Shortly after christmas, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opened an account on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog service that, like Twitter, allows users to share short messages of up to 140 characters. Kristof began testing what topics would be censored. He found out quickly. One of his first messages was “Can we talk about Falun Gong?” — a reference to the spiritual movement banned by Beijing. Within an hour of his first post, Kristof’s account was canceled.
At first glance it would seem that China’s new Internet is a lot like its old Internet. Overseas sites that are deemed sensitive — including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, among thousands of others — are blocked, part of a network of control sometimes called the Great Firewall of China. Inside the wall, Chinese search engines won’t, for example, link to content to do with the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo or Tibetan independence; also, domestic Internet companies are required to delete any material that the authorities find objectionable. Even as China’s Netizens have rushed to embrace Web 2.0, an Internet in which users are more closely and quickly linked by social-networking services, microblogs and free video hosting, those rules have still applied.
Yet consider the case of another Weibo user who recently went silent. Just a couple of weeks before Kristof typed his initial Weibo tweets, Chinese computer scientist Fang Binxing took a stab at microblogging. In a message to the state-television host Jing Yidan, he wrote, “Hello, I’m also on Weibo now, but I won’t speak as daringly as you, ha-ha.” Scores of other Weibo users showered Fang with abuse. “Let us throw bricks at Fang Binxing as quickly as possible,” wrote one commenter. Why the scorn? Fang, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, is also known as the father of the Great Firewall for his work developing China’s censorship apparatus. In the increasingly freewheeling world of Sina Weibo, where the limits of what users can say are tested daily, Fang was unwelcome. He has since stopped posting messages.
Such is the nature of Chinese cyberspace today: the state pushes, and the people push back. For years, the Communist Party has tried to strike a balance between allowing just enough Internet access to harness the Web’s commercial and educational properties, and curbing content that the party reckons challenges its rule or gives citizens “wrong” ideas about greater liberty. As Tunisia and Egypt show, social media can fuel democratic uprisings — one of Beijing’s greatest fears. Indeed, in recent days the authorities have deleted public comments to even official stories about the Arab protests and blocked some results for searches of the word Egypt. Control is maintained by the threat of demotion, dismissal or imprisonment. Despite former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s assertion that policing the Internet is like “nailing Jell-O to a wall,” China’s censors have proved pretty adept at doing so.
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