I could not understand the speeches over the loud-speakers during the two hour presentation. I have few close Chinese friends, and I have never managed to have a candid conversation about what happened in 1989. Many of the people in Victoria park were not even born when the Chinese military opened fire on its own people. I know the history, from documentaries and books, but I don’t know why it should matter so much on a balmy Friday night, 21 years later.

But a hundred thousand people weeping over candles says it still means something.

I began to ask people why they were there.

“We came to learn about the history,”  three young girls told me in halting English. They were secondary school students, and their teacher had encouraged them to come.

That history is not taught in mainland schools, and all mention of what happened in June 1989 is elaborately censored online — including web pages, online forums, IM conversations, and personal emails. Last year a former Chinese solider was arrested and taken from his home in the middle of the night for publishing an open letter calling for a review of the incident.

Hong Kong operates under a different constitution, and you can talk about Tiananmen here — most of the time. Last week a group of activists tried to display a statue called the “Goddess of Democracy” in front of the Times Square mall, a sort of faux Statue of Liberty that mimics a famous paper-mache figure erected by the original protesters in Tiananman square in 1989. Thirteen people were arrested and the statue was confiscated.

“It wasn’t hurting anyone,” said a man in his late  20s, who would only identify himself as “a worker.” “It’s not right for them to take it away.”

He said this was his first June 4th vigil, as it was for many others I spoke to. In fact it’s estimated that this was the biggest turnout ever, exceeding even the very first vigil in 1990, when Hong Kong citizens openly feared what the 1997 handover to China might mean for their freedoms.

This demonstration would be impossible in Beijing. Officially, the students who were calling for “democracy” remain dishonored; the Communist Party of China insists to this day that the military violence was necessary to maintain stability of the country. That’s what they say when they can be forced to talk about it at all — for the “June fourth incident,” as it’s been blandly retitled, is taboo. The June fourth incident does not exist.

There was no coverage of the Hong Kong demonstration in the Chinese media; nothing on Xinhua, nothing in China Daily.

And I think that’s why people keep coming. Occasionally someone I talked to used  words like “freedom” and “democracy,” but when I pressed them it always came down to specifics. The statue was taken away. The Chinese government won’t talk about what happened. There was no grand ideology uniting the people in Victoria Park, no deep ideals other than this: we want to talk about it, and you will not let us.

When it comes down to it, the 1989 protestors didn’t know what they were doing. They wanted change, and they boldly called out the crimes and repression of their government during the horrors of the cultural revolution and after. But they also wanted to force students to attend demonstrations, according to later interviews. The protest movement was hardly democratic or even organized; it had no coherent philosophy and was riddled with internal power struggles. It’s easy to make the students and workers of 1989 into heroes or martyrs, but the truth is messier.

“I’m willing to keep an open mind,” one Hong Kong medical student told me. “Maybe there was no way to finish the affair without blood. But many mainland students don’t fully understand what happened that day. They need to know so they can make a careful judgement.”

Maybe that’s the sort of diplomatic language that will be necessary for reconciliation. But the history isn’t so bloodless. People died. Lots of them. People lost limbs and family and friends, and then lost friends again when everyone connected to the protests was quietly rounded up, silenced, or exiled. A series of laminated yellow posters recalled the victims, with the name, photograph and whatever is known of the story of each one. We know that some people were shot or crushed by tanks; others simply disappeared that night.

Does it help to imagine a woman sitting alone in her Beijing apartment, grieving silently for a long-lost lover? She can’t even write an email to a friend to say how she feels (try; it will bounce.) There will be no commiseration. It is not yet allowed.

And here, at last, I began to see what was denied to me as an outsider. I am not Chinese. I do not have family on the mainland — family who disappeared 21 years ago, and family who live still with the threat of a government that cannot talk about what it did. For me Tiananmen is abstract; I can make it about ideals like “freedom of speech” or “human rights” but I have no faces to attach to the violence. It was not my statue they took away.

“For me it’s a memorial,” said a middle aged man there with his wife. He wore glasses and a white polo shirt, with a camera slung around his neck. He had a slight pot belly. He said he had two children.  ”I have to keep coming every year until the Chinese government admits what they did, and that it was wrong,” he said.

“I may not live to see that day.”

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/they-remember-because-they-are-told-to-forget/feed 0 http://jonathanstray.com/dont-throw-that-out http://jonathanstray.com/dont-throw-that-out#comments Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:30:51 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=1850

The village of Kangzhuang, in Henan Province, China, was built in 2006 next to the Tianrui cement factory (in background, above), to house villagers relocated after the government bought their land. A huge grey cloud of dust hangs permanently over the village. The villagers told me that the factory is shut down for a day or two whenever air quality authorities come to visit, then started up again as soon as they leave.

I visited Kangzhuang on another story. But eating dinner that night, covered in a film of dust, I suggested to a Chinese colleague that this issue of cheated environmental regulations deserved to be investigated further.

“That’s not news,” she said. “That happens all over China, every day.”

And she’s right: it’s not news. All chronic problems fade from attention, and old news won’t interest (most) readers, or sell papers. But we’re leaving the paper era, and this changes things. In the web era, documenting old, marginal, or incomplete stories is much more valuable — and much more affordable — than it used to be.

There has been much discussion of how web writing style must differ from paper writing style, but the difference in medium also changes what stories can and should be covered. Despite its physicality, paper is a deeply transient medium. Yesterday’s newspaper lines birdcages, but yesterday’s web stories will be showing up on Google five years from now. An editor selecting stories needs to be thinking about not only tomorrow’s page views but next year’s as well, and also, crucially, how the story will function in combination with stories from other outlets. There are close ties here to the concept of stock and flow in journalism, and the new-media notions of topic pages and context.

I ran into this paper-web cultural divide discussing a pitch for a story about the number of civilian casualties in the Iraq war. I had done a little bit of new reporting on the topic, but mostly I just wanted to write a thorough summary of the various estimates and a careful, clear analysis of how reliable each might be. An editor friend said that, since the studies I would be referencing were several years old, this wasn’t news and would be hard to sell to the outlet I was proposing; I said that I was planning to write an authoratative article on a topic of great international concern for a general audience, a piece which doesn’t really exist yet. I felt that this would be exactly the sort of public service that journalism is supposed to be, and further, we’d have a good shot at getting in the top five results on Google.

We clearly had somewhat different conceptions of what stories count as publishable journalism, which seemed to be derived from our focus on different media.

Not only is the web a permanent medium, it’s a distributed, accessible-from-anywhere medium (unless your government doesn’t want you to know about certain things, but there are ways around that.) A single report of environmental cheating at a cement factory is not going to change anything for the people who will get sick from cement dust, but hundreds of such reports all over China might. If editors, used to selling papers, think of stories as throwaway consumables rather than careful additions to a permanent store, they miss opportunities for collective action.

But how to fund such long-term, speculative projects? After all, every story costs money to produce. I think part of the answer lies in another medium-driven difference: the web is more amenable to journalism of different levels of quality and completeness. The New York Times aims to be “the paper of record,” which means it hopes always to tell the full story, and to never get a fact wrong. On the web, this is ridiculously inefficient. As a social medium, the web draws power from collaboration and conversation — say, between different papers in different places — and that process is severely hindered if only “finished” work makes it online.

Yes, there will always be a need for the authoritative voice and the carefully edited, sub-edited, copy-edited and fact-checked article. But what about all that other good stuff that journalists produce in the course of their work? What about the juicy trimmings that had to be cut from the main story, the tantalizing leads that the reporter hasn’t had time to follow up, and the small incidents that have meaning only in aggregate? The web demands that we put more online than we would publish on paper, and provides a place for information of all grades. In this new medium, amateur journalists (such as bloggers and thoughtful commenters) are often much more adept at creating value from information by-products than their professional peers. News organizations will have to find forms for publishing unpolished information, such as the beat blog.

The report of environmental malfeasance in Kangzhuang is not yet a story. It hasn’t been checked against other sources, we haven’t heard from the local government ministry about whether they did a proper environmental study prior to putting 2,300 people next to a factory, and anyway the journalists who visited the town (myself among them) are currently busy writing up an entirely different story. But this tidbit deserves to be aired in a public place, so that others can build on it in the future. This is a valuable public service that could be provided for low cost, a service that is possible only on the web. Will an industry trained in the paper era see this possibility?

We are witnessing the birth of a new kind of internet censorship in the Xinjiang province of Western China: the kind where a web site must be specifically allowed, instead of specifically disallowed.

China’s largest province was disconnected from the world completely, including a shutdown of phones and SMS, after hundreds of people were killed in separatist protests by the Uyghur minority people in July. Today, the Far West Blog reports that 27 more web sites have been allowed through the previously complete internet block. Wow. A whole 27. That brings the total number of extra-provincial sites accessible to Xinjiang residents to 31, and all of them are inside China.

The Chinese government maintains that the US-based “World Uyghur Congress” instigated the riots from overseas using the internet and SMS. No communications, no riots, the logic goes. And perhaps this is true, if myopic (fascinating debate on this here).

But there is something very wrong about opening up sites one by one like this, despite the fact that state-run Xinhua news agency is playing it up as communications being “restored”. The current Xinjian policy represents a new and extremely troubling flavor of censorship: rather than some sites being blocked, some sites are allowed. This is a white list, as opposed to the usual black list; the default is now “no”. Bearing in mind that personal satellite dishes are illegal in China, this means the government has complete control over the information that people are exposed to. This is just like the pre-internet era in any number of times and places, really, but that doesn’t make it any better.

At least text messaging, including international text messaging, was restored two weeks ago.

According to Far West Blog, here is what you now get from the outside world if you live in Xinjiang:

• 7 News Sites (including China Daily and CCTV)
• 4 Travel Sites (including Ctrip and Air China)
• 3 Business & Finance Sites
• 3 Telecom Sites (all three major Chinese carriers)
• 2 Shopping Sites (including Taobao, China’s version of eBay)
• 2 Computer Service Sites (so you can update your anti-virus)
• 2 Gaming Sites (more flash games…yippee)
• 2 Education Sites (study materials for students and help for teachers)
• 1 Fashion Site

Yes, this also means no IM, no Skype, no email, no nothing outside of the province. “I have had to sit here and endure a frustrating feeling that we are now living in the stone ages,” says Far West Blog writer Josh.

These 31 sites seem ridiculously limited, and these limits (no email!) would severely hamper business in the affluent Eastern provinces. Xinjiang has only 20 million people, so perhaps China can more or less do without it for a while. But what if the national firewall let through only, say, the top 10,000 or 100,000 currently uncensored international sites? How much easier it would be to prevent some pesky overseas message board from cropping up to corrupt Chinese minds! Why, your world-censoring work would practically be done for you, and almost no one would be the wiser.

Let’s hope that this isn’t a precedent.

UPDATE: There are rumours, based on government statements in December, that a national whitelist is planned. Nothing definitive yet.

I had intended to do this myself. But I’ve discovered that I’m back in graduate school full time, so I’m looking for a collaborating programmer who wants to do the majority of the coding. If you have some programming skill and you want to get into web apps, drop me a line!

But mostly, you’ll do this because you think that the world needs better multi-lingual communication. In particular, you want people to be able to keep track of news from places with oppressive internet censorship regimes (Iran, China, some Middle East), and you want the people who live there to be able to have public, real-time conversations with the rest of the world.

(Getting an uncensored internet connection in these places, one that can actually reach Twitter, is a different problem. But believe me, that problem has an active community around it.)

Spaz is written in Adobe Air and will need to call the Google Translate APIs.

I got three immediate answers:

“The West.”

“Japan.”

“Separatists.” (E.g. Tibetans, Uighurs.)

There was instant consensus on this list, among the PRC students. Good to know.

The “Pillar of Shame” is faces: faces in agony, anonymous faces, dead faces. It stands in the plaza of the Student Union of the University of Hong Kong as a monument to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in which hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by the Chinese government. It was installed by students on the tenth anniversary of this sorry event, and the police did not stop them.

This would never fly on the mainland. In China, web searches, blog posts, foreign news broadcasts, and even instant messages about the Tiananamen Square massacre are very closely censored. To erect a monument to something that officially did not happen is unthinkable, not to mention severely punishable.

But Hong Kong is different.

The island was a British colony by treaty with the Chinese for 100 years. The 1997 handover to the Chinese government was peaceful, and Hong Kong became the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” This means that it is under different law. In effect, the Hong Kong Basic Law — drafted jointly by the British and Chinese in the late 1980s — is a completely different constitution for the region. Hong Kong and China even require different entry visas and have different immigration procedures. In particular, mainland Chinese residents are not allowed to live here permanently.

And they might want to! Hong Kong residents enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and guarantees against unwarranted search or detention. The chief executive is not democratically elected, but the legislative council is. The internet is not censored and the economy is officially capitalist.

This arrangement provides a strange vantage point for China observers; it’s China, but also not-China. It’s free, and you can do things here you could never get away with on the mainland. For example, Rebecca MacKinnon of the University of Hong Kong has published some wonderful research on the Chinese internet censorship regime.

The Basic Law is guaranteed by the PRC for 50 years, until 2047. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

[Update May 6 17:00: added information on the context within China's overall internet censorship.]

The thing about censorship is that, when done well, no one really knows what’s being censored. This is why last week’s leaked documents from Baidu, the largest Chinese-langauge search engine and blogging site, are so titillating. Maybe someone screwed up bad, or maybe someone on the inside had an attack of transparency; whatever the reason, we now have a huge pile of documents detailing Baidu’s censorship policy during the period from November 2008 to March 2009. 

Whee!

The documents, now safely ensconed in a permanent home on Wikileaks, reveal for the first time a detailed inventory of the Chinese government’s priorities for, er, harmonization. There is a blacklist of 798 specific URLs, most of which seem to be recent news articles and discussion forum posts on sites both inside and outside of China. Far more interesting is a long list of sensitive keywords. Included policy documents suggest that the appearance of any of these terms in a blog post triggers a manual review by the staff of Baidu’s censorship team — whose names are listed in another of the leaked documents! While some of these topics have long been outright censored, such as “Tiananmen Square,” others are more general categories to be watched. Taken together, these sensitive terms are a fascinating portrait of China’s institutional paranoia.

Some categories are obvious, such as “Taiwan” and “naked chat”. Other areas are shockingly broad, such as “power” and “tyranny.”  Certain media outlets such as Voice of America are considered unacceptable, and “SMS the answer” is forbidden within the “exam information” section. Also, China does not have any ketamine, AIDS, or ethnic conflict, and frowns upon one night stands. The main document of interest begins,

近期重点监控信息

中办发 国办发 温州 鬼村 段桂清 四川广安 广安事件
中组部前部长直言 动物园 集会 涿州 饲养基地 中石油国家电网倒数 张文中 华闻 王政
假冒 记签 校园改造工程 雍战胜 死刑现场 冯巩 陶虹 高勤荣

And I can’t read that either, so below is an automated translation, via The Dark Visitor who clearly used something more formidable than Google Translate. Still, machine translation really doesn’t work as well as one might like, or perhaps “electric chicken” makes perfect sense in context.

To put this all in the larger view, I recommend Rebecca MacKinnon’s excellent research on Chinese blog censorship, where she shows how each blog company implements its own self-censorship regime. The results are very non-uniform, with individual posts allowed or deleted seemingly at random, and certain blog sites censoring much more than others. This is one part of the overall Chinese internet censorship strategy which includes URL keyword blocks, email scanning, shutdowns of certain sites during political events, and of course the Great Firewall which prevents Chinese citizens from accessing Wikipedia, among many other things. (Baidu also runs an equivalent encyclopedia service called Baike which is no doubt heavily sanitized.) It’s not possible to get a complete picture of China’s internet censorship regime from just this one leak, however extensive it might be. Instead, what we have is a narrow but deep window into a previously opaque process.

Note that the 798 blacklisted URLs cannot be considered comprehensive by any means; even Australia has an 1100 URL blacklist, and the 798 URLs seem to be missing porn entirely. The sensitive keyword list likewise cannot be considered definitive; for example, it does not include “Charter 08″ in reference to last year’s pro-democracy manifesto. Hopefully, we will soon have good translations of the leaked policy and personnel documents which will give us a better idea of how these keywords are applied.

More on the leak at the China Digital Times. (And yes, the lead image to this post really does concern censorship in China; see here, or watch the video.)

Without further ado, the leaked list of sensitive keywords, in machine translation with a few manual cleanups.

Reactionary
Communist Party
Producing party
Anti-communist
Anti-G
CPC
Brainwashing
GCD
CCP
GONG Party
Network Special
Tyranny
Dictatorship
China will
Power
Public property party
Voice of America
Free Asia
ddgcd
World War III
Puppet government
Pseudo-big
独夫民贼
Taiwan
A total of X Party
Communist
Do not like party
The demise of socialism
Out a total of
Do not do personnel
Communism sleep
Network blocking
Now the police
Hemosiderosis division
Now the Communist Party
Opposition
The present Government
Shanghai
Today’s society
Land alone
gong chan dang
Total independence
Commemoration of the Cultural Revolution
40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution
Internet police
National Unification Council
Waste Commission
Guidelines for National Unification
Taiwan du
Taiwan independence
China’s human rights
Suppress
The children of the list of senior cadres
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Song
Chiang Kai-shek
Human rights protection
Democracy dictatorship
Taiwan independence
Shanghai independence
Beijing independence
Hong Kong Independent
Return to Mongolia
The party now
Zhang Zhixin
China
Hate China
One-party power
Government incompetence
Weak diplomacy
One-party interests
One-party dictatorship
Quit
Dictatorship
Freedom of expression
Olympic outsiders
Capital
Alliance party
Bandits
A total of thieves
Chinese Party
The second capital
Death of the party
Administration
Public Order now
Anti-party
Anti-socialist
Total death
The party now
Hao Xin years
Who is the New China
Anti-party
Min pig
Aparine, as   

Information on various types of human rights petition
Procession
Demonstration
Petition
Assembly
Rights
Strike
Buyout
Aggregation
Of demobilized army officers
Letters
Rebel
Land
Off
Demolition
Investors
AIDS
Sit -
Riots
Democratic
Demobilization
Impact on the masses
Clashes with police
Collective protest
Violence, assaulting a police officer
The use of force to suppress
Armed repression
Dai Jing
Ryan incident
8.18
9.12 events
Yuan Weimin
Migrant workers
Wei said
Forcing people to rebel
Criminal and Law Enforcement
A cops and robbers
A gang officer
Guangan
School burglary action
Everlasting Regret laid-off workers

64 events
Tiananmen Square
HE Xin
Atrocities
Riots
Unrest
The massacre of students
The suppression of students
Zhao Ziyang
89 years
Square incident
Demeanor of blood
17 years ago
89 events
89’s
Goddess of democracy
Bloodshed
tiananmen
2089
The killing of student
Student
Student leaders
89
Events
1989
In a matter
The wounds of history
24 events
64
6 4
Four events
6.4
6 d
4 events
89 storm
liusi
8964
8964
Pro-democracy movement
xuechao
Political turmoil
Beijing storm
tusha
Xidan Democracy Wall
Ziyang
TAM
64 period
Lu IV
CAI Ling
I Fall to open the West
Kaixi
Rivers of Sorrow
Kaixi

Falun Gong and the cult
Eastern Lightning
Li Hong Zhi
Act in a reactive
Made of
flg
Gong FL
Gong wheels
Act X-Gong
Act On
Since the fen
Falun
9 ping
9ping
Lee Hong-X
Possession of stone words
Self-immolation
Cult
LHZ
falun
With nine
Nine Commentaries
9 Comments
Fa Lun
Fa-lun
囵fat
Fat theory
Law theory
fa round
Law lun
Law L
Fallon
9 Ping
Act O-gong
Law 0 Zhigong
The Epoch Times
Big brothel
DJY
DONG Yuan-chen
Falun Gong
Xiao-Ying Li
In reactive
Gong Chinese health puzzle
Zhang Hong Bao
Zhang Hongbao
Shadow government
jiuping
李洪智
Li wheels
zifen
Gao Zhisheng
FL Dafa
Law Lun Gong
Dafa disciples
XX Gong
Li Hong hemorrhoids
Fat round
Cart Lun Law
Unbounded
Free community
Free gate
9 impeach
Sujiatun
Free gate
Check kidney in vivo
Lee x

Relatives of national leaders and important
Hu Jintao
Wu Bangguo
Wen Jiabao
Jia Qinglin
Zeng Qinghong
Huang Ju
Wu
Li Changchun
Luo Gan
Liu
Zhou Yongkang
He Guoqiang
Wang Gang
Xu Caihou
He Yong
Wang
Wang
Hui Liangyu
Liu Qi
Wu Yi
Zhang
Zhang
Chen Liangyu
Yu Zhengsheng
Guo
Cao
Zeng
Deng dog
xiaoping
Tang Dwarfs
Deng Xiaoping
Hu
Ma Ying-jeou
Hu Yaobang
Hu Yaobang
Jiang pig
Lee Teng-hui
刘亚洲
History Jiuwu
Hu Haiqing
Gu Yue Tao金帛

Ethnic issues
Anti-Japanese
Indonesia
屠华
Visit
Japanese
Siege
Yasukuni
A boycott of Japanese goods
Out on
Honker Union
Shina
Tragedy
98 China
Tibet
Xinjiang
Islamic
East Turkistan
Ethnic issues
Whip Man
Return to Mongolia
Ethnic conflict
Back to Han conflict
North Campus BBS
Poor people
Inferior peoples
Jihad
Tibetan shooting

Military secrets
Seven military
7 Military
Navy deployment
Army deployment
Air force deployment
Compiled with the base
Stand and tasks
8023 units
Forces
Army
Fleet Four
Exam Information
Too easy
SMS the answer
Leakage problem
46
Stealth headphones
Volume density test
Cheating in Examinations
Voice transmission
Wireless Headset
The answer examinations
6 answers
Paul had
Help test
Actinoplanes
Generation of test
Send answer
Class answer
Smooth over
4 answers
Test
Gunman
CET
Three answer
Join Us
After the payment test
Packets have been
Test answer
Provide answers
The sale of the answer
With test
Scott
Judicial Examination
Writing paper
Title charge
Fake diploma

The sale of organs
Compensated renal
Transplant
Contributions paid
Kidney health
卖肾
Buy kidney
Kidney Source
For renal
Cornea
The sale of organs
The sale of kidneys
Blood
Paid blood donors

Illegal information
Listening device
One-night stand
Surrogacy
Triazolam
Poppy seeds
Smuggled vehicles
Accreditation
ONS
Ketamine
Slot machine
Ecstasy
On behalf of the development of votes
Selling guns
买枪
Ether
Lonely woman
So bomb
Agency documents
Simulation-like
仿真枪
Electric dog
Gas dog
Electric Chicken
Mass suicide
Employment killer
切腹
Counterfeit money
The sale of guns
Recruitment plan
K powder
Ice
Heroin
Ecstasy
The recruitment of men
Pregnancy to help people
Firearms
Electric baton
To recruit younger
Boy collection
Thanks brother
Social mix
Listener
Recruit people to help
Monitor phone
迷药
嗑药
To buy genuine
Steal qq
Steal password
Stolen card number
Ones
Second-generation ID card
Bank Card
国办发
Made in the Office
The acquisition of antiquities
Unlock
ID cards for sale
蒙汗药

Sex information
Gregaria
Sex
Wife Swap
包养
Sexual partners
Services
Oral sex
屁眼
Milk delivery
肉棒
Vagina
Labia
Bestiality
Dogs pay
Base pay
Evening bag
Full pay
富婆
富姐
Breast
Foam Friends
Mother and son incest
No Code
A night of passion
Sexual intercourse
Dunem force
Show women
Toilet slave
Taiwan do
Paid services
Sexual partners
You pay
See JJ
Passion telephone
Passion Personals
Phone Dating
Nude chat
Slaves
Male slave
Million overnight
Prostitution
Ms. services
口淫
Of interest
Aphrodisiac
Husband and wife exchange
Looking for female
Find M
开苞
Sex
Small film
h Man
h map
陪聊

Liu Xiaobo is now imprisoned at an uknown location for his involvement in the Charter ’08 document

On December 10, 2008, a group of 300 Chinese dissidents published an open letter (english translation) to the Chinese government  calling for wide political freedoms and basic human rights in their country. Although this document has become the vegetarian dinner party topic du jour among Western activists, it’s not at all clear whether it will have any impact in China. For one thing, the Chinese government has censored it, removing it from Baidu and Google and even individual blogs. The internet being the internet, people are reading and talking about it anyway, but this only matters if the Chinese populace in general is sympathetic to the notion of government reform and greater personal rights. They may not be.

The letter, known as Charter ’08, was released on December 10th, the 60th Anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The truly sad part is, you already know what happened next: those behind it were immediately detained, arrested, imprisoned. The text itself might be considered measured and scholarly in the West, but must be interpreted as incredibly harsh and insolent in the Chinese context, if no other reason than because it is direct criticism in a country where “inciting subversion of state power” is frequently invoked:

After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance.

…

The ruling power monopolizes all the political, economic and social resources. It created a string of human rights catastrophes such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, June 4, and attacks on non-governmental religious activities and on the rights defense movement, causing tens of millions of deaths, and exacted a disastrous price on the people and the country.

The Charter names freedom, human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy and constitutionalism as “fundamental concepts,” and calls for the immediate provision of 19 different rights and reforms, including such standard (to a Westerner) concepts as election of public officials for all regions and freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and political affiliation. It also addresses more China-specific issues, such as “urban and rural equality” and “citizen education: abolish political education and examinations that are deeply ideological and serve one-party rule.”

The arrests last month made international news, although the actual text does not appear to have been widely available until The New York Review of Books published their English translation on January 15th, followed by a more graceful translation by the group Human Rights in China. Although new coverage has fallen off dramatically since then, a search on Technorati shows that the story has percolated quite steadily through the English-language blogosphere for the last month. This is exactly the sort of stuff that Western activists love — but what does it actually mean within China?

Apparently, despite the censorship attempts the document acquired an additional 5000 signatures within the first week, which is, on one hand, a stunning number of acts of sedition. On the other hand, there are over a billion people in China, and so far the government seems to be handily winning the information war. A full month after the letter, Uln Dice of Chinayouren wrote,

The fact is that Charter 08 is still an unknown movement in mainland China. Out of 5 local friends I asked, all with university degrees and fluent English, even today only one of them had heard the term (but knew no details). As for the majority of Chinese who live out of the cities and don’t use the internet, there is no way they can have heard about it.

Ultimately, there are too many factors at play here to tell what the effect of Charter 08 will be, if any. The best detailed analysis that I’ve seen is Rebecca MacKinnon’s piece on her blog. It’s in English, by a Westerner, but one who speaks Chinese and actually has frequent contact with Chinese citizens, and I must recommend it highly. There are many reasons why Charter ’08 might have little effect. One  key factor is perhaps the receptiveness of the population itself: if the document truly resonates with the populace, no amount of censorship can stop it. But as I have written  previously, it’s a mistake to assume that the average Chinese person actually feels any need for Western value imports such as freedom or democracy; the rural poor are more concerned with getting their fair share quick, and the emerging middle class are happy with the status quo, reaping the benefits of China’s growing economy. Further, Chinese culture is firmly rooted in the Confucian “father knows best” ethic and the corresponding reliance on an all-knowing emperor, which can make the notion of “government by the people” sound like anarchy. The authors of Charter ’08 — no fools — are aware of the need for a cultural shift, writing:

The only fundamental way out for China: citizens should become the true masters of the nation, by throwing off the consciousness of reliance on a wise ruler or honest and upright official.

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

FCC Chairman Newton Minow gave this speech in 1961, decrying the state of the medium that many had hoped would bring new light to humanity. What is to say that the Internet will not sink into the same mediocrity?

There are differences, of course. The internet is (currently) very much an active, two-way medium; the internet is (currently) a very democratic place, where anyone can espouse their worldview to the whole world for only the effort of typing. And the internet is (currently) far too large and diverse to be effectively controlled by any particular corporate or goverment interest.

But I have a morbid interest in dystopia; and already I see signs that not everyone realizes what freedoms we could lose. Like bad science fiction, here are a few scenarios where the internet fails to live up to its almost obscene promise, where it becomes just another “vast wasteland.”

The Telcos Tell us What To Watch

YouTube sucks. The bandwidth is so damn low; they’re too cheap to pay for proper 3D transmission. I’d rather watch the big ‘V’ — you know, the ViABNBCNNFox channel. I guess they get a volume discount on bandwidth. Good thing that Net Neutrality legislation didn’t pass or it would be even more expensive for them.

Useful Information Ends up Costing Money

There used to be a free encyclopedia, but now it’s subscription only. So is the Library of Congress Catalog, now that it’s been privatized. Of course, online academic and scientific journals have always been restricted; there was a brief flash of interest in open-access Journals in the 2000s, but no one really seemed to care, so the idea died. It’s fine though, since everyone can still read these things; it just takes a few bucks. Everyone can read them in this country anyway. There are subsidies in other places for citizen access. I think.

Intellectual Property Law Serves Satan

No, you can’t show those Citibank documents to your friends — they’re all protected by copyright and trade secret law in perpetuity. Of course it’s legal; intellectual property laws serve the public good by creating incentives for content creation. Why, without copyright law, why, our information-scape would be severely impoverished! Incidentally, this is also why Wikileaks was shut down.

We Forget the Developing World, Again

BBC World News 12 July 2025:

Internet Still not Useful in Africa

A new study released today by UNDP Africa showed that despite a decade of near-uibiqutous access to the internet, those living in African nations are still ten times less likely than their European or Asian peers to consult the web for news, information, or services. “The problem is media formats,” explained the study’s author. “Africans access the web on their phones through the existing 5G mobile networks. The screens are very small, so most web pages don’t view well. Also, most of the major news sources and reference works are poorly represented in native African languages.”

Search Monopoly Goes Bad
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 never happened. If they did exist, where is the record? There’s nothing in the national archives in Bejing, and you can’t find it on Google. What do you mean, check another search engine? Hey look: it says here we’ve now at war with Eurasia!

The Mainstream Wins

Yeah, of course I’m online. Er, I really just use MySpace and Facebook. There are other big sites out there I guess, but I’ve never heard too much about them. I mean they never have any games or whatever.

We Had Stars in Our Eyes

We thought that everyone having free access to the world’s information was enough. We were so dazzled by our new collective intelligence, we never thought of what else might be important. And that is the subject of my next article.

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/how-the-internet-can-fail/feed 1 http://jonathanstray.com/chinese-american-fairness http://jonathanstray.com/chinese-american-fairness#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:00:41 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=21 There was an ad on the Muni, on the 30 through Chinatown, printed in English and Chinese. It was a public service announcement, warning people to beware of hustlers selling fake visas. Among other things, there was a bullet point that said,

Don’t believe anyone who says ‘we know people at the immigration service and can get your papers done quickly.

I imagine talking to a Chinese immigrant about this. I imagine their confusion. “But,” my friend Ming says, “it is very difficult to get a visa. If they know someone, this solves the problem.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I’d tell him.

Ming blinks his confusion. How can it not work like that? If he had an uncle at the service, there wouldn’t be any problem. It was his cousin at China Airlines who got him the reservation from Bejing to San Francisco in the first place.

“It’s not like that. In America, it doesn’t matter who you know at the INS. Everyone has to wait in line just the same way.”

“Impossible.”

“It’s a fair system.”

“It’s not fair,” says Ming. “Helping the people in your family is fair. Helping your friends and business relations is fair. Treating them just like strangers is terribly, terribly…” He hunts for the word but there’s no English translation. It’s stronger than “rude,” more formal than “impolite.” It’s simply not done.

But this idea that status doesn’t buy you anything when it comes to rights — this is important to me. I This must have something to do equality, I think, with democracy even. How do I get across to him that this is right? “Ming,” I say, “in China, if you don’t know anyone important — say you’re a worker in a factory, or a cycle-rickshaw driver — then you don’t have a chance when dealing with the government. In our system, everyone has at least a little chance.”

“In your ‘fair’ system, they have no chance anyway,” he says sourly. “Chinese way is better.”

My turn to boggle. “How can you support the patronage society like that? How can you be for a system that is to the disadvantage of just about everyone who isn’t wealthy and powerful?”

Ming stares at me hard. “If you want a nice house in America, how do you get it?”

“Uhh… you buy it, I guess.”

“And this is fair?”

“Well, everyone has an equal opportunity to buy it.”

“Except those with no money,” he points out.

I blink. “But how else could you do it? You don’t just build a beautiful home and then give it away to your friends!”

“Why not?”

“What?”

“How,” he asks me, “can you support the market system like that? How can you be for something that is to the disadvantage of everyone except the wealthy and powerful?”

“No fair,” I tell him.