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.

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?