MCLC: China sharpens its censorship blade (4)

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China sharpens its censorship blade (4)
Recently Covell Meyskens at the University of Chicago asked on this list, whether Chinese people care about restrictions of the internet, what do they care, and so on, beyond the usual suspects of academics and intellectuals whose job it is to think, speak, and write. The question disappeared, unanswered, from the list, and I don’t have an answer either, but I just wanted to say I think it is a very worthwhile question and I hope someone can point to research by knowledgeable scholars studying these issues. Maybe some answers can be found in the China Digital Times, chinadigitaltimes.net, and I think there must also be academic research on these issues.
Anecdotally, as a straphanger on the Shanghai subway I do notice some of the reportedly over 500 million Chinese internet users holding their many phones and other devices. I imagine that they must be affected by having to register and so on, and they probably expect to be watched by Big Brother, and they might be annoyed and resigned at the same time (which would also apply to internet surfers in the West and in the rest of the world, of course).
But my guess is also that most of the Chinese users only are on the Chinese “intranet”, partly because they mainly speak only Chinese and read only Chinese and partly because they won’t and don’t look beyond what they are allowed to look at, even in Chinese. Specialist scholars will know more about the millions of younger people try to learn English to watch American soap shows instead of Chinese soap shows, but I think there is a big effort to build a parallel universe of a Chinese-controlled intranet where features and options often are made to imitate some of the American ones, so consumers can feel they are getting something similar. I’d bet millions of people buy into this, and actually believe they are getting something foreign, or something good enough.
This can be subtle, and complicated. For example, near where I live, I noticed there is a chocolate-coffeeshop called Lind. This must be either an unlawful copycat version of the Swiss firm Lindt, or maybe a franchise where the owners decided to save ten yuan on the last letter (“t”). My point is that most consumers may not care, they go there and want to believe, while paying up, that they are getting something like a desirable foreign piece of chocolate, and it is sweet enough for them. And maybe this is what happens if you watch youku instead of youtube — similar to Lind, youku must have been invented so as to make people believe it is similar.  This caters to a craving for entertainment, etc., and for various desirable foreign things, but it manages to (or tries to) harness these desires within a parallel universe, — which of course also makes huge sense as a protectionist tactic to save profits for the Chinese companies that take over the niche in question –so is it not that in addition to censorship, such commercial interests must also be powerful forces driving the cordoning-off of China’s consumers’ hearts, and minds. I hear stories of such clever protectionism from all sorts of foreign businesspeople in China.
I am no expert on these issues, but I imagine that other listmembers can point to serious research that must be going on, on censorship and the-man-in-the-street, as well as how it relates to the for-profit interests that must be involved, even the psychological manipulation that is core to this. (I am sure all the companies and also the government has these very research topics at the very top of their own agenda, but of course they would not be publishing anything).
yrs,
Magnus Fiskesjö <magnus.fiskesjo at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 10, 2015
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