China Censorship: Live Chat 2pm EST

Join me today at 2pm Eastern Standard Time for an hour-long live chat on the Washington Post website.  Don't be shy.

This discussion will follow a live chat at 11am EST with Washington Post Beijing correspondent Philip Pan, who has been running an week-long excellent series in the Post this week on the internet in China. His work this week is the most nuanced and thorough journalism I've seen coming out of the Beijing-based press corps on the complex ways in which the internet is impacting politics, society, culture, and business in China. Don't miss it.

Today's installment, Bloggers Who Pursue Change Confront Fear and Mistrust, is the best start-to-finish account I've seen anywhere of the Michael Anti MSN Spaces censorship incident and all the circumstances surrounding it.   Don't miss his earlier articles from Sunday and Monday: The Click that Broke the Government's Grip,  Refrerence Tool on Web finds Fans, Censors about the censorshp of Wikipedia in China, U.S. Firms Balance Morality, Commerce about the issues surrounding last week's congressional hearings, etc. Each article has a wealth of supplementary material linked from the side. Sunday's installment has a partial list of banned words, Monday has a graphic on how Wikipedia definitions differ from official Chinese encyclopedia definitions, and today's article includes sidebar links to translations of many of Michael Anti's recent blog posts.

FURTHER NOTE: Also very worth reading today is Ethan Zuckerman's reaction to a Newsweek International op-ed that I co-authored with colleague John Palfrey. The article was heavily edited and targeted to an audience that has not necessarily been following or thinking about the subject, and thus didn't get into too much subtlety. Ethan makes some really good points, emphasizing in more technical detail why it would be bad for the Chinese and bad for the global internet if U.S. tech companies were to leave China entirely. He also points out that the Internet is already balkanized:

My friends get several key things right in their piece, including the observation that Chinese companies are beginning to make real money from building tools that allow governments to censor the Internet. This is an important point that I don’t think is emphasized enough in discussions about Chinese internet censorship. There’s a tendency to lump China with other nations that filter their citizen’s access to the internet, like Saudi Arabia or Burma.

There’s a critical difference: Chinese companies are perfectly capable of building technology to filter the web, whether or not US companies export this technology. This doesn’t mean that US companies should have a blanket excuse to help China censor… but it does make the equation far more complex for China than for Burma. If US companies pull out of China, expect Huawei and ZTE to continue developing routers that filter “undesirable” content, Baidu to produce a heavily censored search engine and Bokee to produce a blogging site that prevents users from saying things the State Security Bureau prefers they wouldn’t speak about.

The fact that Chinese companies are working hard to build an alternative to the (technically global, but largely American and European) internet adds some serious complexity to this situation. Rebecca and JP end their piece with a caution that we’re heading to an era of “Internets”, not “The Internet”. This is a bit of rhetorical simplification on their part - we’re there already. In countries that effectively control their population’s access to the Internet - like China, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and others - there are hundreds or thousands of sites that simply don’t exist on the Internet because no one can reach them. As a result, the Chinese internet is a subset of the public Internet.

A reader in the comments section points to a Newsweek story on Chinese bloggers that appeared alongside our Op-ed, and asks why, if there are as many as 30 million Chinese blogs as some claim (I think it's probably more like 5-10 million active blogs), why most of them don't seem to show up in Technorati which now tracks less than 30 million blogs worldwide? Ethan has written about some possible reasons why, here.

Comments

[LfC]

Rebecca,

Hope you would consider blogging on it:-

It is "highly likely" that all Chinese searches will be directed to Google.cn, a censored version of the search engine, for "practical consideration",the Beijing News said, quoting an unnamed source of Google China.

http://voyage.typepad.com/china/2006/02/googlecn_very_l.html

[wangning]

some of Philip Pan's series reports on Washington Post website have been blocked in China a few hours ago.The censors are more efficient now.

[Black River Eagle]

Thanks for the Heads Up Rebecca on all the stuff going on over at the Washington Post re: The Great (Fire)Wall of China. I didn't realize that Newsweek International Online "edited" the interview with you and John Palfrey of the Berkman Center. Why edit? Did you guys say something that Newsweek executive management and the corporate advertisers may not like?

If enough Chinese bloggers keep pushing from the inside and the rest of us keep pushing from the outside, the Beijing Lock on free speech and democracy in China is sure to bust wide open. Critical Mass., so to speak.

[Golfen]

I think as you mentioned to keep preasure on China will not be effective at all! They don`t really about millions of people, they are used to it to ignore everything

[Golfschlaeger]

Just to mention, of course we have to keep going and not to give up! Thinks can change when a regime gets new leaders as we saw in Germany for exmaple