Greetings from the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing. I once read, in Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell, about a year that Russell spent lecturing on philosophy in Beijing. He was extremely taken with the city and the country, predicting that it would flower into a leading role in the world. This momentarily puzzled me, as my vision of China didn’t seem in sync with Russell’s democratic ideals. But then common sense clicked in, and I realized that we were talking about a period just after World War One, during the Sun Yat-sen era. The new Republic of China was struggling to emerge out from Imperial rule, and the Communist takeover was decades in the future. One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world. The fact that it didn’t is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history.
These days China is increasingly prosperous, but not quite free. Upon landing at Beijing International Airport, one fills out the usual customs declaration form, full of admonishments against bringing in firearms or questionable agricultural products. But there is an extra item on the list of dangerous imports: writings, recordings, or other collections of information that could be judged as a threat to the political, moral, or social good of the nation. The didn’t actually ask to search my laptop, but the warning was there.
It’s well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) censors blogs, so I’ve been poking around using the internet connection here in my hotel room, trying to judge the extent to which this is true. (The flipside, of course, is the perilous situation of bloggers located in China; apparently they’ve been required to register in order to blog, but I don’t have the latest on that. I should mention that there are all sorts of blogs about China, not that I have any expertise about them.) Access to most websites is fine, but certain addresses are certainly being blocked. Of course it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the actions of the local ISP, the city of Beijing, or the Chinese government itself, but you draw conclusions using the data you have, not the data you wish you had.
Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on WordPress.com seem to be available. You can search on Google Blog Search or Bloglines, but Technorati is blocked. I haven’t found any individually-hosted blogs that were off-limits, although certain news sites like philly.com are mysteriously banned. The Eagles are in the middle of training camp, how am I supposed to keep up? Also, the New York Times is readily accessible, so make of that what you will. I also couldn’t reach the BBC, although I can actually watch the BBC news channel on my hotel room TV.
Google, of course, is available, in the wake of their somewhat-infamous deal struck with the Chinese government. But Wikipedia is a little confusing — blocked at times, available at others. Apparently this is an ongoing skirmish. I typed in “China” to Google, and the first link was the the Wikipedia page, so I clicked there, and saw it no problem. Then I typed “China internet” into the Wikipedia search box, and was given a list of pages, including Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China. But when I clicked there, it briefly began to load, before switching to a “The connection was reset” error. A little spooky, to be honest. Right now I seem to be able to see most Wikipedia pages, although apparently not those specifically about the PRC (although the main China page is still okay). You might think, no problem, I can just look at the Google cache pages for whatever Wikipedia article I’m interested in. But no, you can’t; nothing in Google’s cache seems to be available. So much for infamous deals.
None of which has prevented me from reading any of my favorite blogs. I just do what I always do, and read the feeds via Bloglines. They’re all perfectly visible, even for the blocked sites. Google reader works just as well. A lack of internet savvy on the part of the censors, or an intentional oversight? The one thing that one can’t do is leave comments (or start up your own blog, obviously), and maybe that’s the point.
(I also notice that when I visit google.com, I am not automatically redirected to the local version google.cn, which seems to happen in European countries. Is this because the hotel’s service provider is rigged for foreigners, and ordinary citizens have different rules? Not sure.)
It could be much worse, of course. I mean, here I am, typing away on my own blog, with little fear that the secret police are going to burst into my hotel room in the middle of the night to haul me away. But the biggest single reason I don’t have that fear is that I know that word would get around, and that it wouldn’t look good — free information protects free people. Amnesty International has a campaign, irrepressible.info, to protest against internet censorship around the world. The more noise people make about this issue, the more pressure governments will feel to keep the web free.
Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government. Different cultures, different systems.
My Chinese grandfather once said, “The Chinese could rule the world if they wanted to except for one obstacle; the Chinese”.
Test your site to see if it’s banned by the GreatFireWall of China.
Has a neat animated interface to boot!
http://sensorymetrics.com/2007/03/14/great-firewall-of-china-blocks-60-of-our-blogroll/
I was always mystified by Russell’s enthusiasm for China. Thanks for the clarification!
And this China practically owns the US? 🙂
On my trip to China last month, I found that China seems to block the Chinese language wikipedia entirely. On the English language wikipedia, they look for certain terms (you found one; “Taiwan” is another, and I’m sure you can guess more). If you go to one of those pages, they’ll block the connection and then block Wikepedia entirely for you for the next few minutes. The blocking is done, I believe, by RESETs; as a result, you can sometimes see part of the forbidden page.
China is not united by a common spoken language any more than Europe is. The regional “dialects” are as varied as any other language really. There are at least eight clearly separate versions of Mandarin Chinese and then you’ve got the Cantonese dialects and …
However, this picture is complicated by two things. Most Chinese speak and understand Standard Mandarin to the point of being completely bilingual. And secondly, they share written language.
The writing system in China is very cool. While different dialects pronounce the language differently, the semantic meaning of the pictograms is the same. So if you can not speak the local dialect, you can write down what you want to say. (Assuming the other person can read.)
Furthermore, this semantic unity extends also back in time. While I find it difficult to read older English, for example, my girlfriend has no problems reading 2000 year old Chinese texts.
China is a fascinating place. I hope it will get the freedom and glory it deserves.
No, they don’t have to *register* to start a blog. BSPs will certainly require some information, but nobody cares whether they are true or not. There’ve been a proposal of course, and as far as I know, that’s all.
I guess China only the country banning this much blogs, though most of the countries are banning few sites in their country but much less than China. But on the other side, it shows the victory and the impact of blogs…
conservatories north east
When flying into the US one has to tick one of the boxes on immigration if “You intend to […] commit immoral acts.”
I wonder: according to whose morals? Does that mean I can not visit Las Vegas?
everything is available if you use the Tor network.
Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government.
But we have forms of government censorship too, done on behalf of corporations–try putting out a remix album of a big label artist without getting permission, or writing your own original non-satirical work starring a copyrighted character like Mickey Mouse, or your own sequel to/adaptation of someone else’s copyrighted book or film, and even if you have no intention of making a profit and are willing to give proceeds to the original artists, it will be illegal to distribute your work. Of course I think this is a much more harmless form of censorship than China’s wide-ranging censorship of political ideas it doesn’t like, but it’s worth noting that even aside from personal slander and fire-in-a-crowded-theater situations, we don’t have fully “free speech” here.
Its so easy to get around their firewall, its almost childs play for any technogeek. There are even step by step guides for the layman.
Is John Searle’s closing lecture going to be on Chinese rooms?
When I was in China last summer, I found that there exist mirrors (e.g., for wikipedia) for most of the annoyingly-blocked sites (and like Haelfix said, the blockages are mostly a deterrant and not terribly difficult to circumvent… and similarly, while my blog is on Blogspot, I know I have several regular readers in Shanghai).
Elliot:
It would be cool to get a bunch of American kids in a room, and train them through Searle’s methods to produce a blog in Chinese! Heh, a bit of turnabout on production …
The plagiarists who got me fired from a fairly senior engineering position at Rockwell International, found out that I was to be interviewed by Playboy. Raising the spectre of p0rn, they managed to get me put under 100% complete prior censorship, where I had to submit everything that I submitted for publication, including poetry and mathematics, to a PR flack.
After I’d left, and subpoenaed my personnel files, I found over 440 pages of demented bureaucratic censorship convulsions, some stemming from the plagiarists asserting that I was carrying wepons into the Federally secured property, which allegation I’d never been told. Else I’d have agreed to be searched above and beyond the metal detectors I walked through every single day.
For someone as prolific as I (over 2,500 publications, presentations, and broadcasts) I found the censorship more than slightly irksome. Yet I also resented some crackpot documents that were in my file because they assumed that I was the author.
Then there were the government refusals to let me attend international conferences in, say, Bulgaria, where I was Session Chair or Panel Moderator. But that’s another story from the same Cold War.
I read a lot of Chinese literature in translation, and have even published some transliterations of classical Chinese poetry. But I don’t speak the language(s).
I imagine China as Rockwell cubed. Having a space program and lots of computers does not a modern nation make, nor an Olympics, nor iron bars a cage.
This report apparently just out is quite relevant:
Link
Former official: China’s ‘perception management’ agenda controls all media
China’s government controls virtually all media outlets to exercise “mind control” and manipulate public opinion, according to testimony by a former state propagandist at a hearing of the U.S-China Economic Security Review Commission last week.
PS, I think it’s odd the Chinese allow Bloglines if that allows you to see just about anything anyway. As for Google, did they change their search ranking criteria recently? I’ve seen sudden changes in some results.
Neil,
I was afraid nobody would get it 😉
e.
Jonathan Vos Post
raises American issue
are we much better?
e.
We’ve already been treated to several Chinese-Room jokes, and I’m sure there are more forthcoming.
Elliot — yes, we are much better. But we’re not nearly perfect.
Actually, you will find more sites blocked when connecting the internet in a university…
a Chinese reader: but isn’t it possible to navigate around the extra university blockages? At least, with the experiences I was discussing above, we were at a Chinese university at the time.
The strength of the myths — even among Chinese people and students of Mandarin — about the languages of China and about Chinese characters is an intersting topic. It’s somewhat as if the majority of students of astrophysics took astrology seriously.
An earlier poster is quite right in noting that China is not united by a spoken language and that what are often called Chinese dialects are actually languages in their own right. Most of the rest of the points, however, could use some clarification.
Even according to statistics from the PRC (which should of course be taken with a very large grain of salt), just 53 percent of the population there can speak standard Mandarin. Although that might technically qualify by a couple of percentage points as “most,” it is a far cry from the vast majority of those in the country being able to communicate with each other in speech. They cannot, though China is making some progress in this by its repression of languages other than Mandarin.
More importantly, the various Sinitic languages of China do not have a common written form. Literate, monolingual speakers of, say, Cantonese can communicate in writing with literate, monolingual speakers of Mandarin because both are taught to read and write the same language: Modern Standard Mandarin. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of Europe in the Middle Ages, when people were taught to read and write Latin. Although educated people in, say, Spain and France could communicate with each other in writing using Latin (though not so often in speech, because of pronunciation differences in their Latins), that is of course not at all to say that written Old Spanish and written Old French are the same. Neither are written Mandarin and written Cantonese the same, which should not be a surprise given that the languages differ in vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etc.
Next, only a few Chinese characters can be classified as pictographs, and most of those that are became so stylized long ago as to bear little clear hint of their origins. (Nor, it should be noted even though the word has not occurred in this thread, are Chinese characters “ideographs.”)
As to the matter of semantic unity over time, being literate in Modern Standard Mandarin does not make one able to read Literary Sinitic (a.k.a. Classical Chinese). Only prolonged study will do this.
But as for China being a fascinating place that deserves freedom and glory, I couldn’t agree more.
And finally — on the matter of the original post itself — Russell’s impressions of China were likely influenced by Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren), who served as his translator and became his lifelong friend. Chao was a fascinating, brilliant man; but I’ve gone on at perhaps too much length already, so I’ll close here.
Dear Sean: Maybe you or the readers here have not noticed the latest round of movement-to-the-Total-State in the U.S. Federal government and Congress. Happy Summer Holidays, everybody.