Concerns About China Internet Censorship
Millions of Americans like me and you go online every day. We enjoy going on social media to communicate with others, watching videos for entertainment, and looking up information to educate ourselves. To over a billion Chinese people, however, the concept of having nearly unrestricted access to the Internet is considered a dream, with the government blocking all international websites and monitoring everything they do. (The term “online freedom,” I suspect, is probably censored from their Web). Everyone in the East Asian country is at risk of getting fined or arrested, whether they be bloggers, news companies, or just everyday citizens. The strict Internet censorship regulations under President Xi Jinping’s reign do not discriminate. Although this is an ongoing problem in China, we need to be more aware of it.
In 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed to have every computer sold in China to have pre-installed censoring software called the Green Dam Youth Escort. As Austin Ramzy of TIME writes, it was “promoted as a way to restrict pornography, but most of the targeted websites were political.” However, thanks to protests from Web users and foreign computer makers, the proposal was dropped during the same year; now installing Green Dam is voluntary rather than mandatory. The apparatus currently used to censor China’s internet is known as the “Great Firewall of China,” developed in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China. According to Cathy He of The Epoch Times, its function “includes blockading foreign websites and censoring content deemed undesirable by the Chinese Communist Party.” Thanks to the Firewall, Chinese netizens, or Internet users, have no access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Pandora, Spotify, and countless other websites and apps for social media, videos, news, and music. Even Google --including all of its apps like Gmail and Docs -- is blocked.
In 2018, though, the multinational search engine began to work on Project Dragonfly, a censored version of itself for China to use. However, backlash from human rights activists and even its own employees has made it controversial. In a petition titled “We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly,” Google workers stated that by “providing the Chinese government with ready access to user data … [this project] would make Google complicit in oppression and human rights abuses.”
The Firewall also aims to block anything that makes the Chinese Communist Party look bad or is dissent with its ideology. For example, no one can look up anything related to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when thousands of pro-democracy protesters -- most of whom were young students -- were killed or arrested by Chinese troops. Certain terms such as “human rights,” “free speech,” and “democracy” are censored. Even references to George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm are prohibited. I find it kind of ironic that they would ban Orwellian allusions. China’s Communist government believes in having control over its citizens, and 1984 is about a society that operates in a similar way. If anything, I thought they would promote the dystopian classic and have it as required reading material for all the schools in the country! Speaking of blocking fictional things, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) -- China’s central Internet regulator and control agency -- has cracked down on a couple of children’s characters for ridiculous reasons. First of all, they censored the classic Disney character Winnie the Pooh because President Jinping did not like the memes that compared him to the talking toy bear. To this day, Pooh is still banned; just last year, China refused to let the film Christopher Robin play in its theaters, and then they censored him out in the recently released video game Kingdom Hearts 3. Second of all, the British kid’s show character Peppa Pig got cracked down on as well because she promoted “gangster attitudes,” although not in the show itself but in vulgar cartoon edits of it. No one could search the term #PeppaPig on the Chinese short-video app Douyin (or Tiktok) for a while. Fortunately, unlike the bear, the cartoon swine is no longer censored, as she is starring in a special movie to celebrate the Year of the Pig for Chinese New Year 2019. You may find it funny and absurd that they would censor such innocent things, but this is just another good example of how oppressive China’s government is. We, too, like to make a lot of presidential memes and “gangster” cartoon parodies, but for us, there is no risk of getting detained. I think the fact that we are able to laugh at this proves how free we truly are, especially when it comes to getting creative online with political and inappropriate humor. According to Li Yuan of The New York Times, China has developed the most sophisticated online censorship system in the world, and it will only grow stronger as President Jinping continues to push for more Communist control over society. Censorship factories are becoming a new industry in the country, thanks to “authorities demanding that media companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content”.
One factory in Beijing called Beyondsoft currently employs over 4,000 workers to browse the internet and spot things that allude to past Chinese leaders, abuses and scandals of Chinese authorities (including the Tiananmen Square massacre), any “potentially offensive” words or phrases, and more. However, as complex and sophisticated as the censorship system and The Great Firewall are, people always figure out ways to infiltrate and deceive them. Censorship factories are looking into using artificial intelligence to do the job, but users can easily trick their algorithms. Virtual private networks, or VPNs, allow people to climb over the Firewall and gain access to foreign websites, such as Twitter. Even though that social media website is blocked, thousands of netizens still go on it to post information about current events in China every day. As of 2018, China has over 800 million Internet users, and “that size, combined with the growing popularity of interactive applications … has placed great strain on censors’ ability to restrict the flow of sensitive information”). But despite these rebellions, the CAC continues to monitor and crack down on the Chinese Web. Just last month in January, as a part of a six-month campaign to rid the Internet of “harmful” and “vulgar” content, the agency purged hundreds of websites and thousands of apps.
A number of news outlets and social networks have been called out for harming the “internet ecosystem,” and people who had accounts on Twitter were either forced to delete tweets and close accounts or arrested and interrogated by police. So why should these matters in China be of concern to us? Internet censorship is an issue in a lot more places in the world than you think. The governments of North Korea, Syria, Iran, Cuba, and numerous others censor the Web in their countries as well (although China and North Korea are on the extreme side). This leads to my point: the countries that currently have uncensored Internet, like America, may not be completely safe from their influences. Xi Jinping is planning to spread his “cyber-sovereignty” throughout all of cyberspace -- the entire global Internet as a whole, not just his own country’s. Already, our country and Western Europe, where freedom of expression is encouraged and defended, are contemplating their digital limits; Facebook and YouTube have said that they would hire more people to moderate their content. Yet, even if we are influenced by China’s sophisticated system in any way, I do not believe that our government will go as far as blocking foreign websites and censoring dissenting terms online. The First Amendment of our Constitution ensures the protection of our freedom of speech and expression and, therefore, prevents our government from going that far.
After all, the United States is a republic, not a Communist country. But still, as I said, we cannot just disregard the censorship issues in China. While the human rights of American citizens are not being oppressed, the human rights of Chinese citizens are, and in the most extreme ways. There is no argument that we take for granted our right to nearly unrestricted and uncensored Internet access every day, whether it be it for work, school, or entertainment purposes. We can watch and listen to whatever we like and educate ourselves about any subject we choose thanks to our access to vast sources of online information. Unlike people in China, we don’t have to worry about getting fined or detained when we look up information or post things on social media. You have to wonder: How can 325 million of us take our Intenet liberties for granted while over one billion others risk getting arrested for even hinting at the idea of having them?
