This is China! BLOG

Inexorable China: Hot Wired

During June of 2007 my weblog, This is China! was inaccessible here in China. Readers in other countries were able to read my daily entries of “Conversations and Musings on the Trends Shaping China Business and Society”. A rather harmless blog by Chinese censorship standards, typically exploring complicated issues and relationships between China and Chinese people and the rest of the world; sometimes within the context of business, sometimes in my personal life in China. Though at times irritated with the heavy-handedness or the transparently ignorant ways of Chinese government officials, the blog was hardly worthy of being shut out of China distribution channels.

Eventually I hit on the idea of testing whether other blogs on the eponymous Typepad blog hosting service were also blocked. They were. Whether it was dog fancying blogs or blogs about flower arranging, all blogs on Typepad were blocked. The Great Firewall of China had been extended to block out any and all communications from the Typepad service. The Great Firewall of China is how we who live and work in China half-jokingly refer the national government’s effective if sometimes spotty attempts at filtering international content that flows from the outside world into China. By October of the same year I had moved my own blog to the service that supported my consultancy’s website. Though the Chinese authorities had unblocked the Typepad service in China at the end of that summer, few of us whose blog articles served the readership that lived in China trusted that Typepad would not be arbitrarily pre-empted again. The This is China! blog lost nearly 70% of its readership during the months it was blocked in China.

As a Wall Street journal writer cited during a panel discussion of her China team’s experiences in the country, “The Chinese government will need to learn how to accept criticism.” The best that we China bloggers that had used Typepad can figure, one or some Chinese dissident in China or abroad was using the inexpensive subscription fee and ease of use of the service to post entries the Chinese government found critical of its stewardship of China. Still other blogs are always blocked in China: Black China Hand, which decries racism in China with every entry; and Beijing Man, which points out all the silly and stupid things that happen in Beijing, whether civil or governmental.

The April 27, 2006 issue of the Economist Magazine notes that blogs in China numbered more than 30m that year, when three years before they were hardly heard of. Estimates in 2006 were that the number of internet-connected computers in China have more than doubled since the end of 2002, to 45.6m, and internet-users have risen by 75%, 111m. China now has more internet-users than any country but America, and over half of them have broadband. The Economist magazine also reports that users of short message services (SMS) on mobile phones have more than doubled since 2002, to 87m.

Indeed, SMS – or text messaging – on mobile phones has been a prime medium through which Chinese citizens have been able to organize protests on scales not seen since the Communists fought the Nationalists in the 1930’s and 40’s. Text messages told Chinese in Shanghai when and where to begin marching against the Japanese attempt at accession to the UN Security Council, in April 2005, and informed citizens of Xiamen in the Spring of 2007 about the protest against the construction of a paraxylene factory in the city limits, where pollutants could easily injure the health of nearby residents.

Since the year 2000, internet bulletin boards, chat rooms such as MSN, Yahoo, and QQ – the most popular messaging system in China – have served as platforms for complaints and criticisms of Chinese government officials. From issues ranging from a rape that Beijing University administrators tried to cover up in 2000 through the SARS outbreak in 2003 through criticisms of kidnapped boys in Shanxi province who were forced into slave labor at brick-making kilns in 2007, the electronic communications have become an important medium of civil disobedience. Indeed, in China most kinds of social organizations are against the law, barring those by family members. Protests such as those by students in the May 1919 protests and then again in 1989 at Tiananmen Square have made student gatherings a dangerous proposition. And then of course it was the workers and peasants that made up the Red Army that eventually pushed the Nationalist forces into exile on Taiwan. Electronic media have made virtual gatherings feasible and provided a wedge by which Communist Party policies and actions can be destabilized. Witness the gathering of ten thousand Falun Gong practioners that surrounded the Beijing compound of China’s highest officials in 1999, all gathered together through a covert email campaign.

The Chinese government actively filters emails and text messages based on various keywords – for instance, Taiwan, Falun Gong – and has a police force of some 30,000 online monitors, according to human rights groups. The Government has jailed over fifty people in China for expressing their criticisms of the Government.

However contrary to its own interests in maintaining control and power, the Chinese government actively promotes the wiring of its citizens and pervasiveness of information technology throughout the society. It is building communications infrastructures and communications protocols to rival any that America and Europe have. Indeed, the Government is relying on it to not only monitor its citizens, but also to usher its economy from a second-tier industrial base to a tertiary services economy.

Of course, the Party’s hope is that the genie once out of the bottle does not turn on its liberator.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China

Other articles in the Series:
1. Inexorable China
2. Inexorable China: Land Grabs
3. Inexorable China: Increasing Water Demands
4. Inexorable China: Increased Infrastructure Availability
5. Inexorable China: Go West for Cheap Sneakers
6. Inexorable China: China at Your Services
7. Inexorable China: Re-making the Military