Monday, December 11, 2006
China and Google In a way, Dan Gilmor’s discussion of China’s crackdown on internet accessibility touches on many of the themes of this course. If you were a young Chinese teenager in 2003, you may have groaned when that annoying “Page Cannot Be Displayed” banner appeared in place of your favorite website. That year, China had flipped the switch on thousands of politically sensitive websites, establishing what’s known as "the Great Firewall of China" (read the terrific NYT Mag article). Early this year, Google launched a new Chinese version of their popular search engine with a built-in blacklist of keywords like “democracy” or “human rights” (profit-seeker model of the Media at work). Seriously, I invite you to type in the words “Tiananmen Square”, first on Google.cn, then on Google.com, and compare the difference. After Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube, I wouldn’t be surprised if that clip we watched in the beginning of the semester of the student protest is blocked also.
Is the Chinese government delusional, or just out of touch? If President Hu Jintao had read the first ten chapters of Dan Gilmor’s book, he’d recognize the futility of his efforts. The collective ingenuity of mankind hungry for information is practically unstoppable. If a computer hacker in Sweden can crack a company code, then surely millions of Chinese will find their way around the Great Firewall’s ramparts. Let’s say I threw in one line about Tiananmen on a Yao Ming message board. Even better, let’s say I repeated my comment on every single Yao Ming message board in the country (an ambitious task, no doubt). Would the government have the courage to firewall Yao Ming from China?
Notwithstanding devious tactics, the Net’s democratizing power is just as threatening to Communist rule. Millions of Chinese can now discover new information outside of the State-controlled schoolhouse. Tiananmen Square might be off the list, but the West’s rich traditions of liberty and hope permeate everything we read and see. How can you read of a new breakthrough in cancer research and not marvel at how what people can accomplish under a democracy? Last I’ve checked, authoritative information concerning the Orange and the Rose Revolutions are allowed on Google.cn. How can you learn of a popular uprising and not be convinced of man’s capacity for change?
Try as they might, I’m sure that China will lose its battle against New Media, just as the Music and Movie Industry will ultimately succumb to Peer-to-Peer technology. The diffusion of ideas brought about by the Net is the death knell for authoritarian regimes everywhere.
# posted by Jonathan Noble @ 12:11 AM 
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Great point Uncle Cool. The NYT Mag article seems to suggest that Chinese are comfortable with less-than-absolute freedom.
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