is writing his dissertation in part about this type of power-struggle in China.
I will make a blanket assertion, as I often do, that this power struggle comes from the myth of trying to maintain a socialist nation in the face of the dominant global democratic capitalist economy. As anyone who has been to China knows, the distance between the really poor and the really rich is pretty huge. Where’s that middle class for stability?
“Where’s that middle class for stability?”
In the USA?
ahhhhhh….I would say that the middle class in China is growing, but actually, the Chinese middle class very well might be migrating to the USA in bulk through academia and other opportunities. However, this is not isolated to the USA, but is a global chinese migration.
Hmm. Would you really class “we don’t have software blocking internet sites,” and “we have the best beer in the world” together as interesting statements which can’t be denied outright?
The latter is rather subjective, but the former seems pretty cut-and-dried. You’ve been there. Did you encounter any websites which were blocked?
it’s true, i think, that they don’t have software blocking; it’s technically hardware filtering; and many Chinese can’t recognize it mostly because they can’t load pages that are filtered (thinking Plato’s allegory here — how can you know what you don’t know? and how can you prove that what you don’t know is something you don’t know to a person who doesn’t know it?). i’ve had this conversation many times with various people here and there. just try a couple of things (these only work in China 大陆): search in Google for “falun gong,” try and load the page http://www.chinadigitaltimes.net … wow, neither seem to work; but when i use my foreign proxy server,… well, that’s odd, they’re working again. hmmm. let’s not forget that only one month ago Wikipedia finally became accessible, as a run-up to the Olympics (yes, there is official documentation for this development) and China’s need to not 丢面子.
i also get a lot of: well, yeah it’s filtered… but why would you want to look at that stuff anyway? and explaining that “why” to someone is somehow peculiarly difficult. like, really, what tangible benefit does freedom of information provide to you? maybe it’s like remembering that the sky can be blue in beijing, and that maybe it’s nice and the even way it should be.
as for the middle class, i don’t think migration is a main issue here. but when you have nigh 1.4 billion people, a “growing” middle class amounts to bupkus. another question is what are people in china, middle class and others, doing to solve the growing class disparity? except for a few voices, it seems like not much. mostly it seems like the poor, as always, are funding the middle class’ growth. (and we don’t need to limit this discussion to China, as Damjan points out).
lastly, the whole myth of socialism has to be played against the myth of “democratic capitalism.” governing structures may facilitate certain traits, but at this moment i feel like the problem runs deeper. capitalism and democracy don’t make people into “good” people (though some argue this as a point of accountability in governing structures; and there may be some validity, though it’s often strained). people have to decide to be good all by themselves.
very last lastly: it’s complicated and i’m a student; certainly there are plenty of better competing views.
It would be great to get a computer setup at Beijing University that we could make accessible for people in the USA and elsewhere to use as a proxy to test the Internet in China…sounds like one of those million dollar art ideas…
I can see it now: A gallery visitor walks up to a computer, what do they type in, “BBC”, and bam, no site. Isn’t that interesting.
MAJOR SARCASM
I’m not putting my name on it though, I want to be able to get back in to the country
on another odd note, that search i performed in Google for the words “falun gong” disabled my home connection for about fifteen minutes. yeah, i’m not making this up. won’t be trying that out again except unless i am behind a hardware anonymizer.
Really! That is interesting. Search through my blog to see how to solve your crises. There is an easy to use ssh-tunnel program. You can use your account on cabbage on the other end to connect to UCSD and through the Chinese firewall…