Anna’s Out of Town News

It seems that foreigners and locals in China live in parallel universes when it comes to information access. Yale’s VPN allows me to freely surf the Internet, while the Chinese teenagers have been Facebook-less for the past month or so. But the access-to-information gap is about much more than that.

I recently went to a talk with Lijia Zhang, the author of Socialism is Great. Her book is not banned in China, but as a Chinese, you will likely not hear about it. Only stores that stock Western literature offer it in China;  most Chinese don’t shop there. When The New York Times published its review, someone cut out the article from all copies of the newspaper that the newspaper stands had. As a Chinese, you will probably not even learn that this book exists: Ms Zhang’s work can be found in several publications, including The New York Times, but nytimes.com is blocked in China.

We Westerners take access to information for granted; be it snapshots of the celebrity du jour or digitized copies of Charles Darwin’s notebooks — it’s all online, and most can be accessed instantly and free of charge. If we decide against having fairly affordable broadband Internet at home, we can probably get it at work — or at the public library. If not, we can get online at Starbucks and at McDonald’s (at least in some countries); our phones likely have Internet access and are often 3G-enabled. Even our MP3 players can get online. If the Internet goes down at our dorm for two hours, we complain. We can chat, Skype, and video chat  with the rest of the world without leaving our room. Most of  our communication with relatives — including our octogenarian grandmothers — takes place online, via emails, Facebook, VoIP software etc.

When I got to China, I was quick to learn all the WiFi places to use my iPhone — Starbucks, bars and restaurant at the expat areas, and a coffee place at the nearby mall. I can use my laptop with the VPN connection there, and there is even VPN software for cell phones now. There is no wireless access on campus, but there is the LAN, so that’s enough to keep me happy. I have access to many more resources — if the VPN doesn’t work, I can ask a friend to copy-paste the content I am interested in and email it to me. If I want to read a book and can’t find it in China, I can take out my US-issued credit card and order it to be shipped over here (books in English are usually not a problem to receive, whatever their content). Overall, I can access whatever information I want at the cost of logging into VPN every time I want to get online. But my reality is very different from that of most Chinese.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical college student questioning the system and willing to learn more about the world and the regime than the government carefully rations. She’s a middle class college student in Beijing. She can speak English pretty well, and has traveled several times outside the country, to Hong Kong and Europe. How would she go about it?

The Chinese government is said to employ over 30,000 Internet censors who ruthlessly block whatever website go against the government’s current Internet policy. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society maintains a list of the websites that are found to be blocked in China: It features some websites that I would personally not have interest in seeing, even for the sake of freedom of information (nothing can make me click on a website with ‘midgetsex’ in its domain), but many are well-respected resources such as the BBC.

Most college students in Beijing don’t even know about proxy websites or VPN software (the government doesn’t like this information being in the public domain). Websites that provide proxy services keep being blocked by the censors, though new ones pop up all the time — but one needs to Google them to locate them. Google.com is sometimes blocked (the Great Firewall has issues with it every now and then), but when it’s not, you have to google it in English. Let’s say our college student understands enough about technology, and speaks enough English to find a proxy service online. Without VPN, it is difficult to have full access to many resources. For instances, most proxies seem to only let one login onto Facebook, not efficiently function within it (e.g., one cannot accept friend requests).

To get VPN access, one needs to be affiliated with a foreign institution that provides that service, or to subscribe to one of several online services that provide VPN services on a monthly subscription basis at a reasonable rate, but most of them ask for a foreign credit card. Chinese debit cards are most often not suitable for being used to pay online. Acquiring an actual Visa or MasterCard in China is tedious and expensive. This seems like a strange issue to have — but several years ago, many Russians could not use Skype for the same reason.

Unless our college student has foreign friends who are willing to share their VPN access with her, she is most likely not going to be able to get The Private Life of Chairman Mao off of PirateBay (which is, ironically, banned in China; this post is by no means a suggestion to download it. Go buy it at the store and don’t forget to appreciate how easy it is to do in your country). There is a growing number of foreigners in Beijing, but their number has nothing on the Chinese population, so the chance of an average Beijing student becoming good friends with a foreigner is small.

The situation is of course not hopeless. Ultimately, you cannot completely block information from permeating any space, no matter how hard you try. Our hypothetical student can go to Hong Kong at a reasonable cost and freely use the Internet there. If her English is good enough, they can buy books at the Western book stores. She can study abroad and travel internationally, and then return with a new understanding of on what information she might have been missing out. The internet censors are apparently only proficient in English, since I had no problems reading entire websites dedicated to controversial Chinese issues in other Eastern and Western European languages. Most of the population struggles with their English, but there are still many who gain proficiency in other languages.

Time and time again, it surprises me that no one seems to mind as much. Our Chinese roommates could also attend the talk with Ms Zhang — and only one out of about sixty showed up.  They were simply lacking interest. By the way, Lijia Zhang organized the biggest workers’ protest in Nanjing after the Tiananmen events, and her personality, if not her book, is extremely interesting. If the overall lack of interest in accessing controversial information remains so low, the government may not even have to bother with the Green Dam or any other semi-ridiculous effort to limit population’s access to information.