Greetings from the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing. I once read, in Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell, about a year that Russell spent lecturing on philosophy in Beijing. He was extremely taken with the city and the country, predicting that it would flower into a leading role in the world. This momentarily puzzled me, as my vision of China didn’t seem in sync with Russell’s democratic ideals. But then common sense clicked in, and I realized that we were talking about a period just after World War One, during the Sun Yat-sen era. The new Republic of China was struggling to emerge out from Imperial rule, and the Communist takeover was decades in the future. One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world. The fact that it didn’t is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history.
These days China is increasingly prosperous, but not quite free. Upon landing at Beijing International Airport, one fills out the usual customs declaration form, full of admonishments against bringing in firearms or questionable agricultural products. But there is an extra item on the list of dangerous imports: writings, recordings, or other collections of information that could be judged as a threat to the political, moral, or social good of the nation. The didn’t actually ask to search my laptop, but the warning was there.
It’s well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) censors blogs, so I’ve been poking around using the internet connection here in my hotel room, trying to judge the extent to which this is true. (The flipside, of course, is the perilous situation of bloggers located in China; apparently they’ve been required to register in order to blog, but I don’t have the latest on that. I should mention that there are all sorts of blogs about China, not that I have any expertise about them.) Access to most websites is fine, but certain addresses are certainly being blocked. Of course it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the actions of the local ISP, the city of Beijing, or the Chinese government itself, but you draw conclusions using the data you have, not the data you wish you had.
Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on Wordpress.com seem to be available. You can search on Google Blog Search or Bloglines, but Technorati is blocked. I haven’t found any individually-hosted blogs that were off-limits, although certain news sites like philly.com are mysteriously banned. The Eagles are in the middle of training camp, how am I supposed to keep up? Also, the New York Times is readily accessible, so make of that what you will. I also couldn’t reach the BBC, although I can actually watch the BBC news channel on my hotel room TV.
Google, of course, is available, in the wake of their somewhat-infamous deal struck with the Chinese government. But Wikipedia is a little confusing — blocked at times, available at others. Apparently this is an ongoing skirmish. I typed in “China” to Google, and the first link was the the Wikipedia page, so I clicked there, and saw it no problem. Then I typed “China internet” into the Wikipedia search box, and was given a list of pages, including Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China. But when I clicked there, it briefly began to load, before switching to a “The connection was reset” error. A little spooky, to be honest. Right now I seem to be able to see most Wikipedia pages, although apparently not those specifically about the PRC (although the main China page is still okay). You might think, no problem, I can just look at the Google cache pages for whatever Wikipedia article I’m interested in. But no, you can’t; nothing in Google’s cache seems to be available. So much for infamous deals.
None of which has prevented me from reading any of my favorite blogs. I just do what I always do, and read the feeds via Bloglines. They’re all perfectly visible, even for the blocked sites. Google reader works just as well. A lack of internet savvy on the part of the censors, or an intentional oversight? The one thing that one can’t do is leave comments (or start up your own blog, obviously), and maybe that’s the point.
(I also notice that when I visit google.com, I am not automatically redirected to the local version google.cn, which seems to happen in European countries. Is this because the hotel’s service provider is rigged for foreigners, and ordinary citizens have different rules? Not sure.)
It could be much worse, of course. I mean, here I am, typing away on my own blog, with little fear that the secret police are going to burst into my hotel room in the middle of the night to haul me away. But the biggest single reason I don’t have that fear is that I know that word would get around, and that it wouldn’t look good — free information protects free people. Amnesty International has a campaign, irrepressible.info, to protest against internet censorship around the world. The more noise people make about this issue, the more pressure governments will feel to keep the web free.
Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government. Different cultures, different systems.
August 9th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
My Chinese grandfather once said, “The Chinese could rule the world if they wanted to except for one obstacle; the Chinese”.
August 9th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Test your site to see if it’s banned by the GreatFireWall of China.
Has a neat animated interface to boot!
http://sensorymetrics.com/2007/03/14/great-firewall-of-china-blocks-60-of-our-blogroll/
August 9th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
I was always mystified by Russell’s enthusiasm for China. Thanks for the clarification!
August 9th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
And this China practically owns the US?
August 9th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
On my trip to China last month, I found that China seems to block the Chinese language wikipedia entirely. On the English language wikipedia, they look for certain terms (you found one; “Taiwan” is another, and I’m sure you can guess more). If you go to one of those pages, they’ll block the connection and then block Wikepedia entirely for you for the next few minutes. The blocking is done, I believe, by RESETs; as a result, you can sometimes see part of the forbidden page.
August 9th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
China is not united by a common spoken language any more than Europe is. The regional “dialects” are as varied as any other language really. There are at least eight clearly separate versions of Mandarin Chinese and then you’ve got the Cantonese dialects and …
However, this picture is complicated by two things. Most Chinese speak and understand Standard Mandarin to the point of being completely bilingual. And secondly, they share written language.
The writing system in China is very cool. While different dialects pronounce the language differently, the semantic meaning of the pictograms is the same. So if you can not speak the local dialect, you can write down what you want to say. (Assuming the other person can read.)
Furthermore, this semantic unity extends also back in time. While I find it difficult to read older English, for example, my girlfriend has no problems reading 2000 year old Chinese texts.
China is a fascinating place. I hope it will get the freedom and glory it deserves.
August 10th, 2007 at 1:33 am
No, they don’t have to *register* to start a blog. BSPs will certainly require some information, but nobody cares whether they are true or not. There’ve been a proposal of course, and as far as I know, that’s all.
August 10th, 2007 at 3:30 am
I guess China only the country banning this much blogs, though most of the countries are banning few sites in their country but much less than China. But on the other side, it shows the victory and the impact of blogs…
conservatories north east
August 10th, 2007 at 4:40 am
When flying into the US one has to tick one of the boxes on immigration if “You intend to [...] commit immoral acts.”
I wonder: according to whose morals? Does that mean I can not visit Las Vegas?
August 10th, 2007 at 7:07 am
everything is available if you use the Tor network.
August 10th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government.
But we have forms of government censorship too, done on behalf of corporations–try putting out a remix album of a big label artist without getting permission, or writing your own original non-satirical work starring a copyrighted character like Mickey Mouse, or your own sequel to/adaptation of someone else’s copyrighted book or film, and even if you have no intention of making a profit and are willing to give proceeds to the original artists, it will be illegal to distribute your work. Of course I think this is a much more harmless form of censorship than China’s wide-ranging censorship of political ideas it doesn’t like, but it’s worth noting that even aside from personal slander and fire-in-a-crowded-theater situations, we don’t have fully “free speech” here.
August 10th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Its so easy to get around their firewall, its almost childs play for any technogeek. There are even step by step guides for the layman.
August 10th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Is John Searle’s closing lecture going to be on Chinese rooms?
August 10th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
When I was in China last summer, I found that there exist mirrors (e.g., for wikipedia) for most of the annoyingly-blocked sites (and like Haelfix said, the blockages are mostly a deterrant and not terribly difficult to circumvent… and similarly, while my blog is on Blogspot, I know I have several regular readers in Shanghai).
August 10th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Elliot:
It would be cool to get a bunch of American kids in a room, and train them through Searle’s methods to produce a blog in Chinese! Heh, a bit of turnabout on production …
August 10th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
The plagiarists who got me fired from a fairly senior engineering position at Rockwell International, found out that I was to be interviewed by Playboy. Raising the spectre of p0rn, they managed to get me put under 100% complete prior censorship, where I had to submit everything that I submitted for publication, including poetry and mathematics, to a PR flack.
After I’d left, and subpoenaed my personnel files, I found over 440 pages of demented bureaucratic censorship convulsions, some stemming from the plagiarists asserting that I was carrying wepons into the Federally secured property, which allegation I’d never been told. Else I’d have agreed to be searched above and beyond the metal detectors I walked through every single day.
For someone as prolific as I (over 2,500 publications, presentations, and broadcasts) I found the censorship more than slightly irksome. Yet I also resented some crackpot documents that were in my file because they assumed that I was the author.
Then there were the government refusals to let me attend international conferences in, say, Bulgaria, where I was Session Chair or Panel Moderator. But that’s another story from the same Cold War.
I read a lot of Chinese literature in translation, and have even published some transliterations of classical Chinese poetry. But I don’t speak the language(s).
I imagine China as Rockwell cubed. Having a space program and lots of computers does not a modern nation make, nor an Olympics, nor iron bars a cage.
August 10th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
This report apparently just out is quite relevant:
Link
Former official: China’s ‘perception management’ agenda controls all media
China’s government controls virtually all media outlets to exercise “mind control” and manipulate public opinion, according to testimony by a former state propagandist at a hearing of the U.S-China Economic Security Review Commission last week.
PS, I think it’s odd the Chinese allow Bloglines if that allows you to see just about anything anyway. As for Google, did they change their search ranking criteria recently? I’ve seen sudden changes in some results.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Neil,
I was afraid nobody would get it
e.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Jonathan Vos Post
raises American issue
are we much better?
e.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
We’ve already been treated to several Chinese-Room jokes, and I’m sure there are more forthcoming.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Elliot — yes, we are much better. But we’re not nearly perfect.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Actually, you will find more sites blocked when connecting the internet in a university…
August 10th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
a Chinese reader: but isn’t it possible to navigate around the extra university blockages? At least, with the experiences I was discussing above, we were at a Chinese university at the time.
August 11th, 2007 at 2:23 am
The strength of the myths — even among Chinese people and students of Mandarin — about the languages of China and about Chinese characters is an intersting topic. It’s somewhat as if the majority of students of astrophysics took astrology seriously.
An earlier poster is quite right in noting that China is not united by a spoken language and that what are often called Chinese dialects are actually languages in their own right. Most of the rest of the points, however, could use some clarification.
Even according to statistics from the PRC (which should of course be taken with a very large grain of salt), just 53 percent of the population there can speak standard Mandarin. Although that might technically qualify by a couple of percentage points as “most,” it is a far cry from the vast majority of those in the country being able to communicate with each other in speech. They cannot, though China is making some progress in this by its repression of languages other than Mandarin.
More importantly, the various Sinitic languages of China do not have a common written form. Literate, monolingual speakers of, say, Cantonese can communicate in writing with literate, monolingual speakers of Mandarin because both are taught to read and write the same language: Modern Standard Mandarin. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of Europe in the Middle Ages, when people were taught to read and write Latin. Although educated people in, say, Spain and France could communicate with each other in writing using Latin (though not so often in speech, because of pronunciation differences in their Latins), that is of course not at all to say that written Old Spanish and written Old French are the same. Neither are written Mandarin and written Cantonese the same, which should not be a surprise given that the languages differ in vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etc.
Next, only a few Chinese characters can be classified as pictographs, and most of those that are became so stylized long ago as to bear little clear hint of their origins. (Nor, it should be noted even though the word has not occurred in this thread, are Chinese characters “ideographs.”)
As to the matter of semantic unity over time, being literate in Modern Standard Mandarin does not make one able to read Literary Sinitic (a.k.a. Classical Chinese). Only prolonged study will do this.
But as for China being a fascinating place that deserves freedom and glory, I couldn’t agree more.
And finally — on the matter of the original post itself — Russell’s impressions of China were likely influenced by Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren), who served as his translator and became his lifelong friend. Chao was a fascinating, brilliant man; but I’ve gone on at perhaps too much length already, so I’ll close here.
August 11th, 2007 at 4:17 am
Dear Sean: Maybe you or the readers here have not noticed the latest round of movement-to-the-Total-State in the U.S. Federal government and Congress. Happy Summer Holidays, everybody.
August 11th, 2007 at 9:52 am
I don’t agree with you .If you can stay at China long time ,you will find she is a great country,from what you said ,I think you didn’t know china at all.
August 11th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Something I have wondered (as someone who will be travelling to China sometime in the next little while) is whether the Great Firewall of China interrupts VNC connections — can you just open an encrypted tunnel back “home” and then use the internet as if you were sitting in your office back in North America???
August 11th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Sorry — I meant VPN, not VNC…
August 12th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Ein Volk, ein Mandarin, ein China!
August 14th, 2007 at 8:39 am
When I spent last summer in Shanghai, the most inconvenient web censorship for me was that the English-language Wikipedia was completely blocked. Luckily, as the Wikipedia itself points out, “Technically adept Internet users in China are currently able to circumvent the block fairly easily.”
(I encourage folks not to reveal the method, since sometimes these holes get plugged when they get too widely known.)
If the English-language Wikipedia is available sometimes now, I wonder if that’s part of the general whitewashing China is getting in preparation for the Olympics?
Last summer the BBC and Voice of America were also blocked. And, any webpage mentioning the phrase “h-m-n r-ghts” was blocked. Now I read that “T–w-n ind-p—–ce” is also forbidden.
(I leave out some letters, since I don’t want to ruin this blog for Chinese readers.)
But, to my surprise, ABC, CBS, NBC and National Public Radio were completely accessible!
In many cases I could see the existence of blocked webpages via Google – but if I tried to click on them, I’d get an error message. Sometimes this would disable Google for a while afterwards… I never could quite figure out the pattern. At times I got scared that I’d hear a knock on my door. But, I figured they weren’t mainly worried about Americans reading English-language websites.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Here’s a story today, similar to what I posted about earlier. Maybe “bogus journalists” is a code word for bloggers?
Link
China Announces Media Crackdown
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: August 15, 2007
HONG KONG, Aug. 15 — China today disclosed a crackdown on “false news reports, unauthorized publications and bogus journalists,” two months before the opening of the politically sensitive Communist Party congress, which is held once every five years.
The crackdown, confirmed by the government’s official web site, comes after a television journalist was given a one-year prison sentence and a $130 fine on Sunday for allegedly fabricating a story about Beijing dumpling makers that were said to use cardboard as filler.
According to The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, and the State Press and Publication Administration together warned that, “Those who intentionally fabricated news that caused public anxiety and tarnished the nation’s image would be harshly dealt with or even prosecuted if they broke the law.”
“Their news organizations would also be penalized,” the newspaper added.
The government urged news outlets to set up hotlines so that the public could report false news accounts.
…
August 16th, 2007 at 12:32 am
“One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world.”
Sure one could… If one knew nothing about the details of the country, and had some sort of blank slate theory of human culture.
I believe this same sort of “easily imaging” without ever bothering to check with experts is what led to George and Dick’s awfully big Iraq adventure.
August 16th, 2007 at 2:41 am
Here is some perspective from China.
VPN is not blocked, you can get it from witopia or set up openvpn yourself on a server outside the country. It really cannot be blocked since it uses https, to block that would block all safe e-commerce. But most Chinese can’t get VPN from America since they don’t have dollar credit cards. Using VPN also tunnels through the US wiretapping, but at the other end when it comes out of the server it can be datamined like pen registers. But in the meanwhile the encryption is fairly effective. It is usually faster than other methods, but sometimes notaiceably slows traffic. If you run open and get blocked by the firewall, you can turn on VPN but be sure then to reload in the browser or clear the cache and maybe cookies in order to see the desired page.
It is also good to use some encryption with email, GPG or Enigmail. It is probably illegal for Chinese to possess encryption tools, maybe still illegal to export from the US, but it would not seem to me safe to do business in China otherwise, as the government and party are your competitors and have the tools. I don’t know if there are Chinese laws like in England that allow the police to demand encryption keys, it probably doesn’t make any difference. If you encrypt then maybe do it twice for deniability. It is possible to use steganography but some studies indicate it probably is not being used. Yahoo’s picture-sharing network in the US, Flickr, has been blocked in China, no reason given.
Tor is effective but slower. The Tor plugin for Firefox is widely used but you have to turn it on manually. It is possible to install portable Firefox with Tor on an encrypted USB flash card so you don’t leave traces on your host computer.
It is best to bring your own computer since the hotel computers might not be able to boot from the USB card and are suspect with probably keyloggers, all the software is pirated (try to run Windows Update for example!).
Note that your laptop is subject to warrantless search at the US airport, you should check for keyloggers and root kits if they take it away from you for inspection for child pornography–their forensic kits can detect even deleted software and obvious encryption makes you suspect.
You can use proxy servers (search Google) but usually they don’t allow you to edit pages just read.
Psiphon seems to be effective but requires a friendly server outside China. I doubt that many use it.
In addition, wi-fi is available in some big cities in cafes and the like, and some private citizens run wi-fi open as in other countries (although I haven’t seen FON). There exist available software tools to change your hardware network card ID number for deniability.
GSM mobile phones are cheap and pay-as-you-go SIM cards for China Mobile or China Telecom are available anywhere (you can only top up the minutes in the city where you buy the SIM card), also GPRS and CDMA data plans. Although there are regulations requiring subscribers to register with real names, in point of fact this is not done (for regular GSM pay-as-you-go) in small stores or street vendors so it is in practice anonymous for everybody. Although there is no GPS in most Chinese phones the police do have the software to locate subscribers by triangulation if they need to find you, and you can assume that SMS is monitored.
Probably on some networks as universities there are large rooms of people (volunteers often) sitting at computers who monitor traffic and such places as chat rooms or forums and sometimes interject messages to get the conversation back in approved lines, and maybe sometimes admonish users. However, university network traffic is largely p0rn from the guys, so many users must have some way to circumvent the monitoring.
Skype is very popular and users of the Skype chat IM function who download from Tom Online will probably find that some words don’t get seen at the other end because of some software filter. Most Chinese users seem to know this and download the English Skype program from outside China. Although Skype is encrypted it has been reported that it is not too difficult to break it, although one wonders if that is practical with so much VOIP traffic. If you wish you can use Zfone from Phil Zimmerman to encrypt VOIP such as Gizmo, at both ends.
There has been much discussion in the West about the Chinese ID cards and camera surveillance, compare that to the Real ID and CCTV controversy in the US and UK. In reality, the houkou residency registration is not enforced and the ID cards are rarely used, while fairly anonymous cash and pay-as-you-go near-cash cards such as the Octopus card are widely used in China as compared to ID-theft-prone credit cards in the West. At hotels you must show your passport and the number is entered in the computer system, but the police don’t any longer seem to enforce the home-owner’s registration of private guests with them.
It is correct that blogger registration was proposed but has not been put into effect, likely the computer system not done. There are millions of Chinese blogs, many based outside the US since sometimes Chinese ISPs will be asked to take them down if the owner doesn’t remove something upon government request. If you want to set up a blog that can be easily read from China, check first with the GFW tool and use a service that is somewhat anonymous with domain name registration, there are some. (Oh, the actual name is Golden Shield Project, not Great Firewall, and it is something sold to China by the US company Cisco.)
Although most blocking is done by internet address (domain name) they also must keep track of IP numbers, in some cases they request IP number information from Yahoo and other US services so as to track down offenders. The censorship laws are unclear–the government sets out objectives and then asks the private companies to carry them out and make the detailed policies themselves as a condition of doing business, so the companies or ISPs often go overboard. So some companies dump on Yahoo and Google to compete, the locals are really worse when it comes to censorship, the recent complaints about Google and Yahoo in the US don’t help.
Even though all this sounds quite horrific to Western libertarians, I think there is far too much China-bashing around this theme. Read Goldsmith and Wu to get a perspective on the global scale of Internet use shaping, not just China, but often worse in very much the same ways in your favorite home country over which you might be expected to have some control before you start mouthing off about practices in this great country about which you know so little.
In point of fact the Chinese seem to do pretty well under the circumstances. There might be some 40 bloggers in jail but the vast majority of Chinese internet users are really not that disturbed by not being able to read articles in Wikipedia or blogs on blogspot–when Wikipedia suddenly came back a few weeks ago I bet few people rushed to use it. Most internet users here are quite nationalistic and would rather play their own games or surf for local things in Mandarin. The Chinese government and people are very likely most interested in social harmony and working hard to increase the standard of living, rather than in increasing personal freedom right now in areas such as art or expression.
Also, the perspective from a Beijing hotel by a Westerner is really not trustworthy. For example, broadband penetration in the big cities of the east is high especially among young people but not enough to support real e-commerce. The middle-class citizens of the big cities of the east depend on migrant workers from the rural areas, they likely are not concerned about democracy, they would be outvoted if it were honest. And maybe there should be more Communist rule from the center about matters such as the environment, to control the corrupt local officials tied to the local capitalists.
Hope this helps, enjoy your stay.
August 18th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Lu_xun40 — thanks for posting this; it is exceptionally useful.
August 18th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
The fundamental difference between Chinese and US censorship is that there is no compulsion in the US to use a specific corporate channel. They have the same ability to not publish material they deem offensive as you have the right not to publish material you deem uninteresting, immoral or offensive material in your blog. china has a monopoly on all information therefore there is no freedom of choice. read up on positive vs. negative liberty