I meant to post a link but couldn’t remember how to spell Tiananmen Square. Not only is information scrubbed but the Chinese Government went after political targets by illegally tapping into their email accounts.
This article claims that the US has officially hurt China’s feelings 27 times, along with an interesting explanation of why China is unique in using the “hurt feelings” angle in diplomacy.
Information can cause problems. If you have a ferry boat, and one passenger hits another, this alone would not cause the boat to tip, but the information that a fight has broken out flew free and all the people on the ferry run to see the fight and this overturns the ferry and hundreds die. It was the free flow of information that can be implicated, not the damage done by two sets of fists. It is perfectly rational that the government would want to control the flow of information.
I had co-workers in mainland China. The one time anyone asked me to look on google for news for them, what they wanted to know about was at the outbreak of swine flu, how bad it was known to be in China. It happened that what I could tell them did match what they had heard from official sources, which was not all that bad.
In this case, the problem would have been solved by more information being available, e.g. “Don’t go over there or the boat will tip and you’ll die.”
How does this show that the needs of the individual are subservient to those of society? If anything, I think it demonstrates the opposite – namely, that the people in question will place their own well being over those of society. That is, unless an inconvenient traffic cop or camera happens to be nearby.
I was going to criticize the example as being rather contrived myself, but then it occured to me that the Chinese goal of information suppression really is to avoid people “rocking the boat”. Keeping in mind, of course that if the boat swamped it wouldn’t just be because the people moved in reaction to information - it’ll be because the government rocked back to retain the status quo with everyone (particularly themselves) in the proper position.
The information that if everyone goes to one side, then the ferry will likely tip is available to any who can observe and reason. The knowledge that people tend to rush to see a fight is also readily available and likely already known to those rushing to the fight. You can’t solve the problem by providing more information which everyone already has. The problem for those on the ferry is that people react to information without thinking through the consequences, especially of the consequences for everyone reacting the same way.
The example comes straight from ferries which capsized in Asia and other places. Also I think it is narrow minded to think that all that the government is trying to do is prevent people from rocking the boat and that the only damage is done by the government retaliation. While that is almost certainly part of their agenda, there are bits of other information that they might believe would cause a dangerous panic or some other harm that they want to censor. Rumors that a bank was about to fold can cause a bank that would have otherwise been sound to fold. People trying to escape a disease outbreak can cause the spread of the disease they are fleeing and could turn an outbreak into a pandemic.
If this were seriously a problem, the US and western europe would be smoking ruins. Can information sometimes exascerbate a problem? Sure. Does this risk justify an information lockdown?
Well, not in America, certainly. We have a constitution which ensures freedom of speech. But that is a value we have adopted not because it always has the best result but rather because we value freedom, or at least did when we ratified the bill of rights. I doubt it would pass if it were re-proposed today.
A lot of western Europe has been in smoking ruins at various times, the Depression was also pretty nasty. Bank runs based on rumor have wiped out many life savings, just as ferries have capsized. Free flowing information can cause and exacerbate problems.
I don’t really care if government has benign intentions in censorship, I still don’t want my government to censor and am quite glad I have constitutional rights to free assembly and free speech. China does not, as far as I know. Does the the risk justify information lock down? Apparently China thinks it does.
And personally, I think they’re wrong.
I think a better analogy of the free flow of information is what happens when a river is dammed up. Eventually the pressure builds until the truth breaks through in a torrent, bringing down all those who conspired to hold it back.
Personally, I was glad when Google announced that they could no longer go along with the Chinese government’s censorship. I understand some reasons the Chinese government would like to censor, and I think it is important for us to realize that there can be real, valid reasons they would want to rather than making the Chinese government into a one dimensional evil caricature.
But, I think that it is not realistic that they will be able to participate fully in the global economy and maintain the stranglehold on the flow of information. I mentioned a co-worker asking me to look up something. There are thousands (millions?) of such people who communicate with co-workers outside of China. These communications are often over encrypted channels in real time and monitoring all content is simply not feasible. That is just the explicit communications channels. Any shared resource can be used as a method of communication whether intended for that purpose or not.
One thing no one mentioned about the ferry analogy is how difficult it would be to stop that information from flowing in order to prevent the mad rush to watch the fight. You could preemptively put up barriers that would prevent people from actually moving to another part of the ferry, or barriers that blocked line of sight, but blocking sound would not be easy and any barriers add cost. Barriers which are strong enough to prevent the stampede would likely hamper loading and unloading and reduce capacity. Magiver, I think that is an excellent analogy of what tends to happen when information is blocked. In the ferry analogy, imagine line of sight barriers were put up. Any commotion might lead to a panic and if the barriers were not strong, they might be overcome and the ferry tipped.
Oh, for Chrissake, “brutally oppressing” Tibetans? I’m so sick of this false spin. I’ve visited Tibet and have never seen anything of the sort. Decimation of an entire culture? Yeah, that’s why 95% of ethnic Tibetans are literate in Tibetan, whereas only 3 percent (the lama class) were before 1951. That’s why Han Chinese cadres need to speak through translators to their Tibetan employees. That’s why 少数民族 birthrates will dwarf those of Han in minority areas.
China Guy knows what he’s talking about: reality on the ground here in China hardly ever matches the Western news reports of it.
My solution would be to require ferrys to have a wider hull, therefore making them more difficult to tip over. There are lots of reasons why the people on the boat might rush to one side. Fire would be one example that restricting information won’t stop.
Wider hull? It seems like that would only make the lever arm longer and allow a smaller percentage of total capacity to have the capacity to capsize the whole shebang.
That would be a wider deck, not a wider hull. True, the decks below the main one would be wider, but being lower in the craft, they would exert less leverage. Heck, if it’s really a problem, require catamarans.
So applying that back to the situation in China, you think it is better that the Chinese government take steps to make sure that the free flow of information doesn’t cause things to go all topsy-turvy instead of limiting the information flow? I too think that is best, but I don’t expect that view to gain traction with the Chinese government any time soon.
There was a lengthy article on Yahoo News today about just how much Chinese netizens DON’T care about a Google pull-out. Not even an issue over here.