Saturday, October 20, 2007
the great (fire)wall
Now that I'm out of the country, a quick note about blogging in China. When I first arrived in Beijing and tried to update this blog for the first time there, I discovered that for some reason I couldn't seem to load my blog's URL on any computer in the city, including the laptop that Fish's luxury hotel had provided him with (at no extra charge!). Soon after I discovered that I also couldn't view any pictures on flickr.com, where I had been posting our photos before embedding them in the blog! Then I found out that I also couldn't load wikipedia.org anywhere! Turns out China has all these internet firewalls set up around the country, which block a variety of sites that the government has deemed dangerous (flickr.com, for instance, had just started being blocked right before Maya's and my arrival, and the word on the street was that this was because someone had posted old photos from Tiennamen Square on the site. Rumor also has it that a couple of U.S. companies helped China set up the firewalls in the first place). What makes the whole thing even more fascinating is that just about all the Chinese people know how to get around the firewalls - there's a variety of sites, like stupidcensorship.com, that enable you to load the blocked sites within the country. It's a telling phenomena - China is full of rules and restrictions, but few are actually enforced or difficult to get around. As Eveline said (much to my surprise at the time, but now that I've spent a month is China, it makes some sense), "I feel more free in China than I did in America."
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i am reading this book called "china road" by rob gifford, an NPR correspondent, right now, & just came across a passage that perfectly illustrates the paradox of greater freedom in this unfree state:
We talk about how practical and unideological the Chinese are. I tell them of the time I visited a racetrack outside Beijing where people were clearly placing bets on horses. I was astounded to discover that this was going on, since gambling is illegal in China. I thought I would give it a try too, so I approached what looked like the betting window and said that I would like to place a bet. The woman told me that I couldn't place a bet (betting is illegal in China, she confirmed), but if I wanted to, I could place a guess on one of the horses.
A guess! I could place a guess on a horse! So I put down twenty yuan ($2.50) and stood cheering the horse on, hoping that my guess would win me some money. The horse didn't win, but it didn't matter. I would have paid a lot more than $2.50 for the experience and what it told me about modern China. That a horse-race track (not some secret basement gambling joint but an out-in-the-open, everyone-can-see-you horse-race track) was able to operate openly, taking bets on horses, simply by calling the bets something else is quite fantastic. And so it is with China's political or economic system. Call it "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Call it whatever you want. If the Communist Party needs a semantic fig leaf, that's fine, even though everyone knows that, in many parts of China, it is in fact raw industrial capitalism.
and, sorry to make this comment so freaking long, but here is another passage from the book that gives the author's take on why things are like this:
After the killing of the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Communist Party leaders made an unwritten, unspoken deal with the people of China: stay out of politics, and you can do anything you want.
speaking of tiananmen, it reminds me of things like how at the magazine you can't say something like, "she moved back to China after Tiananmen" but you can say "she moved back to China after 1989" even though anyone reading that knows what it really means. or how you can't call taiwan "foreign," since it is supposed to be part of china, but you *can* call it "overseas" because it literally is over a sea.
and yeah, you just do NOT feel the presence of the government at all in everyday life here, whereas in the US i feel like you actually do.
okay this is so freaking long maybe i should actually just post it on my blog...
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