Day 1: The Great Firewall

This is the first day of the 30-day countdown. Today's topic: Internet censorship in China (a.k.a. The Great Firewall of China).

Most people know that the Internet is heavily censored in China. For example, very few blogs are available here (like this one, for example -- I can post to it, but people in China can't read it). And the CCP takes a pretty aggressive stance toward censoring anything remotely critical of it. In short, entire areas of the WWW are blocked from users in China, some for no apparent reason.

When I try to access a blocked website, this is what I see:
This is a sight that I encounter many times a day, every day. Aside from the lack of access, I find this error announcement to be incredible irritating and disingenuous. After all, nowhere in the list presented does it say that the website has been blocked by government censors. They just do it and pretend like users aren't wise to their shenanigans.

And it's not like they even have to be sly. In my (albeit limited) experience, most Chinese don't care at all about the censors. Some of my students, for example, seem to believe that the government bans sites because "they are bad for us" (exact quote). In fact, some of them are so well-trained that they hesitated to use Wikipedia for an in-class assignment because that site is usually blocked. They asked me, "Is it okay to use this?" (And no, they weren't talking about the quality of research, they were talking about access to it). What could I do? I just told them, "Well, if it's not blocked now, it must be okay to use it, right?" Never mind that tomorrow/next month/next week it will be blocked again. Of course, I suspect that most of them probably just have their workarounds for finding information. Truth be told, they're not all that keen on researching the topics that their government censors (e.g., that place up North with all the monks; that thorn-in-the-side 'renegade' nation to the East of Fujian province; the dude-in-front-of-tank episode). They're much more interested in Japanese pop singers and NBA stats.

The lack of access to the Internet is one big reason why I could never live in China long-term. It doesn't just interfere with my YouTube addiction, it interferes with my research. It's possible that the government will one day case to play net nanny to its citizens, but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. And while there are "workarounds" to accessing banned sites, they don't always work, and they're a PITA* to use.

* = Pain in the Ass

A banned "teaching moment"

[Update: It looks like the full content of the NYT site is now accessible. YouTube is still verboten.]

If you're following the news, you might have heard about the business happening in Tibet. In response to YouTube videos that showed police and protestors clashing, the Chinese government blocked YouTube access to viewers on the Mainland (and they blocked access to articles about the blocking; they are pretty thorough).

This is what the state-controlled Chinese media has this to say about the happenings in the the China-ruled Autonomous region (notice the use of loaded like 'mastermind,''clique,'and 'united motherland'):

Government chief ensures safety in Tibet
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-03-17 12:33

Qiangba Puncog, Tibet Autonomous Regional Government chairman decried rioters and the Dalai Lama clique for conspiring the latest riot in Lhasa, and underlined the government's determination to safeguard Tibet, during a news briefing in Beijing on Monday.

Thirteen innocent civilians were burned or stabbed to death in last Friday's riot in Lhasa, and sixty-one police were injured, six of them seriously wounded, said Qiangba Pungcog.

Rioters set fire at more than 300 locations, including residential houses and 214 shops, and smashed and burned 56 vehicles, causing heavy losses and seriously disturbed social order in the city.

The vilence was out of conspiracy jointly made by domestic and overseas separatists who are advocating "Tibet independence".

The Dalai clique masterminded, well planned and carefully organized the riot on March 14, Qiangba Puncog said, citing that the rioters' activities were "crime".

The chairman said the Dalai clique's version on describing the vilence and echoing tilted news coverage of some Western media are "ridiculous." They are confusing right and wrong while labeling the riot as "peaceful demonstration", and slandering efforts of local law enforcement to keeping order as "crackdown on the peaceful demonstration."

The Tibetan government chief expressed confidence in maintaining social stability and order under the leadership of the Chinese Central Government,saying the Tibetans will firmly fight against splitting efforts, and safeguard the unified motherland.

Any secessionist attempt to sabotage Tibet's stability will not gain people's support and is doomed to fail, he said.

Compare this with what the NYT has to say (I had to use a proxy server to access this because the government appears to be blocking the Tibet-related stories on the NYT website):

BEIJING — Thousands of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans clashed with the riot police in a second Chinese city on Saturday, while the authorities said they had regained control of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a day after a rampaging mob ransacked shops and set fire to cars and storefronts in a deadly riot.

Conflicting reports emerged about the violence in Lhasa on Friday. The Chinese authorities denied that they had fired on protesters there, but Tibetan leaders in India told news agencies on Saturday that they had confirmed that 30 Tibetans had died and that they had unconfirmed reports that put the number at more than 100. . . .

Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near the Labrang Monastery. Local monks had held a smaller protest on Friday, but the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.

Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as “chaos” and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital. Large numbers of military police and security officers fired tear gas while Tibetans hurled rocks, according to the Tibetans in India.

But Tibetan advocacy groups and witnesses in Lhasa offered contradictory accounts. The Tibetan government in exile said at least 30 Tibetans had died in the protests, according to Agence France-Presse. Witnesses told Radio Free Asia, the nonprofit news agency financed by the United States government, that numerous Tibetans were dead. A 13-year-old Tibetan, reached by telephone, said he had watched the violence from his apartment and saw four or five Tibetans fall to the ground after military police officers fired upon them.

Foreign journalists are being restricted from traveling to Lhasa, and the precise death toll remains unknown.

Now, I am of the opinion that all mainstream media is biased and relatively worthless. The U.S. media machine isn't state run, but it's run by corporations, which is at least as bad, if not worse. However, the level of censorship here is appalling, and it is substantially different (i.e., much more despotic) than the type of censorship that we experience in the U.S. Normally, I'd love to use these two new stories in class. I'd have students read both, compare them, talk about the different way that each "constructs" a view of reality. The point wouldn't be to talk about which one is right, but to talk about how each has a different (and vested) perspective on the same happening and langauge is used to convey that perspective. After all, one of the skills that we are supposed to be teaching students is how to critically read sources of information.

But I can't do that here becuase we can't talk about Tibet in the classroom. We can't talk about Taiwan. We can't talk about T-men Square. Talking about those things -- and many others -- could get me fired and/or deported pretty darn quickly.