Travelling to Tibet

For a foreigner, even just getting to Tibet at all was cumbersome. In addition to a Chinese visa, foreigners need a travel permit to visit Lhasa, and another permit to visit other parts of Tibet, which both require a local travel agency and the accompaniment of a guide at all times. The government wants tourists (who bring in money), but doesn’t want journalists and activists (who bring trouble), and so the travel agencies are put in charge of issuing permits, and are responsible for the behaviour of their charges while they’re in Tibet. Some people find ways around the rules or sneak across the border (which is very difficult and dangerous to do), and wandering around Lhasa on your own is fine, but most people don’t want to get their local guide in trouble, and therefore stay on their best behaviour.

And so the Tibet that a tourist sees is a tightly controlled version of reality. We walked in and out of the old streets of central Lhasa, where old men and women walk clockwise around temples in prayer and the markets and shops are filled with pilgrims and tourists. We took pictures of the buildings and the people, but were strictly instructed not to photograph the soldiers — difficult to avoid, since they were everywhere. The military uniforms with huge guns and full body armour felt excessive in a place filled with religious pilgrims, and sharpshooters on the rooftops of temples and mosques seemed mildly inappropriate, but on the whole people seemed to get on with their lives, and the soldiers just mixed in with all of the rest of the colors and sounds of the market.

I had read a few books on Tibet before coming, and I knew that at least some people were sad that the Dalai Lama couldn’t return to Tibet, or frustrated that the new railway meant an influx of immigrants from Sichuan and fiercer competition for jobs. But I can’t remember anyone we talked to expressing any kind of anger or frustration. Our guide was very friendly and extremely professional. He answered every question we asked him, but never with any hint that he was unhappy about Tibet’s situation. Which makes sense — even if he did have other opinions, why vent frustration to a tourist who can’t do anything about it and will leave in a few days, when informants are everywhere, and saying something negative means risking everything?

And so, other than the overwhelming presence of soldiers in the Tibetan parts of Lhasa (and lack of soldiers in the newer, Chinese parts), which to me gave a feeling of being in a place under martial law, it would on the whole have been easy to come away with the feeling that things in Tibet aren’t that different from in the rest of China — a place with restrictions on things that Westerners see as important freedoms, like speech and religion, but people work around the restrictions, and for most, everyday life feels relatively free.

Tibet in the news

For someone who wants to get a sense of what the situation in Tibet is really like, turning to newspapers and magazines doesn’t necessarily give a simple answer either. The Chinese government has been very active in promoting its narrative of Tibetan history, and at the same time discredit Western reporting on current events. An old woman on a train in Shandong province, in northeastern China, saw that I was reading a book on Tibetan history, and told me about a documentary she had seen that told the story of how Tibetans had been freed from slavery by the Communist Party, chains literally removed from around their feet, and informed its viewers that now all Tibetans were happy and well-fed. Western media is accused of reporting on the actions of a few “extremists”, falsely implying that the majority of Tibetans would prefer for Tibet to be independent when only a small group of “separatists” hold this view, and exaggerating the brutality of crack-downs against demonstrators by cropping pictures and video clips to show police beating protesters but cutting away protesters attacking the police.

The idea that critical reporting on Tibet is a part of a Western media bias against China plays well with the nationalism that’s alarmingly common, especially in people of the post-80′s generation. The fact that it’s difficult for Western journalists to travel to Tibet to research reports only increases the chance that what is reported will contain mistakes or be one-sided, and makes the reporting even easier to discredit.

A complicated history

Central to the public debate, it seems, has been the issue of whether or not Tibet is “inherently” a part of China. The Chinese side cites a long history of contacts between Tibet and China — Tibet was once an empire of its own that exchanged tributes and princesses with the Chinese empire — and then a closer relationship that began with the Qing dynasty Qianlong emperor (a practising Buddhist) in the 18th century, during which time the emperor sent in the Chinese army to prop up the Dalai Lama’s government, in return for spiritual guidance and blessings from the Dalai Lama. Tibet was invaded in 1904 by the British (who wanted to hold this key position between Russia, China and India) but they withdrew once the government back in London found out about the invasion and realized it was a stupid idea. With the fall of the Qing dynaty, Tibet then enjoyed a few decades of de facto independence before being invaded once again, this time by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, who made it a part of the modern Communist State.

Long before the Communist Party took power, “liberating” Tibet (along with Taiwan and Hainan) was a part of the CCP’s agenda — a matter both of strategic military importance (the highlands of Tibet could serve as an entry point either for Indian or Russian armies), and as a matter of nationalist pride (the British invasion put Tibet on the list of areas loosely belonging to the Qing empire that had been invaded by imperialist forces). Later Western activism for Tibetan independence was seen as just the latest reincarnation of imperialist meddling with Chinese territory. The Chinese government often states that it freed Tibetans from what was essentially a slave society, and Tibet in the early 1900s probably was in need of serious reform, which the ruling elite at the time was too slow to deliver. But what followed under Chinese rule was certainly not better.

Tibet, like mainland China, suffered terribly during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It’s sometimes said that in mainland China, the Great Leap Forward mainly affected the countryside, while the Cultural Revolution affected the cities, but Tibet, despite being mainly rural, most certainly suffered hugely during the Cultural Revolution, and probably felt the pain of the Great Leap Forward as well. In fact, in his book Tibet, Tibet, Patrick French cites someone who claims that the Cultural Revolution lasted for a full 20 years in Tibet, starting in 1960 and not ending until 1980.

During the reform period in 1980s, conditions in Tibet improved, and Hu Yaobang, one of the reform-minded politicians in power in the 80s, famously visited Tibet, apologized for the pain inflected on the region, and promised two-pronged reform, both political and economic. Tibetans, like many in mainland China, wanted more, and increasing demonstrations eventually convinced the leadership in Beijing that political reform had been a mistake. Since then, the strategy has instead been a “one-pronged approach”, full focus on economic reform.

Tibet today

The Chinese government has in the past two decades invested huge amounts of money in developing Tibet’s economy. There are policies in place to help Tibetans (and other minorities from poorer parts of the country), most notably extra points on the college entrance examination to make it easier for young Tibetans to get into university, and exceptions to the one-child policy. But critics say that economic development isn’t benefiting Tibetans, partly because low-level jobs go to Mandarin-speaking immigrants from other regions of China (like neighbouring Sichuan province), and higher-level jobs go to people with the right connections, who tend to be Han Chinese.

Critics of the Free Tibet movement sometimes claim that foreigners who say that they’re fighting to protect Tibetan culture really just want Tibet to remain a quaint, rural and essentially impoverished place. Change inevitably benefits some and hurts others, but for most Tibetans, economic development would probably be a good thing. The problem, in my opinion, isn’t economic development per se, but rather who gets the rewards of development (currently those with connections in government), and who pays the price (currently the environment, and local communities who depend on it). The official line seems to be that the majority of Tibetans are happy with the focus on economic development, and that the demonstrations and riots of the past few years are the work of a small number of extremists — but writers who do try to dig deeper seem to find widespread unhappiness with the lack of religious and political freedom, and frustration that the fruits of economic development for the most part don’t go to Tibetans.

Which brings us to today, and what needs to happen. To be honest, I don’t know what the answer is. The Western “Free Tibet” campaign seems to have been not only ineffective but directly counterproductive – the Chinese government’s response has been an appeal to nationalism, and it has essentially locked itself into a position that now makes any kind of negotiation with the Dalai Lama extremely difficult. But the current situation is clearly unacceptable (see here, here, here and here for coverage of some of the most recent crackdowns on Tibetans, and here and here for coverage on recent examples of the government asserting its control over the religious system in Tibet).

In my eyes, the basic problem in Tibet is the same as in the rest of China – a lack of basic political freedom that leaves local officials free to exploit their positions for personal gain without being held accountable for their actions, and silences any potential opposition from the public. To me, there doesn’t seem to be an inherent problem with Tibet being a part of China – the Chinese people I know are proud that this beautiful and culturally rich region is a part of their country, and if political rights were protected and economic rewards shared more fairly, there are potentially benefits to being a part of a quickly growing economy (in this article from ten years back, Peter Hessler, who is one of my favorite authors, points out that China has invested huge amounts of money in building basic infrastructure in Tibet, investment that might be difficult to attract if Tibet were an independent country). As for protecting culture, if Tibet were an autonomous region not only in name but also in practice (as things stand now, autonomous regions in China tend to be under tighter and not looser control from the central government), then it might even be possible to permit a role for the Tibetan language in the political and business spheres, beyond the role it currently has in local government, which seems mostly to be in decorating non-essential signs.

When I got back to Wuhan and talked to Chinese friends there about my thoughts on Tibet, they laughed at my suggestion that Tibet and the rest of China need political freedom, and they told me “that will never happen”. The trend during my two years in China certainly seemed to be in the wrong direction; James Fallows noted in his blog the irony that just as the US was leaving it’s Bush era, China was entering its own — he was referring to international relations, but I think this applies more broadly to the Chinese government’s hard-line approach of the past few years. I don’t know what I, as a foreigner, could, or should do to make a difference – foreign meddling in Tibet in the past has only made things worse. Talking about the issues at stake is important, and I can do so more freely than Chinese friends can and certainly more freely than Tibetans can, but even this blog would be blocked in an instant if it began to get enough of a following to make a difference.

And so, it’s complicated. I don’t think the issue at stake in Tibet is one that’s fundamentally different from the issue at stake in the rest of China — at heart, it’s a question of protecting the rights of those who are politically and economically weak everywhere in China — but the repression in Tibet (and Xinjiang) seem more extreme than in other parts of China, maybe because those two regions have an added racial and religious dimension that make the difference between those with and without power even more blatant, and so the whole situation is more urgent. China is by no means unique in having this type of issue in its history — the way in which the US annexed its western regions and its treatment in the past of Native Americans, and past British treatment of Ireland and the Irish, are just two examples of issues that are today seen as shameful aspects of these countries pasts — but the fact that other countries have committed similar crimes in the past is no excuse for a country to continue committing those types of crimes today, as difficult as finding a solution may be (as the US has painfully learned in its attempts to make things up to the Native American population). For now, visiting Tibet is a mixed experience — like so many other places in China, it’s a beautiful and fascinating place, and it’s easy to ignore the problems that are there, but they’re very clearly still there, under the surface.

Further reading:

For those of you who would like to read more, I like Peter French’s book Tibet, Tibet. It’s billed as “a personal history of Tibet”; French was active in the Free Tibet movement, but later became disillusioned with the movement because of its failure to contribute to any kind of progress in political freedom in Tibet, and so he travels to Tibet to research his book and understand the different sides in the debate. Abrahm Lustgarten’s China’s Great Train is an interesting account of the building of the railway line into Tibet, although some simple mistakes and an obvious sympathy for the Tibetan independence movement undermine the author’s credibility. A professor of Chinese history who we met at the airport on our way out of Lhasa also recommended Dragon in the Land of Snows as a good account of the events the past few decades.

I’m not that worried about being blacklisted (at least for now), but I’ve still found myself avoiding discussing certain topics. On the train from Tai’an to Beijing, we sat across from a very sweet retired couple from Tai’an, who stuffed us full with peanuts and mantou while trying to find out everything from how we could possibly take such a long vacation to what we would do if I got pregnant. When they asked what the books we were reading were about (after repeatedly warning us that reading on the train would destroy our eyes), I had a moment of panic. Martin’s book, a 535 page overview of Chinese history, was uncontroversial enough, but my book, called Tibet, Tibet, might be a different issue. Would it spark a tense debate, or angry comments about Western meddling in Chinese affairs? I needn’t have worried — the couple seemed completely unaware that the Western view of Tibet’s political situation differs from the Chinese government’s, and the old lady told me about a program she had seen about Tibet on TV, that told the viewers about Tibetan slaves who walked around with chains around their wrists and ankles before “liberation”, and showed how much better off and happier Tibetans are today. It seems clear that Tibet in the 1950s was badly in need of reform, but that (like the rest of China) the region suffered terribly in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and that the current policy of focusing on development while limiting political rights is not universally popular among Tibetans (and has meant that a lot of the new jobs created have gone to newly immigrated Han Chinese — trickle-down development is taking a long time to trickle down). But instead of telling her about the issues I was reading about in my book, I just said “Tibet’s history is complicated”, and she agreed.

Not all foreigners in China are careful about mentioning sensitive topics, but many are. Partly it’s a desire not to offend — I wouldn’t bring up religion with a particularly devout friend in the West, and in China, I similarly try to avoid bringing up topics that I think might risk offending people I don’t know well. Partly it’s a language barrier — it’s hard to have a nuanced discussion when neither of us speaks the other’s language fluently. Partly it’s because we’re told to avoid certain sensitive topics when we arrive. Martin’s school explicitly told him not to talk about the “Three T’s” in his classes: Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen; another friend was admonished for showing a movie to his class that was loosely related to Christianity. I was never given specific guidelines on topics to avoid, and while slightly controversial topics were perfect for discussion, I also wanted to make sure that no student felt offended or alienated from the conversation — and that applied outside of class as well.

But nothing in my experience of having discussions with Chinese friends has prompted this level of caution– most people I talk to, especially young people, have tended to be open-minded, progressive, and even when opinions differ, few seem to take offence. There are some issues where I think the outside perspective is better, but others where I might be wrong, and at the very least understanding the other side’s perspective should be beneficial for everyone involved. At the very least, it would help clear up misconceptions about what the other side thinks.

Many have believed that the internet would be the key to breaking through the wall of censorship in China. In some ways, it probably has been — people are able to access much more information in mainland China today than 20 years ago. The Chinese government still tries to use censorship as a tool to manipulate public perception of current events, and it’s hard to tell if they’re clumsily fighting an unstoppable trend towards more and freer flows of information, or if they’ve cleverly managed to focus their efforts on the few issues and the main groups of people that really matter to achieve their goals (see this interesting overview by James Fallows of the Atlantic of how censorship of the internet works).

Some people use proxy servers to access specific blocked webpages, and some people pay for a VPN to get completely unblocked access to the internet. Other spread breaking stories on forums and blogs. For those people, it probably doesn’t matter what the newspapers publish. But proxies are a hassle, blogs and forums take a lot of time to sift through, and VPNs are expensive (even I, with foreigner money, decided the cost wasn’t worth the small pleasure of access to facebook and youtube). Some people will always think the hassle is worth it, but many won’t, and for that majority, a crude list of what newspapers may and may not feature on their front page can have a big impact on their world view. At the same time, there are people who try to push the boundaries towards freer speech (like the editor of Southern Weekly, who according to the memo must not be mentioned), and in the long run, those people should be on the winning side.

His most recent post, from January 29th, seems particularly relevant (this was originally four consecutive posts, which I’ve ordered to make the statement easier to read):

It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers. It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes. But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.

This observation seems important and true for public discussion on the internet in general — we tend to visit websites and read blogs that fit in with our interests and confirm our views, rather than exposing ourselves to opinions that push our thinking and challenge us to find common ground. A particularly poignant example of this is political blogging, where people tend to read and link to blogs that share their own political leanings, creating online bubbles that never really have to touch. Even when certain platforms (like facebook) are widely used, they allow us to stay confined to our own circle of friends. So far, the internet has not proven to be the democratizing force or arena for public discourse that many hoped it would be.

From what I’ve seen, this seems to hold true in China as well. Sometimes topics gain wide exposure online, but more often than not, those topics fall into the category of new, exciting but basically unimportant gossip, and quickly prove to be fads. Any real and potentially threatening discussion is undermined by the 50 cent party and by censorship. The censors can’t be everywhere all the time, but maybe they don’t need to be — small bubbles are not threatening, and when something does expand beyond a small bubble, then they swoop in and block that content.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. Having real-name registration seems like it would at least encourage people to be more civil online (a first step towards constructive discussion), but also probably risks stifling debate. Either way, it’s helpful for observers of the online world (like me) to keep in mind that very few online fora represent a “cross-section” of the population, and online comments, debates and surveys should almost always be taken with a grain of salt. The more we try to push ourselves to not just read content that doesn’t fit in with our bias, but also to comment thoughtfully and maybe allow our own positions to be moved, the better it has to be for building a strong society.

I still support Google, even though I fully expect to go into painful withdrawal as their services start to disappear on the mainland. I’ve heard some people here in China say that Google’s decision to potentially withdraw from China was purely a business decision, a retreat after their failure in the Chinese market, where they “only” have around 30% of the market. I personally find it hard to believe that 30% of a market of hundreds of millions of up-and-coming internet users can be counted as a failure (and Google’s share is also reportedly the wealthiest, best-educated and therefore most lucrative slice of the market). Based on what I know about Google, I think their decision was (at least mainly) driven by principle. But even if it was, it’s a complicated world, and hard to say what the best course of action for a company like Google really is. To give an example of the other side of the argument, Evan Osnos translates part of a Baidu executive’s response to Google’s move:

Common sense: Unequal access to information is one of the major causes of social inequality. The most important information to people is not secrets from inside Zhongnanhai [the Chinese leadership compound] but common information about economics, culture, and technology. Providing convenient access to that information, to make up for the inequity in information, is one of the ways that a search engine can be of social and political significance.

From this perspective, trying to provide convenient access to information for people and give them real value is a responsible approach. It’s not about making a great spectacle of claiming to “do no evil” and then dying a heroic glorious death by turning against the government. It is fine to find a way to exit, but not by playing on the emotions of a population that is under such tight control. That is immoral.

The political system cannot be changed in the short run. In China, every enterprise and individual has to dance with shackles on. It is the same in other countries, to varying degrees. But that is the reality. Trying your best to do your part, within a limited environment, is a sincere way to conduct yourself as a company and a person.

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.

A recent report revealed that the going rate for such a campaign averages 50,000 yuan ($7,315). One firm boasted it has the most “experienced team”, with access to 100,000 freelancers, that can post thousands of articles on up to five popular forums and blog hosting sites, creating 200,000-400,000 visits. And they guarantee a quick sensation.

It seems the current pay for one posting is 50 cents. A typical job posting for this type of work says you can make 40 yuan a day by working two hours, which they say translates to 80 posts.

The Jia Junpeng phenomonon seems to have been an example of this type of PR campaign, and the rumor has it that the buzz over the Chinese Obama Girl was also created by on online PR campaign.

There are also allegations that PR companies pay people who have existing accounts on popular book and move review websites (like douban.com) to post positive reviews of upcoming movies, and compensate these reviewers based on how long they’ve had their accounts (since users can easily spot reviews inserted by PR companies if they all come from newly opened accounts which are only used to post positive reviews for one or a handful of movies). According to ESWN, there’s a very clear pricing scheme for reviews from different types of accounts:

Public relations companies are seeking to purchase used ID’s with the following requirements:
(1) registered prior to 2007
(2) written at least three movie reviews
(3) has no less than 50 friends
(4) able to maintain secrecy and have business ethics
(5) including but not restricted to Douban, Shiguang Net and other webites

The price card is as follows:
(1) Base price of 500 yuan.  One yuan extra for every day registered earlier than December 31, 2007
(2) Until December 3, 2009, each additional movie review from the fourth one will earn an extra 5 yuan
(3) Until December 3, 2009, each additional friend from the 51st one will earn an extra 2 yuan
(4) 100 yuan extra whenever the movie review appeared on the front page
(5) 50 yuan extra whenever the movie review appeared at the top spot of the movie review section
(6) 50 yuan for a positive review of the movie represented by the PR company
(7) 50 cents for a comment against a negative review of a movie represented by the PR company
(8) 25 cents for a personal attack comment against the poster of a negative review of a movie represented by the PR company.

I see these kinds of posts sometimes when I’m looking at reviews for hostels and hotels in China on websites like hostels.com — on English-language websites, their obvious Chinglish and over-the-top praise for the hostel in question (often places that have otherwise gotten overwhelmingly negative reviews) usually make them easy to spot, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

I don’t know if this apparent phenomenon of explicitly manipulating discussion forums and online reviews in order to promote a product is common in other countries as well, but to me, it seems like this is something that happens much more here in China than in other places I’ve been. And if that’s the case, it’s hard to say why. One guess would be that Western internet users seem to spend more of their online procrastination time in closed communities, where all of the people they interact with are people they have already met in real life, while Chinese users seem to spend more time (relatively speaking) on open discussion forums, and are more likely to accept friend requests from people they don’t know personally on social networking sites like renren.com. This wouldn’t apply to movie or hotel review websites, but could help to explain why creating an online trend by registering lots of fake usernames, or hiring people to post comments, might be more successful in China than in other places. Another possible explanation would be some sort of difference in codes of ethics among PR companies — maybe Chinese PR companies think that “fake” reviews are ok, while English-language PR companies are more worried about the backlash against their company or the product they’re promoting if/when people find out about the tactics.

And then there’s the “50 cent Party” (五毛党), people who are allegedly paid 5 mao by the government for each pro-government comment they post, which seems like a uniquely Chinese adaptation to an internet society. In my experience, it seems like people dismiss these comments as soon as they suspect that they come from a 五毛党-ist, but maybe these people influence public opinion more than I realize.

Being a savvy internet consumer is tough. When we’ve lost all of our old ways of evaluating those with whom we come into contact (things like personal ties, social standing, even body language and facial expressions), how do we decide who to trust? To me, all of this strengthens the case for why media institutions, which have the training and resources to investigate and follow up on important stories, continue to be important in a world where the internet allows information to flow more and more freely.

On December 21, pursuant to an order from the Ministry of Culture, the Kaixin001 farm game and the QQ farm game all changed the wording of “theft” to “harvesting” and “picking.”  So if you used to “steal” a black rose from someone else’s plot, now you “picked” a black rose from someone else’s plot of land.

“Dear fellow thieves, there is good news!  The government has re-named ‘stealing vegetables.’  It is now known as ‘picking vegetables’ just like you picking vegetables from your own plot.”

Don’t they have better things to do with their time? I like ESWN’s closing comment:

Some netizens fail to understand why the name change was necessary.  Some say that it was because the people at the Ministry of Culture has time on hand to meddle in such matters.  Others say that “thievery has been legitimized by a name change to harvesting” and recommend that the relevant departments also think of a new term for “taking bribes out of corruption.”

"Stealing books isn't called 'stealing', it's called 'pilfering'"; "Stealing vegetables isn't called 'stealing', it's called 'picking'"

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?

Conflicts arose when China tried to prevent the fair from allowing dissident writers to participate, and the organizers tried to balance the desires of the guest of honor with the need to respect freedom of speech. In the end, dissident writers were allowed to attend, but it seems the Chinese delegation wasn’t entirely happy that more wasn’t done to control who was there and to allow China to use the fair to project the image of itself it wanted to project, one free from controversial issues.

The Times puts the tensions that the book fair highlighted into the larger context of China’s efforts to build its “soft power”, essentially a huge PR campaign to control its image in the world and increase its cultural and diplomatic power.

Since 2004, China has pursued what it calls its “going out” policy on the cultural front, trying to square its economic influence and new status as a global power, while trying to defuse criticism on issues like Tib-t, Taiw-n and hum-n r-ghts.

There have been yearlong cultural exchanges with many countries; the opening of hundreds of language teaching centers known as Confucius Institutes; new foreign-language services from official media like Xinhua and CCTV; and new interest in foreign platforms like the Kennedy Center and the Europalia festival in Brussels.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article on reform of the country’s media and entertainment industry. The government plans to invest billions and to loosen controls of some of these industries in the hopes of building media empires that will rival the News Corporation and Time Warner.

“There appears to be a feeling at the highest levels of government that they need a media machine commensurate to the rising status and power of China,” says Jim Laurie, a former ABC News correspondent who teaches at Hong Kong University and recently met with Chinese state broadcasting executives.

Beijing hopes the moves will even improve the nation’s image overseas — part of a longstanding effort to use “soft power,” rather than military might to win friends abroad.

The use of soft power as an alternative (or as a complement) to hard power doesn’t necessarily have to be bad — a media empire seems less scary than an invading army, even though maybe it’s more subversive and something we should in reality be more wary of. Either way, the policies seem very smart. Something interesting to watch in the future.