On July 3, Chinese government censors blocked access to Danwei.org, the Web site I have edited from my home in Beijing since 2003. It is hosted outside China, so it’s easy for zealous regulators to flip an electronic switch and restrict access. Most of our content is translated from the Chinese media and Internet, which gave us a certain amount of protection: Most Chinese people who write or publish in China self-censor, and this is why we had escaped the censor’s wrath. Until July.
This year — after a period of relatively relaxed controls — the bodies who censor information and culture have come back with a vengeance. There are several reasons: 2009 has seen a number of “sensitive” anniversaries, including the May 4 student uprisings of 1919, the 1959 Tibetan uprising and Tiananmen Square in 1989. The riots in Urumqi in July added greatly to the tense atmosphere in Beijing.
Government nervousness about the Internet was exacerbated by hype in the Western press about Twitter bringing democracy to Iran. Another factor is the financial crisis, which has made mass unrest more likely.
Despite the repression of anyone who sets up as a dissident or suggests that the Chinese Communist Party is illegitimate, there is more anti-establishment chatter on the Chinese Internet than ever. China has a new but firmly established culture of citizens using the Internet to air their grievances with local authorities. This year’s most prominent example was the case of the young female hotel employee Deng Yujiao (鄧玉嬌), where Internet activism was the decisive factor in saving her from a murder charge, when she was widely believed to have acted in self-defense against an attempted rape. Such cases have made the government even more wary of the power of the Internet.
The celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China — which were taking place as I started writing this — have been another cause of sleepless nights for officials. Nobody wanted to be seen as being soft if anything were to have gone wrong.
But none of this explains why Danwei.org was censored. I do not even know if the block was a decision made by a person, or the effects of a filtering software that decided we had too many “sensitive” keywords. There is no hotline you can call and say: “Comrade, why did you censor my Web site?”
Danwei.org is in good company: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other foreign sites are inaccessible at the moment. But the difference between those sites and mine is that I live in China, and the Web site is part of a company that operates in China and pays my bills. We’re also small; we are not a platform like Twitter. It was something specific that we published that got us blocked, and it feels personal.
Nonetheless, my situation is not Orwellian. A mirror Web site that displays all our content is accessible in China, and my company’s consulting business, which is closely associated with the Web site, is unaffected.
Life goes on. Within weeks of the site being blocked, I attended — by official invitation — a provincial government media forum at which I was allowed to air my views. Soon after that, a TV station hired me as a presenter to conduct interviews with officials and well-known business leaders about environmental problems. The program is for a Chinese audience, broadcast nationwide. Not exactly Hard Talk, and they may not broadcast the interesting footage, but I got to give a senior official a hard time about his department’s empty eco-slogans. I also asked Liu Yonghao (劉永好) — one of the richest men in China — what he intended to do about the methane emissions caused by the farting of all the cows his New Hope Group owns.
Most hilariously, and this is difficult for anyone who has not spent time in China to understand, the state-owned China Daily newspaper ran a quote from me complaining about censorship on the top headlined story of its front page.
So there is not really that much for me to complain about. It’s quite possible that our Web site will be unblocked in a few weeks. But the affair has marked me in some way. As JM Coetzee put it in On Censorship: “The contest with the censor is all too likely to assume an importance in the inner life of the writer that at the least diverts him from his proper occupation and at worst fascinates and even perverts the imagination.”
This has been true for me, and I am not alone. The most difficult part of any project in China is to get past the regulators, and thus writers, filmmakers, publishers and editors waste their creativity and squander their powers of innovation on self-censorship and red tape.
The effects are not just an underperforming film industry and under-representation on the world’s literary stage. Censorship contributes greatly to the crisis of trust. People don’t trust newspapers or companies, business people don’t trust each other, and no one — including the people who work in it — trusts what the government says.
Censorship also makes it very difficult for officials to understand how to deal with foreign cultural organizations and media. Two recent examples were the story of the Frankfurt Book Fair and dissident writers (and it’s not over yet), and the row over the Melbourne International Film Festival that brought international recognition to a voice the Chinese government had hoped to silence.
Last week Beijing saw a display of military and economic might that the government and people are rightly proud of. But China wants more for itself. The government is constantly calling for home-grown innovation in science, technology and culture, and for China to wield more “soft power” and have a greater influence on the world. These aims will be difficult as long as China’s bureaucrats retain their iron grip on culture and information.
Jeremy Goldkorn blogs about media, advertising and urban life in China.
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