INDEPTH: CHINA
China's blogs face the censor
CBC News Online | January 21, 2005
From The National January 20, 2005
Reporter: Patrick Brown
Censorship is a reality in China, affecting almost all sources of information, including the internet.
Zhao Ziyang lived under house arrest after being purged in the power struggle over the 1989 student movement. A non-person for the last 15 years of his life, he's also a non-person after his death on Jan. 17, 2005.
The Chinese now have plenty of newspapers and magazines to choose from, but none carried more than a couple of lines on Zhao's passing, although people have been lining up to pay respects at his home.
On the internet, it's a game of cat and mouse as censors prowl chat rooms deleting references to Zhao.
Fung Zhing Dong, whose company China Blog hosts bulletin boards and weblogs, says users generally know what subjects are taboo.
"I think that as far as politics are concerned, it is really a small problem. According to our surveys, of all of the messages posted on our bulletin boards, only two per cent are removed," Fung says.
Some of China's internet cops may have become more sophisticated with Canadian help. Brian Thiessen, of the Justice Institute of British Columbia was part of a recent trade mission to sell Canadian security expertise to China. The institute includes computer studies in its training for Chinese police officers.
"We're definitely not teaching them how to stop freedom of speech. I'm sure that they... perhaps they may want to apply that. I don't know. What we're teaching them is how to investigate crimes on the internet," Sgt. Thiessen says.
Jiao Guo Biao is a professor of journalism at Beijing University who's now banned from writing, censored for an internet essay denouncing censorship. China needs press freedom, he says.
"It would be political change in itself, and it is also a necessary condition of all political change. Without press freedom, there can be no democracy or good governance," Jiao says.
There's not much new about the music at the 13 Club in Beijing on a Saturday afternoon. Once barely tolerated, rock 'n' roll bands are now more routine than revolutionary.
But Wen Ling and his camera are part of a new way of doing things. He's here to check out the scene for his weblog, a photographic chronicle of daily life in Beijing called the Ziboy Blog.
With an idea, a digital camera, and access to the internet, it's cheap and easy to sidestep the government's media monopoly.
Wen explains what his blog is about: "Ordinary Chinese people's lives, what their homes are like, what they eat, what they do when they go out to play, not life on the big good-looking streets, just ordinary life on ordinary streets. I'm always looking around for interesting things like suddenly there's an argument, so I rush over to take a picture, and then there's a traffic accident. Shoot that! Then there are no argument or accidents. I look around and see an interesting house or people who are fun to shoot."
This is a generation of youngsters who find more things possible and more things permitted than ever before, so long as they don't cross the line into politics.
"We all keep our political opinions inside. We don't express them through action. I do my own thing, making a living, getting on with my life. We are not like people in the 80s who might have taken certain actions. We are not very political," Wen says.
Chinese people are much better informed than they used to be and much more ready to express their opinions. But when it comes to sensitive political topics, the Communist party is hiding behind the great firewall of China.
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Background on the pre-existing tension between China and Japan from The Hour.
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