仲尼兄，亚美利坚人士，与我因其娶走的中国媳妇而结识，最近来信询问有关某国互联网访问限制情况，经仲尼本人同意，把部分内容转贴在这里，希望给其他和他有同样困惑的“互联网霸权主义”国家的人士有所参考：

Xiang,

How’s it going? Heard about all the drama with Google trying to go “uncensored” and maybe getting kicked out of China.
Have you seen any problems so far? When I was there, I was able to get to www.google.com. Can you get to that site now, or can you only use www.google.cn?
Very curious,

John

Hi John,
Great to hear from you, I remember you very well.
The google event triggered a wide discussion in China. Almost all independent Chinese bloggers posted comments on it, expressing their anger/ criticize to the government and support to google. Google is highly recognized among young people in China. They trust it, believe in its “don’t be evil” culture and, most of all, are very satisfied with its services, even if the google.cn had been providing censored search results. Today, they believe the quitting is unavoidable and are getting ready to say farewell to google, some are backing up their personal contents stored in google docs, gmails and other places. Some said: “Google, see you in the other side of the great fire wall”, “Google, go as you will and come back when freedom lights the country” – In a word, most people I know believe that Google has been doing something righteous and is a great company with social responsibilty.

However, the comments are banned on major media and all big websites. I saw a post on one of the CCP owned news sites saying that Google was just acting in pettish in order to get more benefits from Chinese government. Another interesting thing in China is that whenever you see the poll results in big websites, you will find you are on the opposite of the “majority” :-p, this time, no surprise, stat shows that more than 70% people think that Google had broken the law and should get out of China!
I also asked my parents about their opinion on this. They seldom access internet and knows little about google. They knew the news. But in their minds, Google is just an evil foreign company hunting only for interest in China. It is just understandable - they read news only from newspaper and TV, where freedom of speech never exists. Google has its bad reputation on those media for pornographic content in search results and violations of intellectual properties in China. As an irony to the government, some bloggers even prepared a news comment for CCTV – known as the mouthpiece for CCP – “Google has decided to quit for its bad business operation in China. At the same time, this is just a perfect demonstration of our law successfully defeats big foreign company.”

A few IT industry leaders said it is a stupid idea from business perspective and google will for sure regret it if they really end up quitting China.

As a result, the biggest market competitor in China – Baidu – has got a dramatic stock price rise on the day that Google made the statements. Baidu owns the biggest share in the industry in China, but despised by professionals because their heavy-censored search results are based on advisement interests, so, it is not accountable at all. However, apparently, their public relationship to government is much more “success”.

To answer your question, the top 3 sites in the world: facebook, twitter, youtube are completely inaccessible for quite a long time. And most services from Google can be easily accessed till now.

I can feel the deep fear in the Chinese government, they want to control the situation but they are losing it. China’s economy has high potential risks which will lead to many social issues. now, google has thrown the ball to the government, putting them on the seat to make the hard decision. The problem is: either way will cause “negative results” for CCP. Google.cn now stopped the censorship and if Google really gets banned in China, more and more people will know how to “break the wall” and get to know the real world even more!

I hope I stated everything you wanted to know clear enough. I appreciate that you brought this up so that we had this chance to discuss it. Let me know if you have any more questions or ideas.
Cheers.

Xiang

Great summary of everything. Good to know that these is some freedom to discuss this online. I have had many thoughts on this topic. I think its so bizzarre for a government in the modern age to believe that supressing something will make it disappear. Quite the opposite!

Your response to my question was puzzling. You said that facebook is completely inaccessible, but you obviously have access to it. Do you proxy to get access, or did you mean to write that facebook was inaccessible for a long time, until Google agreed to censor itself and was given permission to operate in China. Since they got permission, now facebook, twitter, and youtube are all accessible. Is that right?

My question was primarily about access to google.com vs access to google.cn and what “censoring” really means. When I was there, I took time to do some web browsing, and I found that I could access google.com as well as google.cn. I thought it was strange that China would let google.com be accessed from within China if they are worried about censoring. I mean, from google.com, I searched for “Tiananmen” and several photos of soldiers attacking students were returned, and I was able to visit those websites and see pictures that the Chinese government didn’t want me seeing. Then, I searched for 天安门 and only pictures of government officials and sunny days were returned. I got the impression from this that the “censoring” is more just about censoring the search results of searches done in Chinese. Is that right? Or was there some crack in the filter that the Chinese government doesn’t know about?

That was my main curiosity. I figure the Chinese government has got to loosen up eventually, and I am hoping that the one party system will give way and you guys will be able to choose your leaders from amongst citizens. I know the US doesn’t do that exactly either, but we claim that we do, and that’s something. And really, ordinary people can become national leaders… but usually only if they impress/please/obey people with lots of money and power.

Oh, one of the thoughts I had on this issue was when I was trying to justify the censoring of the search results. I started to wonder what exactly a search result is, and I recalled that Google’s algorithm is based on how popular a certain link is for the search terms that you typed in, and it tracks that popularity with the number of times people click on it, or link to it, or whatever. So, I realized that if we’re just counting the number of things, and if during the 1990’s and early 2000’s there were 3 times as many internet users in America than there were in China, then there would be a whole lot more links and clicks based on America’s opinion of what a good website is for a certain search term, and thus when Google’s algorithm returns something to a Chinese user, it would really just be returning what most American’s would want to see based on the search terms. Ultimately, its the perfect way for a technologically advanced nation (America) to infuse their culture into a nation that is starting to use a similar technology (China). So, maybe filtering isn’t so bad. However, what should probably be done is China should force Google to use a new database for searches done in China, and that database should only include clicks and links done by Chinese citizens/computers.

What do you think? I know its not exactly this simple, but seems like this is a slightly different perspective, and could be valid.

John

Sorry for the late response, some personal stuff has kept me busy for the past week.

I really like your questions and opinions, but before digging into this, I’d like to start with solving your “puzzle”.

As you guessed, I actually access facebook and youtube through proxies. In China, we call the method “getting across the wall” 翻墙. The serious restriction led to the results that more and more people have to learn the skill of “翻墙” so that they could get information they need. Those information are not necessarily political.

You mentioned twitter, yes, it is sure the most popular and hottest tools in the world. And it is not popular in China for the obvious reason. However, because of the powerful API, people are easily accessing it from plenty of 3rd party applications. That’s why I saw more and more Chinese young people and famous influencers join in. I do believe these techniques that support information sharing will eventually change China in near future. But that is the last thing that the party wants to see - people getting united. Hope that can help you to understand the government’s behaviors: they might be tolerant to criticize and negative opinions, but they must control the channels with which people are able to get united and actually do something.

The Hillary’s speech on internet freedom was not allowed to be published in Chinese Medias. Instead, the news said that it is a reflection of hegemonism. Few people know exactly what it about and its meaning. We always say that Americans know nothing about China, while it turns out to be that we are the last one who sees how the world looks like. When I was a little child, I was told that I should learn English to see the real external world, but now, I found the meaning of studying English is to see China more clearly. I doubt if any person will insist in supporting the one-party system after understanding the political system of US. The fact is: people are getting seriously misled far from the truth.

For the search algorithm, I do not agree that it should be an excuse of the filtering. I suppose this is more of a “contrification” issue than a culture aggression. Chinese culture is abandoned by us ourselves, not anyone from external. You can easily draw this conclusion from the long, long Chinese history. The latest event was the well-known “culture revolution”. Who else can protect your culture if you do not treasure it yourself? Like you said, putting more weight on the local data in results might be an easy solution. I don’t know. But I do not think filtering is good in anyway. We are trained to get opinions from the authorities instead of our own judgment for centuries. And that led to the lack of creativity and innovation, which is one of the key of competencies in modern age.

I am worried about the future of China, because more people are starting to get freed on mind in a remarkable speed, but the government no longer has effective ways to get them back to the age of ignorance and blindness.

Leo