When I think censorship, what first comes to mind is usually political censorship. But a lot of what gets censored on the internet here isn’t just politically controversial content, but also the kinds of things that you might say aren’t fit for daytime television — “spiritual pollution” — i.e. sex, violence and generally morbid content (including medical research papers on sexual subjects).
One recent example is the online computer game World of Warcraft. Faithful readers of this blog might remember that the Jia Junpeng phenomenon arose the last time the game was down. That time, rumor had it that the government had forced the creators of the game to make it less morbid — put some meat on those skeletons, and make sure that dead bodies are buried immediately instead of lying around the game as rotting corpses.
Dagens Nyheter (and the New York Times) report that the game is down again. This time it seems like it isn’t a censorship issue per se. Instead, there’s a power struggle among different departments in the government over who should have the power to regulate the booming Chinese online world. Both the General Administration of Press and Publication and the Ministry of Culture claim to have jurisdiction over online gaming, and the Ministry of Culture has given NetEase, the operator of the game, the green light, while the General Administration of Press and Publication say they’ve rejected NetEase’s application. From the New York Times article:
Which agency will win the regulatory battle remains unclear, although the Ministry of Culture, with allies among other ministerial-level offices, is said to enjoy an edge. Regardless, there appears to be much for both offices to do. The government this summer proclaimed its desire to clean up the Internet, ridding it of pornography, gambling, violence and seditious material.
The ministry dived further into that Herculean task in the past week, announcing sanctions against 188 companies that it said were running unlicensed, vulgar or overly violent online games. NetEase and World of Warcraft were conspicuously absent from the list.
Anecdotally, cleaning up vulgar content on the internet doesn’t seem hugely controversial — when I ask my students about the issue, there are usually at least a few who think it’s a good idea both to clean up vulgar content and to put controls on online gaming in order to combat internet addiction (which is seen as a major problem, sometimes “cured” through internet addiction bootcamps, see here, here, and here).
But obviously other content is blocked as well, both politically controversial content, and then lots of pages that don’t seem to make much sense, like youtube, facebook, twitter, and pretty much every international blog-hosting site. Word on the street was that the government wanted a flawless National Day celebration for the country’s 60th birthday; social networking sites could possibly be used to coordinate protests or even demonstrations, and everything would be unblocked after the holiday passed in early October. A month later, nothing has happened. One source in this apartment speculates that blocking foreign social networking sites is a way to drive users into Chinese social networking sites (of which there are plenty, and they’re mostly all accessible), in order to keep the money in Chinese pockets (and maybe also the content on servers located in China that can be controlled as necessary). But it’s hard to know.
It’s also hard to say how effective internet censorship is. On one hand, until recently, a computer-savvy person could fairly easily use a proxy server to get around the Great Firewall. It seemed like if you were educated enough to figure out how to use a proxy server or read articles in English, maybe the government didn’t care what you were reading — it was the uneducated masses they were trying to protect. On the other hand, when the topic of the media or the internet comes up in my classes, there are usually only a handful of students who have even heard of proxy servers — and that’s with the selection bias of a group of highly-educated young people who have chosen to pay lots of money to study English. Something’s also happened with the Firewall in the past few months that makes it much harder to get around with proxy servers — maybe that loophole is being closed. Even I have by now more or less given up on blocked websites and switched from facebook to xiaonei, from youtube to tudou.
At the same time, Nicholas Kristof notes in his New York Times column that content can be posted online much more freely now than a few years ago, and that on his Chinese-language blog, he has been able to post entries on all sorts of controversial topics: “All my posts on the blogs went up instantaneously and have remained up for the last week; I find it impossible to be censored. The reason is simple: nobody reads my Chinese blogs. China has around 30 million active blogs, and as long as they don’t trigger political problems, the government doesn’t care.” He also says that in contrast to a few years ago, he can now post almost any comment on popular forums without being moderated. And when it comes to “vulgar” content, all you have to do is take a look at the latest content on chinaSMACK to see how broad the definition of “fit for general consumption” has become.
And then of course there are the millions of Chinese “netizens” who keep pushing the boundaries for what’s permissible (e.g. through stories about the mythical grass mud horse). People are incredibly creative when it comes to finding ways to slip through the censors, like replacing the word “harmonious” with the word “river crab”, which sounds similar in Chinese, but is less likely to flag the censors (for another example, see Tony’s blog post on the evolution of ways to write “local person” and “outsider”).
So in summary, it’s a complicated issue. During my year-and-a-bit here, the trend has been towards less and not more internet freedom, but the longer term trend still seems to have been a positive one, and I obviously hope that long-term trend will continue. At the very least, it would be great to have access to YouTube again, so that I can find out what this keyboard cat thing is all about… or maybe that’s precisely what I’m being protected from?