Ordie
04-04-2010, 11:06 AM
Behind The Great Firewall
By Andrew Moss
To the Chinese, freedom of speech isn't really the issue.
They have closed off Tiananmen Square.
The huge portrait of Mao stares across an empty Square at the giant mausoleum to the south where the Chairman's body is usually on display. Officially the Square has been blocked off because the President of Malaysia is visiting. But today is June 3, the anniversary of the 1989 uprising that left hundreds dead in Beijing—perhaps more, nobody really knows—and jolted all of China. Police are everywhere. The Square is ringed with soldiers.
And the government has laid down the line: "The safety and security of Tiananmen Square and other key areas is the first and most important priority—they must be rigidly controlled and kept absolutely secure. We must appropriate our successful experiences during the Olympic Games …. We must adequately guide public opinion and be mentally persuasive, creating a healthy and harmonious public opinion environment."
This means you must not talk about what actually happened in 1989.
Twenty years earlier, weeks of escalating student protests and a massive hunger strike in the Square had spread dissent to many parts of the country. The government was split and vacillating. Finally Deng Xiaoping, the man who had brought capitalism back to China, asserted control. Military units were sent into Beijing with orders to suppress the students by any means necessary, and on June 4 they reached the Square. Faced with tanks and machine guns, the students were persuaded to abandon their hunger strike and leave. There were no deaths in Tiananmen Square itself, but many supporters died on the Square's western approaches.
Today, television and the print media are controlled and "Tiananmen Square Massacre," "June 4," and "Chinese democracy movement" are all censored terms on the Chinese Internet. The government has shut down many local websites. "We have designated June 3 to June 6 as the national server maintenance days," it piously explains, "This move is widely supported by the public." Meanwhile, foreign sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr have been blocked. Public discussion of what happened in 1989 is off limits, pushed behind the Great Firewall.
For a Westerner studying Mandarin at language school, the tight governmental control is a weird experience. And can it work in a country with 300 million Internet users? Three Beijing experts offered some surprising opinions.
Jeremy Goldkorn, a fast-talking South African, edits Danwei, the best known English-language website in Beijing. "People see this country as an unreconstructed totalitarian state," he tells me. "Western media tend to give people the impression it's still the 1970s here, which it's certainly not. There is debate in China. There are people willing to give the authorities the middle finger. If you're trying to understand China, if you think that everybody is a robot, you're not going to understand what's happening here."
We are sitting in the Stone Boat café in Ritan Park, one of the beautifully tended parks that make Beijing bearable in midsummer. Around us, mixed groups of Chinese and Westerners from the city's new business class sip white wine and Tsingtao beer.
The Internet has become a Fourth Estate in China, Goldkorn says. "Kids know how to use free proxy servers. There are people who download Freegate and Ultrasurf, these Falun Gong tools that help you get around the firewall. This Green Dam thing has been discussed and compared …."
Green Dam is the filtering software that the government wanted installed on all new PCs—supposedly to filter out ****ography, though it would work just as well on politics. Under a hail of withering comment on the Web, the government backed off. "Green Dam Girl," the anime figure created to protest the software, has become an Internet meme representing governmental stupidity.
"Westerners tend to underestimate the incompetence of the Communist Party when it comes to good old-fashioned totalitarianism," Goldkorn said. "That said, they've done a really great job economically …. Few people here are interested in sacrificing practical gain for principles …. Free speech is way back there. It's not a priority of pretty much anyone."
"I myself have got to the point where I'm not paranoid any more," he said. "You can have a very free intellectual life here thanks to the Internet. You can sit here in Ritan Park and say 'Zhao Ziyang' and nobody's going to stop you."
"Zhao Ziyang!" he shouted out to Ritan Park. "Zhao Ziyang!" He was talking about the General Secretary of the Communist Party and former premier who went out into the Square in 1989 to talk the students out of the hunger strike.
For this Zhao was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life, which turned out to be 16 years. His posthumous memoirs, smuggled out of China, were published in the West last year, to coincide with the anniversary. He is an unperson in China, his name a banned search term on the Web.
Continued:http://alumni.berkeley.edu/news/california-magazine/spring-2010-searchlight-gray-areas/behind-great-firewall
By Andrew Moss
To the Chinese, freedom of speech isn't really the issue.
They have closed off Tiananmen Square.
The huge portrait of Mao stares across an empty Square at the giant mausoleum to the south where the Chairman's body is usually on display. Officially the Square has been blocked off because the President of Malaysia is visiting. But today is June 3, the anniversary of the 1989 uprising that left hundreds dead in Beijing—perhaps more, nobody really knows—and jolted all of China. Police are everywhere. The Square is ringed with soldiers.
And the government has laid down the line: "The safety and security of Tiananmen Square and other key areas is the first and most important priority—they must be rigidly controlled and kept absolutely secure. We must appropriate our successful experiences during the Olympic Games …. We must adequately guide public opinion and be mentally persuasive, creating a healthy and harmonious public opinion environment."
This means you must not talk about what actually happened in 1989.
Twenty years earlier, weeks of escalating student protests and a massive hunger strike in the Square had spread dissent to many parts of the country. The government was split and vacillating. Finally Deng Xiaoping, the man who had brought capitalism back to China, asserted control. Military units were sent into Beijing with orders to suppress the students by any means necessary, and on June 4 they reached the Square. Faced with tanks and machine guns, the students were persuaded to abandon their hunger strike and leave. There were no deaths in Tiananmen Square itself, but many supporters died on the Square's western approaches.
Today, television and the print media are controlled and "Tiananmen Square Massacre," "June 4," and "Chinese democracy movement" are all censored terms on the Chinese Internet. The government has shut down many local websites. "We have designated June 3 to June 6 as the national server maintenance days," it piously explains, "This move is widely supported by the public." Meanwhile, foreign sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr have been blocked. Public discussion of what happened in 1989 is off limits, pushed behind the Great Firewall.
For a Westerner studying Mandarin at language school, the tight governmental control is a weird experience. And can it work in a country with 300 million Internet users? Three Beijing experts offered some surprising opinions.
Jeremy Goldkorn, a fast-talking South African, edits Danwei, the best known English-language website in Beijing. "People see this country as an unreconstructed totalitarian state," he tells me. "Western media tend to give people the impression it's still the 1970s here, which it's certainly not. There is debate in China. There are people willing to give the authorities the middle finger. If you're trying to understand China, if you think that everybody is a robot, you're not going to understand what's happening here."
We are sitting in the Stone Boat café in Ritan Park, one of the beautifully tended parks that make Beijing bearable in midsummer. Around us, mixed groups of Chinese and Westerners from the city's new business class sip white wine and Tsingtao beer.
The Internet has become a Fourth Estate in China, Goldkorn says. "Kids know how to use free proxy servers. There are people who download Freegate and Ultrasurf, these Falun Gong tools that help you get around the firewall. This Green Dam thing has been discussed and compared …."
Green Dam is the filtering software that the government wanted installed on all new PCs—supposedly to filter out ****ography, though it would work just as well on politics. Under a hail of withering comment on the Web, the government backed off. "Green Dam Girl," the anime figure created to protest the software, has become an Internet meme representing governmental stupidity.
"Westerners tend to underestimate the incompetence of the Communist Party when it comes to good old-fashioned totalitarianism," Goldkorn said. "That said, they've done a really great job economically …. Few people here are interested in sacrificing practical gain for principles …. Free speech is way back there. It's not a priority of pretty much anyone."
"I myself have got to the point where I'm not paranoid any more," he said. "You can have a very free intellectual life here thanks to the Internet. You can sit here in Ritan Park and say 'Zhao Ziyang' and nobody's going to stop you."
"Zhao Ziyang!" he shouted out to Ritan Park. "Zhao Ziyang!" He was talking about the General Secretary of the Communist Party and former premier who went out into the Square in 1989 to talk the students out of the hunger strike.
For this Zhao was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life, which turned out to be 16 years. His posthumous memoirs, smuggled out of China, were published in the West last year, to coincide with the anniversary. He is an unperson in China, his name a banned search term on the Web.
Continued:http://alumni.berkeley.edu/news/california-magazine/spring-2010-searchlight-gray-areas/behind-great-firewall