“But how will you do research?”
This was one of the most common questions I got before going to Beijing. Research in a think-tank requires having access to a large range of sources, much of it political. Yet a lot of popular sources remain blocked in China by the Great Firewall – Google, the BBC, the NY Times – just to name a few. A think-tank will not be able to do a lot of ‘thinking’ if all its sources are a sycophantic chorus of sanitised information.
Turns out, the office Internet is routed through Hong Kong, so we had unfettered access to the interwebs. Most commercial businesses also use VPN services to “climb over” the Firewall. All this is no surprise – but what about individuals?
“Climbing over” the Firewall is nothing new for most of the Mainland Chinese people I’ve met. Twitter, which is blocked in China, estimates that they have 10 million China-based users.[1] Obviously, all the people I’ve met have either studied abroad or have worked in an international company, where they would have had company VPNs. With an increasing number of Chinese people working, studying and travelling abroad, who exactly is the Great Firewall keeping in?
Internet censorship is, I think, ultimately about class. The people who are aware of, care about, and can afford[2] having open access to the internet are also likely to be the ones who are happy or at least apathetic about the status quo. After all, they are the ones who are doing OK in the system. Under the new social contract of state capitalism, this is the new bourgeoisie. With this unrestricted access, they know what’s going on. When asked about certain problems in the country, they will often quote propagandistic phrases in a satirical tone, using the government’s own words to transgress against itself.
One is tempted to ask, why hasn’t anyone done something more? I guess we must remind ourselves that complacency through cooption is universal – go to any liberal campus and you’ll find a healthy population of champagne socialists (I was/probably still am one of them).[3]
The other reason is that this group is still a tiny minority in China. A report from the Berkman Centre at Harvard shows that only 3% of the population in countries with Internet censorship tries to circumvent it. While the actual number is probably higher in China, that is still a minority.
The final reason is simply because people aren’t interested. We don’t want Facebook because it’s Facebook, we want Facebook because its part of our social ecosystem. If you’ve grown up in a completely different ecosystem, Facebook is kind of useless. The same goes for news sources – China has its own epistemic and social ecosystem, and people are (understandably) more comfortable in that one than they are in a foreign one. The same Berkman report suggests that over 95% of site visits in China are to sites hosted in China.[4]
Indeed, the area where people are trying their hardest to circumvent the censors has nothing to do with the news or social media. It’s the most often visited but never talked about area of the Internet – porn. Porn is blocked in China, but anyone who thinks one of the most powerful governments on earth can stand between a person and their porn is deluded. By 2012, the streaming app Kuaibao,[5] which hosted a lot of porn, was downloaded 300 million times, when there were only 540 million Internet users in China.[6] It was shut down in 2014, but netizens still come up with ingenious ways to circumvent the censors – such as inventing a whole new set of vocabulary.[7] If you want a large group of people who don’t like government censorship, this is your group.
So where does that leave us? I’m not sure, but it seems like the greatest ally we have in the struggle for a free Internet is the clichéd bespectacled teenage boy in his bedroom with his underwear around his feet.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/05/twitter-estimates-that-it-has-10-million-users-in-china/
[2] VPN services are not expensive per se, but it adds up – and there are only a few providers that have reliable service in China, and those tend to be the expensive ones.
[3] Probably a topic for another essay
[4] http://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.harvard.edu/files/2010_Circumvention_Tool_Usage_Report.pdf
[5] It doesn’t only host porn
[6] https://qz.com/1001366/how-the-chinese-watch-porn-on-chinas-censored-internet/
[7] https://qz.com/1001366/how-the-chinese-watch-porn-on-chinas-censored-internet/
Life on the Wall 