Let me ask you to think for a moment about everything you know about China and the Internet.
I’m willing to bet within a minute you will have covered most, if not all, of the following: censorship; great firewall of china; the state spying on the citizenship’s use of the Internet; complicity of US firms assisting the state in prohibiting debate about democratic reform; lack of freedom.
This morning’s highlight session for me was Kaiser Kuo challenging those assumptions. A native New Yorker of Chinese descent, he works for Ogilvy in China scouting promising technology companies within the World’s most populous – and controversial – state.
He started his discussion by pointing to Western reactions to the recent moratorium after the Sichuan earthquakes. At that time, the Chinese government issued a statement which amongst other things demanded:
All websites are to stop all entertainment activities and services for three days. From May 19 00:00 to May 21 24:00, all gaming websites and gaming channels of major portals are to shut down; Cover all entertainment channels on websites and programmes with a message of mourning, and none of the other pages within these channels should be accessible; All entertainment BBS’s are to be shut; All music and video search functions at search engine portals to be shut; All entertainment advertisements should be offline.
This, Kuo argued, was in keeping with Chinese cultural tradition. However, in the West bloggers were outraged and suggested this was just another example of China’s bully-boy antics over the citizenship. In turn, the Western reaction angered many Chinese members of the online community.
What angered them more though was one young lady’s reaction to the moratorium. 21-year old Gao Qianhui ranted in an online piece (I’m advised that the language is so disgusting that I’d best not link to it here, despite it being in Chinese), about how her online gaming was interrupted because of the moratorium. “How many of you died? It was just a few”, she said. “China has so many people, anyway”. The Chinese police detained her for her own protection as the braying mobs outside her home were willing to rip her limb from limb.
She was in a rather offensive way arguing that the Western attitude to the moratorium was correct: it did not need to happen, it was a foolish move on the part of the state. The mistake she – and some Westerners – made was that this attitude does not fit the national Chinese cultural identity.
These issues of national dignity and respect are more important for the average Chinese citizen than the issue of censorship. Kuo talked about “online posses” who were prepared to attack foreign websites, sometimes referred to as “issue-focused online flash mobs”. They are apparently insulted by what they perceive as the patronising and attacking tone of many Westerners when they discuss “freedom”.
It is only by understanding the issues of censorship and political debate in the context of that identity that we will ever make sense of it all. If we are not prepared to do so, we risk alienating a large proportion of Chinese citizens who will deem our words as an attack.
There are problems Kuo conceded, but we are collectively barking up the wrong tree. Those who wish to access censored content are normally able to do so via anonymous proxy or other technological means. What we should be trying to understand is why the average Chinese citizen does not have the freedom to speak their mind freely.
Even that though, he argued, should be carefully managed. Chinese society does not work the way those of us living in European liberal democracies imagine it could or should, and he argued that if Beijing immediately dropped all controls the flow of information would be so overwhelming not only would society fail, but so would any attempts at democracy. After the talk I discussed this topic with him further, and he pointed out that in densely populated urban areas any politician who promised the end of 1-child-per-family would immediately win any vote and that would not be good for China or the World at large.
The overall message Kaiser tried to push across is that the Internet has changed China permanently, and that we should not see the arguments around censorship as being black and white, but rather multiple shades of grey. He talked about how amazing some of the developments have been, specifically around the growth of online participation, the rise of gaming and instant messaging (people IM more than e-mail in China apparently), and how the younger Chinese have embraced the potential of the Internet and are doing amazing things.
Kuo argued Chinese users are too busy enjoying the Internet they have, rather than lamenting the one Westerners think they should have. He suggested Westerners need to step back and stop focusing on “The Great Firewall of China”. We should collectively change our attitude and realise that there is a cultural chasm between the “West and the Rest” and allow the Chinese people to develop their own attitudes towards freedom of speech and political thought at their own pace.
As he pointed out, when freedom of speech was enshrined in Western liberal democracies, information moved as fast as a galloping horse. In the modern era you can’t just flick a switch and hope for the best.
Regardless of how we do it, I think most of us in the audience hope for a future where Chinese citizens can enjoy a full and complete experience of the Internet for the betterment of themselves and mankind. The impact his talk had on me however, was the realisation it might be better for the Chinese to do this themselves, gradually, over time – and even Kuo agrees it might not be going fast enough.
Dim Sum Digital 