Censorship

A brief summary of my Summer: I got off scott free from the diploma riots only to get mild sunstroke in Yangshuo, overcharged for ice cream on Putuoshan and some sort of nasty stomach-purging condition in Beijing while vacationing with my dad. I decided to move to Enlgand for the football, but then realized I would miss the American kind (also: happy with the way the Eagles defensive line looks, Stalworth may finally be the right number one for McNabb although I'm not ready to jummp on that bandwagon just yet and Westbrook is the real deal). I went on a trip West with Alex (McDonald), got some altitude sickness camping above 12000 feet and flew home from Denver with a more informed impression of the corn states (Nebraska, by the way, beats the snot out of Iowa). I have a great evening job at the ABC house in Swarthmore and plan on spending a lot of time playing Taiko at the college, but I'm still in the market for a day job.

And before the real post, some notes. It has been quite some time since I published with any regularity, however, I now find myself with a great deal of time on my hands and not a whole hell of a lot to do. On the advice of several people, I have decided to try to force myself to publish on some sort of shedule as opposed to when I have time and something to write about and my computer is not acting up or being censored by the Chinese government and I'm not feeling terribly lazy and/or some crisis or particularly newsworthy event provokes me into writing something. In any case, my current plan is to try to post every Tuesday in the hopes that I can develop something like a real readership, which will in turn give me more impetus to write something every Tuesday. So, those few of you reading this, I am calling on you to respond to my posts and to bug me if you wake up on Wednesday morning and find nothing new posted on the site.

Given the anniversary of 9/11, I felt a particular need to post something yesterday, and I will continue to post things like this when the fancy strikes me. However, I intend to hold myself responsable for these posts in addition to my (hopefully) regular Tuesday rants. Of course, so much is happening all the time that it may be harder than I anticipate to address everything I want to. For instance, in writing about 9/11 and today about censorship (which has been in the news), I managed to overlook another big anniversary: the death of Chairman Mao thirty years ago last Saturday (September 9, 1976). Some news organs have been writing about the cultural revolution in addition to terror. Mao and terror are both of great interest to me, so I'm gonna have to figure out a way to do them both justice considering that their milestones occured twenty five years and two days appart. Hopefully I'll have a system down by the time the Towers' 25th year of decease occurs two days after the Chairman's 50th. I'll write about Mao next week, which will give me time to read up. This week: censorship.

As you may have read, the CCP's official news organ, Xinhua, has instituted new restrictions on the ability of foreign new organs to distibute in China. Here are some reports in the People's Daily (Xinhua's English language paper) as well as reacation reported by BBC and the Financial Times and the full text of the regulations. Most pundits are convinced that these new restrictions are more a bid for the unprofitable Xinhua to take market share away from the big reporting companies like Reuters, the Associated Press and Bloomberg, especially in the financial reporting sector. Basically, the restrictions require foreign news to be distributed by companies approved by Xinhua; currently the only approved distributer is a subsidiary of Xinhua itself. It is not clear the degree to which the new restrictions will hurt reporting of general news topics, but they will almost certainly damage the availability of financial information to buisinesses, banks and financial services. This seems espeically counterproductive given that China is considering a new financial watchdog to better regulate a corrupt and comparatively ineffective sector.

A continuing criticism of Chinese media censorship, which goes so far as to put limits on foreign cartoons is that it not only leaves clear ground for governmental and civil rights abuses but also hurts the longterm capabilities of the Chinese economy. For China to develop a high-tech information economy, companies need free access not only to financial information but to any news that might affect financial markets, which is to say, any news. It is clear that Xinhua reporting alone, or for that matter, any single news agency, is not up to that task.

This is not the first time that new restrictions on speech have had the dual purpose of supporting Chinese companies over foreign ones. Government regulation and censorship of the internet, especially through search engines and portals, has been seen as a way to improve the market share of domestic corporations while simultaneously improving control over the flow of information. The government makes use of the so-called "Great Firewall of China" to punitively block certain sites as well as search engines which return those sites. To avoid their entire network of pages being blocked, search engines like Baidu and portals like SINA proactively censor anything they think might turn up the government list. This sort of complicit censorship is also carried to bbs and chat sites by university students and other volunteers. Even Google has censored it's Chinese search, although it has compromised by keeping two running, a chinese version of its main site which may return blocked results and itself be punatively blocked from time to time, and google.cn, which self-censors and will not return blocked sites. Google caught some heat for this, but they felt it was the most reasonable way to maintain their Chinese market share. This solution still provides an uncensored search which has the added benifit of enabling searchers in China to determine which sites are blocked by the combined use of both tools. Despite Google's solution, the punative blocking of sites that don't self-censor has made it much easier for the Chinese portals to grow, partially at the expense of foreign rivals like MSN and Yahoo.

This type of censorship is ingenious, it helps companies that censor obtain a higher market share, which means that a greater share of the population is using censored searches. The companies have incentive to do the work of censoring themselves or face the possibility of being blocked by the firewall; companies that censor better are blocked less which makes them more desirable to consumers. Outsourcing the censorship of print media can potentially work the same way. Giving Xinhua the ability to control their rivals' distribution will help grow Xinhua's market share. And of course Xinhua is censored, so that means a greater share of the print market will be reading reliably censored news. Who needs to burn books when you can give a leg up to a censored printer and let the market do the work for you?

The idea of occasional punitive censorship is based on the same principle of terror or secret police. There were far fewer Gestapo in Nazi Germany than is generally assumed. The threat of seemingly random arrests or crackdowns made the reach of the secret police seem greater. The threat of the Gestapo was that you might be arrested for anything at any time, so you would proactively avoid anything that might get you in trouble, even if it wasn't explicitly forbidden. This in turn created a network of informants quick to avoid being associated in any way with anything that might be construed a crime.

I saw this mentality come face-to-face with American individualism during the diploma crisis at Shengda. The Chinese teachers, without exception, avoided the issue as much as possible or stood with the administration. Many students were complicit and even active in informing the powers-that-were of any potential infractions of any kind (including when I ripped down a poster of the founder to make a tremendously juvenile statement of no real function). Administrators and teachers regularly would give us "advice" to stay home, which the troublemakers among us regularly ignored. Finally a meeting occured between the administration and the foreign teachers in which nothing useful was accomplished. The Chinese could not understand our inability to take a hint and self-limit our behavior out of fear of potential reprisals. We Americans (and Canadians, and Brits...) could not understand their inability to give us clear-cut guidelines on what we could and could not do. The administrator kept saying "this is a Chinese affair" while the foreign teachers sought some guidance on how to recognise a "Chinese affair." Basically, a "Chinese affair" is anything that might potentially be declared a "Chinese affair" by anyone who could possibly have the authority to make this sort of declaration. Earlier, in my writing class, I had been told by a student that they were not allowed to talk about "politics," which of course does not include things like Bush's mismanagement of Hurricane Katarina or the EU's limits on Chinese "textile dumping" or anything else that makes other people look bad, but does include anything that might make China look bad.

In fact, the very wording of the new regulations basically prohibit any news that makes China look bad, prohibiting anything that might (among other things):

"(3) endanger China's national security, reputation and interests;
....
(5) incite hatred and discrimination among ethnic groups, undermine their unity, infringe upon their customs and habits, or hurt their feelings;
...
(9) undermine social ethics or the fine cultural traditions of the Chinese nation;"

as well as the catch-all: "Xinhua News Agency has the right to select the news and information released by foreign news agencies in China "

This is getting rambling, but a last thought. I can't help but wonder if this crackdown on outside reporting is due in part to emberassment on reporting of a few major crises in the past year, including the diploma crisis and the violent crackdown in Guagdong.