Beijing

...now browsing by tag

 
 

The sad state of the internet in China

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

This post has been in gestation for awhile now.  However, right when I think it’s time to speak about the Chinese government’s pernicious censorship of the internet some new bit of even more saddening news comes out and then yet another, so I kept waiting.  The story of the Chinese internet, especially since the summer of 2008, has been one of endless sorrow.  It’s almost too bad the internet is such a intangible thing.  If what the Chinese government was doing was happening on the streets, rather than secretly in an office room without warning or explanation, people might stand up and care.

I originally wanted to write this post because just last week the Chinese government blocked IMDB (The Internet Movie Database) to all 300 million+ 385 million+ Chinese internet users.  This is simply a piece of pathetic censorship and emblematic of the paranoia that the Chinese government has when it comes to the freedom of speech.  I love movies and since I can’t use Netflix, go to a video rental store or use American cable television I use the Chinese internet and stream whole movies online for free (it is easy to watch and download movies, TV shows, and music for free on the Chinese internet), but I am constantly looking for new movies to watch.  IMDB was always a great way of figuring out what is popular State-side and what movies have come out on DVD.  I don’t think that’s why the government blocked it, probably has more to do with their gargantuan (and unwinnable) fight against pornography.

Then there was this little tidbit of news last month that had every foreigner in China laughing their asses off, before a period of quiet sadness set in as they realized the perilous world they live in.

“Our country’s Internet situation is unique. Compared to all kinds of restrictions in foreign countries, China has the most open Internet in the world.”

«我国互联网形态有特殊性。相对于国外的各种限制，中国的互联网是全世界最开放的。»

- Zhou Xisheng (周锡生) Deputy Chief of Xinhua News Agency, Director-General of Xinhua News Net.

In general the internet in China has since the Spring of 2008 been sliding ever-faster towards a sad world were freedom turns up no search results.  2008 was of course the year of the Olympics and was when we saw the riots in Tibet, with corresponding government censorship and paranoia.  2008 was followed by a new year of even more censorship as Facebook and Twitter were blocked and Xinjiang became (and remains) an internet dead zone after intense riots there.  And as time has gone by the government has silently picked off sites big and small, hiding pieces of the internet from its people.

All of this would be enough to warrant a blog post on any blog that pays attention to China issues, but with this morning’s bombshell of an announcement about Google in China the story of Chinese censorship of the internet has exploded and we all can’t help but take notice.

Early this morning in China, Google posted on its official English blog this: A New Approach to China.

The post starts off by explaining that in mid-December Google’s servers, along with those of a couple dozen other American internet companies, were systematically attacked by someone or something in China that really knew what they were doing.  Google never states that it is blaming the Chinese government but it’s there if you read between the lines.  For Google the attack targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.  But that’s not all!  The real juice of the post comes towards the end when they write:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Right now this means that Google.cn is uncensored for the first time ever (check out those cute pictures of the Dalai Lama!) (1/25: Google.cn has continued to be censored since the blog posting).  In Beijing Chinese citizens are laying flowers outside Google’s China headquarters.  A friend of my colleague just emailed her saying that Google management at the Beijing headquarters has told employees to not come to work starting tomorrow. (1/25: These rumors about the office closing seem to have been nothing but rumors.)

Google, like so many other useful and righteous websites will soon no longer be accessible in the People’s Republic of China.  As someone who uses Google search, Gmail, and Google Reader every single day, this is not good news.  Some are rightly pointing out that Google was never going to become the no.1 search engine of China (that belongs to China’s own Baidu.cn) and that Google never made a lot of money in China, so bowing out of China was not as difficult a decision as it could have been.  Nevertheless, this announcement is epic.  Foreign companies never go after the Chinese government like this.  American companies actually bend over backwards to do business here, even if that means ignoring issues like freedom of speech or privacy.

I can’t help but applaud Google’s actions.  Not only are they living up to their mantra of “Don’t be evil”, but they are also confronting the Chinese government the way no one else seems to be doing.  That said, people in China are really sad today.  Here in my office Google is the search engine of choice and my colleagues are not happy that they will have to let it go now.  Me, I’m horribly sad to see Google go (though I have the power to jump over the Chinese government’s Great Firewall), but as an American who holds certain freedoms in high regard and as someone who lives in China I am thankful that someone is standing up.  I really liked what Jeremy Goldkorn, of Danwei, published in the Guardian today:

The fallout will be interesting. I can’t recall a single case of a major international company with operations in China taking a stand like this. As someone who agreed with Google’s reasoning when it entered China, I also support this move. If it cannot operate here in accordance with its global standards, it should leave. I have given up on getting my own website unblocked by the government and am resigned to the fact that it’s only accessible to people who are outside China or know the technical tricks to get over the Great Firewall.

I’d rather be outside the wall and free than inside it with the icy hand of the censor around my throat.

This has been really big news today and seems to only get bigger as the day goes on.  Looking at my Google Reader feeds of China blogs, it seems that the vast majority have already posted something about this news.  Twitter, which is blocked in China, has been glowing with people’s comments on the issue (check out China Digital Times collection of interesting tweets).  Of course, the government here seems to be blocking information of the announcement left and right.  Still, the news is traveling fast along office corridors and between friends on the street and people sitting next to each other in internet cafes across the nation, censorship of the internet is being talked about like I’ve never seen before.  And that, my fellow internet users, is something we should be thankful for.

Mourners laying flowers at Google's China headquarters in Beijing. January 13, 2010

Mourners laying flowers at Google's China headquarters in Beijing. January 13, 2010

Some further reading on the subject:

Imagethief
James Fallows (The Atlantic)
More photos of people bringing flowers to Google’s China headquarters
Global Voices Online
The Peking Duck
Shanghaiist
China Hearsay

Posted in Internet, Politics | 2 Responses »
Tags: , , , ,

The Life of John Zeidman

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Americans have been coming to China for centuries and they will continue to come long after my generation has left this world.  In fact, the first ones arrived in China in 1784 aboard the ship Empress of China, hoping to trade American ginseng for Chinese tea, porcelain, and other goods.  I have always enjoyed reading and hearing about these experiences, whether they happened a hundred years ago or last week.  Even with the great strides the world has taken and the developments these two countries have made, a trip from America to China is still an undeniable adventure.  Young men and women floating along in their lives in America with no hardened idea of what they want out of life may find themselves taking the flight to China and once there a new world of opportunity opens before them, and yes, even adventure.  China can intoxicate men with its vibrant cities, ancient culture, and a language that can make the most cynical of students see the beauty of learning a foreign tongue.  This country can literally provide everything that some young Americans need to make sense of this world, to see the way forward.

When Mozart first sat down at the harpsichord there must have been a click in his brain, a puzzle fitting into place.  For some, China can provide a similar epiphany.  It was this way for me and I know I am not alone in my sentiments.  While I am not saying I am destined to devote my whole life to China, I am just as sure that there was a profound click in my brain after my first trip to Beijing as a high school student.  It wasn’t something I could just brush off as I headed back to America.  There was something about this country that fulfilled my childhood dreams of foreign discovery in such a profound way and it gave me something useful to pursue in life.  Ever since that cold January day when I landed in Beijing that’s what I’ve been doing.  I don’t know where it will take me, but I know it will be worth it.

If this all sounds overly romantic, please excuse me.  I’ve just finished reading the story of an American that came to China to study a full five years before I was even born.  His name was John Zeidman and for him, like me and many other others, “China seemed to bring everything together.”

The story I read was written by Calvin Trillin and published in the New Yorker magazine on October 7, 1985.  I found my way to this mid-eighties copy of the New Yorker by way of a journalist I respect a lot, James Fallows.  You see Mr. Fallows just published a small article (all articles feel small in comparison to New Yorker articles) for the Atlantic magazine about an American couple who live in the town of Xizhou in my former home province of Yunnan.  To keep it short, they are trying to keep Xizhou from becoming the tourist wasteland that other historical towns in the hinterland of Yunnan have become (I’m looking at you Lijiang).  They run a community center/inn than supports the local arts and provides a more fulfilling way for visitors to appreciate that most beautiful and interesting corner of China.  Something mentioned in the article stuck out at me, though.  In the article we learn that the American husband, Brian Linden, came to China in the early 1980s as a student:

Soon after his arrival, he was spotted by a movie director while jogging down a Beijing street and cast as the lead in a Chinese movie. The film, He Came From Across the Pacific, was based on the tragic story of John Zeidman, an American exchange student who caught viral encephalitis in China and died in 1982.

I had never heard of John Zeidman, but I was instantly interested.  For a Chinese movie to have been made about an American student who came to China at that time, when relations between America and China were just beginning to include student exchanges, it was bound to be, at the very least, a good story and most likely a big deal.  Luckily for me before I came to Shanghai I packed a good chunk of my father’s “The Complete New Yorker,” which is stored on DVDs, and I had the 1984-1997 disc.  So today while there was a lull at work I stuck in the disc and brought up the article.  The information used in this post is entirely from that New Yorker article, unless otherwise noted; there was little more that I could find about him online and no photographs.  If you have a subscription to the magazine I suggest you read the article online.

I would like to add that in writing this post I don’t want to hurt anyone by rehashing a painful story, it was just that I found this young man’s experience in China so absolutely fascinating and heart wrenching.  The fact that no one I know my age living in China has heard of him is unacceptable to me.  Historians tell stories worth telling and this is without a doubt just such a story

Click to continue »

Posted in America, Beijing, History, Internet, Personal | 3 Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

China’s National Day Parade

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

The Chinese National Day Parade 2009

The parade of the century is over.  There is a beautiful blue sky over Beijing, it is in fact nothing short of a perfect Beijing day.  In Shanghai, however, it’s overcast and raining hard.  Not a problem for me, I’m sick in bed and it’s better that it rains when one is sick than the other way around.  But in Beijing everyone is healthy and walking under a beautiful blue sky.  Keep in mind, the Chinese Air Force put a lot of time and effort into making this blue sky; last night they blew up special bombs over Beijing to dissipate any clouds that might be forming.  One must remember that the Communist Party of China decides the what the weather will be like.

I missed the beginning of the parade, when the flag was raised, precise groups of fighter jets and helicopters flew over the capital, and President Hu Jintao inspected endless rows of perfect soldiers and their heavy machinery.  Lucky for me the whole thing is on repeat on almost every channel, so I haven’t missed anything.

After the flag raising President Hu rolled down the avenue of Eternal Peace standing in his Red Flag limousine (the same kind Mao Zedong rode around in) for his inspection of the military.  He passed the Grand Hyatt hotel, a Mercedes Benz dealership, a Tiffany’s store (all closed and evacuated), and absolutely no spectators that weren’t either in the military or invited by the government. It was weird seeing the empty sidewalks around Tian’anmen square, what kind of parade doesn’t have people on the sidewalks?  As he inspected the very good looking soldiers I couldn’t help but gush over the turquoise blue missile carriers, it’s probably the young boy in me that gets a kick out of fabulously colored military equipment.  He kept screaming 同志们好！(Hello Comrades!) at the soldiers, and nothing more.  By the looks of it China could invade Taiwan and Japan still have enough people and equipment left over to leave a kick-ass army back home to defend the motherland.  Of course, as they kept saying, China is working to bring about world peace.  Forgive me, goosestepping soldiers and nuclear missiles make me think of another time.

After the fighter jets and President Hu’s military inspection the actual parade began.  It started with more perfect goosestepping soldiers, bright tanks and scary looking missile carriers.  Then the parade morphed into something that wasn’t a militaristic display of power but rather a happier and more upbeat display of the greatness of today’s China.  At first it reminded me of another autumn parade: The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.  But how can a parade of 200,000 people showing the glory and power of socialism be in the same category as Macy’s parade?  Plus the plastic smiles and stiff spectators weren’t really reminiscent of Macy’s parade.

The show was impressive my anyone’s measuring stick.  It seemed endless and was synchronized to a degree that I had, until now, believed could only be accomplished by robots.  It was colorful too, with red and yellow being the most prevalent.  On TV we largely viewed the parade from the viewpoint of the country’s leaders (interestingly, I only saw one woman standing with them).  They all stood on Tian’anmen gate, where Mao Zedong had proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China 60 years ago today.  Navy blue suits and red ties were a popular fashion choice among these big wigs, only President Hu wore the classic Mao suit (it’s actual name is the Sun Yat-sen suit, but for today let’s forget that).  The camera often focused on Jiang Zemin and President Hu, but almost as often we got a nice picture of Xi Jinping, who is speculated to be the next President of China.  It seems these things are decided far in advance.  This may not be true after all.

After all the tanks and missiles went by we got to see the floats and all the costumed dancers.  Somewhere in this quilted river of vibrating color were some friends of mine.  I’d like to say I could see them, but then again the whole point of the parade isn’t to see the individual.  My favorite part was the long line of province floats.  Each province had a float that showed off it’s splendor and what it’s famous for, often in a stereotyped fashion (coconut palms for Hainan!).  It was one of the only parts that made me really happy and abundantly proud of the country.  Somehow seeing the floats for the places I’ve lived and being able to understand the Chinese commentator’s words made me excited.  As a special treat there was even a Taiwan float (the PRC government considers Taiwan to be a rebel province).  My apologies to my Chinese friends, armies (whether American or Chinese) always put me off in a way and it’s hard to get excited about a float devoted to the construction of a new generation of rural villages.

The grandest show in the world ended with about ten thousand children letting go of big red balloons and rushing Tian’anmen gate screaming while the words 明天更美好 (Tomorrow will be even better!) were spelled out in massive yellow characters behind them on Tian’anmen square.  It was a nod to the bright future of China and it’s children.  It was cool watching the balloons float over the square and hearing the happy children scream, nonetheless the whole parade never made me think of China’s bright future.  In my eyes, the parade more than anything else seemed to make China’s government look old and dated. This is what I came away with from this awe-inspiring display of China’s unity and power.  For one, the overwhelming military presence, the over 100,000 synchronized students waving colorful fans, and Chinese characters as large as buildings that spelled 社会主义好 (Socialism is good!) on Tian’anmen square all brought to mind the old Soviet Republic and today’s North Korea.  The floats weren’t exactly futuristic, either.  There was great fanfare about the future development of science education and the happiness of the country’s 56 official ethnic minorities, but it didn’t really make China look like a country going forward.  Rather it seemed like a loving display of China’s gloried past and and affirmation that China is happy where it is and that reform is unnecessary.

I’m proud of China and it’s people today.  Regardless, this parade was never meant for me, it was meant for them.  As long as they’re happy then it was a success, that’s what’s important here.  Everyone celebrates their nation’s bithday differently and this celebration was about as Chinese as you can get.  Now I’m going to pop some Tylenol and lie in bed so I can be ready to watch the fireworks display tonight.

Posted in Beijing, History, News, Politics | No Responses »
Tags: , , ,

Off to Laos and Beijing!

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

After my three classes this morning my Spring Festival vacation finally began.  Now I can get a break from Huaihua and do some serious travel.  Tonight I’m hopping a train to Kunming and from there I will take a sleeper bus, for 28+ hours, to Luang Prabang in northern Laos.  Then I’ll make my way back north to Xishuangbanna and take a plane to Beijing.

I am taking my laptop with me so I should be able to update this blog every now and then.  Happy Chinese New Year!  元旦快乐！

Posted in Travel | 1 Response »
Tags: , ,