The big news this week has been that Google is planning to stop filtering out sensitive search words in its google.cn searches, a move that is very likely to get it blocked, and essentially means that Google has decided to give up on the Chinese search engine market. Everyone is writing about it (well, except for in China, where the reasons for the move have been censored).
2009 was not a great year for internet freedom in China. Even just from a foreigner’s perspective, things didn’t go well: Youtube was blocked in April, after the unrest in Tibet, and facebook, twitter, flickr and lots of other social networking sites were blocked in June, as a response to the unrest in Xinjiang. Picasa, google’s photo-sharing website, also seems to be blocked, although it’s unclear why. In Xinjiang, internet access to anything outside the province was essentially turned off completely (for those of you reading this in China, this link is blocked) — for the entire province — from June onwards. In the past few weeks, the internet has slowly begun to become available again in Xinjiang, replaced instead by a new law against threats to national unity and a doubled security budget.
Word on the street was that all of these newly blocked websites would come online again after the October 1st National Day celebrations, when the People’s Republic of China was due to celebrate its 60th birthday (and which it did with blue skies, female paramilitaries in short skirts, and no disturbances). The day came and went, and I still couldn’t log onto my facebook account. The proxy servers I had been using to get around the Great Firewall were also eventually blocked, one by one.
And then there was the ban on registering individual .cn domain names — only allowing registered businesses to open their own websites is a good way to filter out people who want to be able to say whatever they want, don’t like having their posts harmonized on websites like xiaonei, and can’t afford to (or figure out how to) register their own domain name in another country. The news came shortly after Hu Shuli left her post as the editor of the prominent journal Caijing over disputes related to censorship and financing, taking most of her editorial team with her. She instead took over another journal, to be reshaped in Caijing’s freespeaking image under the name Century Weekly. And international outrage proved of little use when Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his role in Charter 08, a open declaration calling for political reform, increased human rights, and an end to one-party rule.
So basically, 2009 hasn’t been a great year for free speech in China. China is a huge, complex country, and talking about absolutes or even trends tends to be dangerous — as soon as you think you know where things are going, the opposite happens. In a longer-term perspective, there has definitely been a huge increase in freedom of speech in the past 20 years, and the growth of the internet in particular has indisputably been extremely important. But at the same time, the Great Firewall is also surprisingly sophisticated. And even though (at least until recently) it was fairly easy to use a free proxy server to access blocked information, when I ask my (university-age or older) students about proxy servers, most of them have no idea what I’m talking about. A lot of people thought that the 2008 Olympics and 2010 Shanghai World Expo would bring with them a push towards increased freedom, but in that respect, 2009 was disappointing.
In this context, I have a lot of respect for Google for taking a stand. Their company motto, “Don’t be evil”, is difficult to live up to — it’s hard to know what the best way is to give as many people as possible as much access to information as possible. But it’s clear that they’re trying, and I think it’s important that they have values that they’re standing by, and that they care more about the Chinese people than about their profits (even if their profits in China right now are small, it’s a huge market with a lot of potential for growth).
And in the meanwhile, people find other ways around the censors (or go all out and mock the censors). In his op-ed on Google’s move, Nicholas Kristof gives some examples from his own experience:
Young Chinese also are infinitely creative. When the government blocks references to “June 4,” the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Netizens evade the restriction by typing in “May 35.”
When I lived China in the 1990s, an early computer virus would pop up on the screen and ask: Do you like Li Peng? (He was then the widely disliked hard-line prime minister.) If you said you didn’t like Li Peng, the virus disappeared and did no harm. If you expressed support for him, it tried to wipe out your hard drive.
The struggle goes on.