Cultural evolution

Chinese Internet Control Features

The Chinese authorities know what they are doing and rely, if not on the support of the majority of the country's citizens, then on their consent when they block access to certain online resources. However, reports that there is strict censorship on the Internet in China have been greatly exaggerated.

There is no sex, but there is porn

“Eastern society, which includes Chinese society, has retained a rather conservative view of sex,” says sinologist, head of the Asia department of the joint directorate of international cooperation of RIA Novosti Irina Iskakova. In China, as once in the Soviet Union, there is no sex, and children are brought by the stork. The reason for the active fight against pornography must be sought in the traditional moral principles of the Chinese, the expert believes. The country is simply trying to maintain public morality and ethics at the proper level.

The first decision to close individual sites was made by the Chinese government in the spring of 2006 - as many as six sites with obscene content were blocked. According to the government, the sites posed a threat to the health and lifestyle of the Chinese population.

An active fight against the porn industry on the Chinese Internet began in 2007. 44 thousand websites were closed, and 868 people associated with them were arrested. The year 2009 began in China with a month of fight against porn sites; 700 resources with obscene content have already been identified and blocked.

These measures, however, do not at all isolate the Celestial Empire from the porn industry.

In the fight against online porn, the government is losing. “There is still as much pornography here as you want, because you can’t block everything,” says 1C general representative in Asia Maxim Mikhalev, who has been living in China for several years.

Dissidents are easier to deal with

Another front in the Chinese authorities' fight against the Internet is political. In March 2008, China blocked websites reporting on riots in Lhasa, the administrative center of Tibet. The resources blocked by the government included YouTube, Yahoo News, Times Online, and Wikipedia. The blockade lasted several days. But to this day in China it is useless to ask Google what Tibetan independence is.

The horrors of censorship on the Chinese Internet are exaggerated by the press, says Maxim Mikhalev: “In fact, most reports about censorship on the Chinese Internet are canards. Six months ago, some joker told Lenta.ru that in China, when you visit a Google page, you are automatically redirected to the Chinese search engine Baidu.cn. Now, in any article about China, this misinformation is faithfully reprinted. Political materials are indeed often blocked. If you enter the words “Tibet Independence” in the search bar on Google, the search engine disappears somewhere along with the links. But access to the website kavkazcenter.com is unhindered, no one here will delete links to the mock execution of Dagestanis and Tajiks, and people will not be sent to prison for denying the Holocaust. You can also write whatever you want about Syktyvkar policemen in blogs, the prosecutor’s office will not be interested in this. So, with political censorship here, everything is no worse and no better than in our country or Europe.”

The fight for online independence

At the same time as the fight against obscenity on the Internet, a campaign to prevent Internet addiction was launched in China in 2007. Among other things, the authorities promised to encourage research and development that would prevent the manifestation of such mental disorders in children. The matter came to the adoption of appropriate procedural norms. For example, an amendment to the law on the protection of minors was adopted. Its goal is to encourage software developers to create programs that limit the time a user spends in an online game.

Last year, China recognized addiction to virtual space as an official disease. Experts announced the figures: every tenth of the 253 million users in the Middle Kingdom suffers from the mentioned mental disorder to one degree or another, and 70% are young people.

Citizens don't mind

The people of China themselves pay little attention to Internet censorship. Firstly, they simply have nothing to compare with. “Most Chinese have never been to the USA or Europe and, accordingly, have never seen how the Internet works there,” says Irina Iskakova. - Secondly, under communist conditions it is simply not accepted to express protests against government initiatives. After all, everything is done for the benefit of the working people.”

“The Chinese are extremely ethnocentric and most of them don't even care that the BBC exists, for example. They found out about this only after this respected television company began broadcasting materials about Tibet that have nothing to do with reality. The reaction of Internet users to Western media was about the same as what we had during the conflict in Ossetia, so if the government had not blocked them, they would have suffered a sad fate. Chinese hackers also know how to work, and their dislike of Western sites is much stronger than that of the government. Therefore, the authorities do not even need to explain their actions; the majority of the population supports them. And those who don’t support them still find a way to watch what they need. So the problem of censorship is mostly far-fetched,” testifies Maxim Mikhalev.

What the Chinese authorities are doing, limiting the country's citizens' access to network resources, may well be considered, therefore, a manifestation of Chinese cultural tradition. This tradition is just different from the European one.





Prepared jointly with iToday.ru

Olga FEDINA, iToday.ru, - specially for Vremya Novostei