MCLC: China sharpens its censorship blade (5)

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China sharpens its censorship blade (5)
Hi, I’ve been following this discussion for a few days now, and after reading this post I feel like I can comment with a few personal experiences I’ve had as a student in China. When it comes to censorship here on the ground level (keeping in mind that I’m not an expert), I feel like it is an almost invisible force for my Chinese friends and classmates. For example, one of the trainers at my gym joined Instagram only a few months before it was blocked. When he joined he asked if I used it and he was pretty excited to see so many weight lifters and other exercise buffs on it. Now that it’s blocked, he’s come up to me a few times mid-workout to ask me if I’m able to use it. I tell him I pay for a VPN and by his response I gather that he’s not willing to pay for one just to access a few apps.
When I was in the process of getting recommendation letters for PhD programs from a few of my professors, many of them were unable to open the submission links from the universities at their work computers. The department’s security settings were blocking websites for universities like Oxford and Columbia, and my professors were perplexed. I have sent multiple articles to one of these professors before from sites that I could access without a VPN, but she could not get to them at work. To me, this says that my profs do not usually look outside of their usual means to obtain information. That is probably largely due to language, like was mentioned in the last couple of posts, but I also think it has to do with habit. It also may have to do with their idea of what counts as a reputable website or information.
Frankly, since I know plenty of Chinese people who have never heard of Facebook or Skype and yet ask me if my family in the U.S. uses QQ to contact me, I just think most people don’t know how far-reaching censorship is and are probably not doing much of anything censor-worthy anyway. That is just my opinion. Also, sites like Youku have made a lot of progress syndicating shows from other countries. Still, it’s obvious to me that only the shows Chinese people like and which must have a copyright stipulation are uploaded (e.g. Two Broke Girls is there but Big Bang Theory is no longer available, even though a lot of people still download it, illegally of course). I see translated TED Talks on the home page of Youku regularly and videos I’ve seen on Facebook make it there, too, after a few days. I can’t help but think that when it comes to the Firewall, we should be careful of sounding like the Chinese population “should” see/have access to all the various platforms available in other countries because, from what I see, what they want is readily available. I know that what most people are worried about is that there might be something that they don’t know they want, and if they only knew… Of course, censoring more serious discussions is a completely different topic, and unfortunately, none of my contacts seem to be those who would log on to post to those kinds of threads, so this is where my experience ends. I hope I’ve offered something useful to someone.
Lehyla Heward <lehyla.heward at gmail.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 11, 2015
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