China Fears Citizens Experiencing Free Speech

There is a great post at fiLi’s world today about Chinese internet censorship that ends with an excerpt from an ESWN translated quote of a Tsinghua University researcher/BBS user from back in 2005. I’ve republished the original quote in its entirety here:

My second translation is from an individual by the user name of BorlandKylix who was able to post this item briefly on SMTH on March 18, 2005. The takeaway point here is that SMTH is an information hub for research and development. Such BBS’s must be considered integral to research advancement in China, and it is counterproductive to prevent interaction with the rest of the world.

“I have been holding back for so long. Since the people above want to defeat on us today, I am going to speak these words no matter what the consequences are for me.

“Listen, brother, this is the information age. Understand? The information age! The most important thing in the information age is information, and that means the civil right to obtain useful information through widely available, equitable, legal and rapid public channels of information.

“I was willing to tolerate the problem about the exchange of information between China and the outside world in the case of Google. Do you know the importance of the search engine which is the soul of the Internet? I work on building robots, and I have to spend hundreds of dollars a month on getting chips. It is so hard to find a good datasheet on the specifications of DSP chips. If I cannot search effectively, what kind of research can I be expected to do?

“What are you saying? You tell me to use that Baidu search engine built inside China? That fucking thing might be good for finding song lyrics, but it is not good for any serious work. Can you look for a self-balancing robot on two wheels? On Google, I can find the design diagrams and creative ideas of foreigners. On Baidu, all I find are items on sale. How do you expect me to fucking find any knowledge from between the teeth of these lying merchants?

“All these are minor matters that I know how to handle. But what is it about our SMTH that caused you to want to destroy it?

“You must think that a bunch of us have nothing to do than hang out on the BBS trying to pick up girls. If SMTH was full of these idle people, I would even support you to turn it off and take the server home to use as a closet. But no matter how bad we were, we technicians are still able to show some stuff every day. Do you not see that the Circuit board has questions such as how to connect the Max 232 and so on every day? No matter what, we can still say that we were contributing something towards the GDP.

“With the shutdown, there are just a few of us left. How are we do exchange academic knowledge and compare our technologies?

“Furthermore, even if SMTH was good for nothing, were we doing anything evil? Were we investigating how to build car bombs? Were we discussing about starting riots? Were we drug-raping underage girls? Were we assembling to watch late night strip shows on the board?

“All we wanted was to find a place to say something that was quite useless!

“What made you so scared and afraid?

“Were you afraid that the girls at the Top Ten page would fight to gain friends and become morally degenerate?

“Were you afraid that women won’t get along with their mother-in-laws on the Family page, or husbands fighting with their wives?

“Were you afraid of the photographs being posted at the Fuyong page?

“Were you afraid of the sign-ins on my personal guest page?

“We are all only small people and poor students. These days, it is so hard to find a job now and housing is so expensive. We have received some form of higher education. We don’t hate socialism. We are not opposed to peace. We don’t long for capitalist liberalism. We don’t support the democratic movement. We are not sympathetic towards the FLG. We can discern rumors. And we may sometimes have impure thoughts when we see the photograph of a pretty woman with big breasts.

“I don’t understand how a group of reasonable people in a BBS community, a server that is only a feet tall and several tens of thousands of accounts would pose a grave danger to our great country, our glorious party and the historically illustrious Tsinghua University campus?

“Please! This is the information age! If people want to know something, you won’t be able to hide it. If people don’t want to know something, it will be useless for you to force it upon them. There was no need to impose this Internet blockade again. If you have a chance, you should visit the Wiki, the blogs and personal pages outside of China. Their EE undergraduate majors have programmable modules and their robots are running all over the place. Furthermore, they even post their technologies for others to study. Meanwhile, our EE graduate students don’t even know how to connect the VCC in the 74 series. SMTH had a technology area. It may not have a high quality standard, but at least it was done by the Chinese. Why can’t we let the people of China and the rest of the world look at it?

“SMTH was not evil, and there was no need to move on it.

“The Cold War has been over many years ago.

“We are several years into the 21st century already.

“We are many years behind the West.

“Please remove the shit out of your head!

“Please spare SMTH!”

All of WordPress.com is blocked. As of late last week all of LiveJournal is blocked. All of Wikipedia is blocked.

However, the vast majority of content on these sites, as with the content of the SMTH BBS, is completely unrelated to anything that the Chinese government fears. Is there really a need for this overkill? The Chinese government has sufficient technology to selectively filter content it deems threatening while allowing other content on the same domain or the same website to be accessible. For example, Typepad is unblocked, but Letters From China, a China translation blog hosted on Typepad, is blocked. Does the Chinese government have a need to fear unthreatening content? No, there is no good reason to fear unthreatening content. Why then is the Chinese government blocking so much unthreatening content? Because it is full of decision makers who know little about the internet and thus fear the unknown? Because old habits die hard?

Maybe, but I think there is an even more relevant reason.

What the Chinese government fears most is the model, not the content. It is easy enough to spread propaganda lambasting what a terrible thing free speech can be in theory, but it may be hard to get people to agree on this point when there is a free, highly accessible, actual working model of free speech in practice for people to experience.

The current situation exists that many Chinese people are either apathetic towards free speech or think free speech is a bad thing. However, one thing most Chinese people do not have is any actual experience with free speech. By denying Chinese people that experience the Chinese government keeps the Chinese people from having any reasonable incentive to strongly question or change their opinions about free speech.

Before the late nineties this was simple, because few Chinese people travelled to a country with a free press and it was very easy for the Chinese government to control the media in China. The problem now, however, is that real platforms now exist for Chinese people to experience free speech, platforms such as uncensored BBS, Wikipedia, LiveJournal and WordPress.com. The Chinese government’s primary goal in blocking these sites is not to block content, but to block the experience of free speech.

Reread each of the questions the author raises in the above quote and answer to yourself, “We are not afraid of what you said or did. We do not care much what you say or do. In fact, you said nothing wrong. You did nothing wrong. We have closed your BBS for one simple reason. We are afraid that you will experience free speech.”

Tags GFW, Internet Censorship, China, Free Speech

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