China's Information Dark Age Could Be Russia's Future - The New York Times
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Russia and China have the tendency to learn the worst from each other: tyrants, famines, purges and, now, internet censorship.
-
Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
Give this article - Read in app
Credit...Xinmei Liu
By Li Yuan
March 18, 2022Updated 2:21 p.m. ET
When Russia blocked Facebook and limited Twitter this month, many Chinese internet users were surprised. Wait a moment, they said: The Russians could use Facebook and Twitter? Both social media platforms have been banned in China since 2009.
By blocking online platforms, shutting down the last vestige of Russia's independent media and making it a crime to refer to the fighting in Ukraine as a war, the Kremlin has made it nearly impossible for the Russian people to get independent or international news after its invasion. Most Russians are taking in an alternative reality.
That's exactly what China has been doing to its 1.4 billion people for years. Nearly all major Western websites are blocked in the country. A generation of Chinese have grown up in a very different information environment from the rest of the world. Mostly, they are left to believe in what Beijing tells them.
"When people ask me how info environment within the Great Firewall is like," Yaqiu Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York, wrote on Twitter about China's censored internet, "I say, 'imagine the whole country is one giant Qanon.'"
After years of testing and hesitation, Russia is heading toward harsher internet censorship akin to China's Great Firewall to better control its people. China's information dark age could be Russia's future.
"What is darkness?" asked a user on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. "You can't speak the truth, and you aren't allowed to see the truth."
The two countries have the tendency to learn the worst from each other.
Both the Russians and the Chinese were deeply scarred by disastrous eras under Communism, which produced tyrants like Stalin and Mao, gulags and labor camps, and man-made famines that starved millions to death.
Now, Russia is learning from China how to exert control over its people in the social media age.
The Ukraine crisis has only accelerated a process that started years earlier. In late 2015, China and Russia signed a strategic cooperation agreement on internet governance. A few months later, two of China's most infamous proponents of censorship traveled to Moscow to preach their ideas of the internet to their Russian counterparts.
"Unlimited freedom can lead to terrorism," China's internet czar at the time, Lu Wei, told his Russian audience at a forum. "If borders exist, they exist in cyberspace, too," saidFang Binxing, known as "father of the Great Firewall."
ImageChina has not always been as tightly controlled as it has become under its top leader, Xi Jinping.Credit...Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
China has not always been as tightly controlled as it has become under its top leader, Xi Jinping. In the 1990s and 2000s, investigative journalists broke many stories that led to the downfalls of government officials and to judiciary reforms. The internet and social media made it possible for the public to exchange ideas, debate important topics and pressure the government to respond to their concerns.
There was censorship — at times very strict — and some people went to jail for voicing their political views. But there was a little room for free speech, as there was in Russia for much of President Vladimir V. Putin's rule.
Then, under Mr. Xi, a new era of control took hold, and it didn't stop at news media and social media. It reached everything that touches human minds: books and cartoons, films and television, music and classrooms.
The country regulates what textbooks children use, what type of novels writers can publish and what kind of mobile games people can play. And it is all possible because the vast majority of Chinese live in the huge information bubble within the Great Firewall.
The effects are clearly demonstrated in the overwhelmingly pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin online sentiment in China after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February. A huge number of Chinese internet users have bought into the disinformation that the Russian and Chinese propaganda machines feed them.
ImageEmployees of TV Rain in Moscow as the station prepared to end operations earlier this month.Credit...The New York Times
Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform, used to be the place to debate democracy and freedom. Now, the biggest influencers on Weibo are state-owned media outlets like the People's Daily, the Global Times and China Central Television. Bilibili, a user-generated video site that used to be popular among young gamers and comic and anime fans, is now full of nationalistic young people known as little pinks.
It requires a lot of perseverance for someone with independent thoughts to keep a presence on Weibo. A law scholar I know had set up 343 Weibo accounts between 2009 and 2014, only to see them deleted one by one. Some of them survived only a few minutes. Many people quit social media because they couldn't stand the abuses by government trolls and little pinks. They also don't want to risk getting jailed for a decade.
The news media has suffered an even greater retreat.
After a huge earthquake struck Sichuan Province in May 2008, many Chinese news outlets sent journalists there despite a ban from the Central Propaganda Department. Their powerful, emotional coverage informed the nation of the tragedy and raised questions about the quality of many school buildings.
ImageIn China, scenes about homosexuality in the film "Bohemian Rhapsody" were not shown.Credit...Alex Bailey/Twentieth Century Fox, via Associated Press
That kind of reporting is long gone. When news happens, the Chinese public has no choice but to accept the government's version of truth.
In January, when the government of the northwestern city of Xi'an imposed a strict lockdown that created chaos and crises not seen since Wuhan two years ago, few news outlets sent journalists to cover it. The only significant reporting the Chinese public got was a first-person blog post written by a former investigative journalist known by her pen name, Jiang Xue.
A few weeks later, when the public was outraged by a video that showed a woman chained in a doorless shack, it had many questions about her, including whether she was a victim of human trafficking. No journalist was able to conduct any independent investigation. Even though the government issued five statements about her case, many people remain skeptical and are worried that they may never know her real identity.
State censors scrutinize books, videos, films, TV series and just about any creative content much more closely before they reach their audience. The goal is to make sure that everyone, especially the young generation, shares the same values.
A well-known Chinese intellectual has written three books that might never be published. Another famous scholar has written five books with no hope of getting them past the censors.
On Chinese TV, hip-hop singers and soccer players wear long sleeves or use makeup to cover their tattoos, and men's earrings are blurred so they won't become a "bad influence" on young people.
China still wants to offer some Western entertainment content, but only in a sanitized format. In the sitcom "Friends," Ross never explained to his parents that he had split from his wife because she was a lesbian living with another woman. "Bohemian Rhapsody," the Queen biopic, had no scenes involving homosexuality. The Chinese censors put a black dress on the heroine's nude body in "The Shape of Water."
Creative talents are now signing contracts that include clauses that make them liable for engaging in immoral behaviors or making politically sensitive comments. Celebrities can have their online presence scrubbed for having a nasty divorce, evading taxes or hiring a prostitute, or for no clear reason at all.
The release of a much-anticipated Chinese thriller was delayed last Christmas because one of the main actors in the movie was accused of taking drugs in 2015. It didn't matter that the charges against him were dropped. All his shots had to be redone.
I used to doubt that young people would want to watch jingoistic propaganda movies. My generation couldn't run away from them fast enough, like Russians in the 1980s and 1990s. But I was wrong.
Last year, "The Battle at Lake Changjin," a government-sponsored movie dramatizing an against-all-odds defeat of the United States during the Korean War, smashed box office records in China.
Image"The Battle at Lake Changjin," a government-sponsored movie depicting an against-all-odds victory against the United States during the Korean War, was a box office hit.Credit...Getty Images
The most depressing aspect of the information dark age is the collective amnesia.
Young censors are so ignorant about China's forbidden history that they need to be taught before they start work. Otherwise, they won't even know to look for references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests, or to the dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo.
Some young people believe it's their responsibility to report to the authorities on speeches they deem not in line with Communist Party values. Some teachers have lost their jobs or have been punished after their students reported on their "politically incorrect" speech.
Last summer, a local state security bureau in the southeastern province Fujian awarded a college student $1,500 for reporting on an online user spreading "anti-revolutionary information."
Many Chinese online users see the Great Firewall as necessary to ward off the information and ideological imposition from the West. And after the Kremlin followed suit this month, banning many foreign websites, many in China cheered the decision.
"It's very necessary to build the Great Firewall," wrote the Weibo user @icebear_Like_. "Ideology is also a battlefront."
Continue reading the main story
Tags
Who is online
428 visitors
You kinda have to feel sorry they're so misinformed.
Don't. Prepare instead.
There are many kinds of information. Some are for progress and healing. Others are regressive and punishing. Always remember this---------so choose, choose wisely.
I thought this story was already posted by another member about 11 or 12 hours ago. It was getting too late for me to comment on it last night (my time) so thank you for obviously thinking it was so important that you had to double up on it and post it again. Maybe tomorrow someone will be so hateful of China, or feel so sorry for the terribly deprived Chinese people, that they will post it a third time.
A lot of what the story relates is correct, but some is not, and some is outright exaggeration. If it really was totally true, that how the hell am I able to be here on NT, using a normal Chinese internet provider and no VPN or special way to get around "The Great Firewall"? How do you explain that I am able to read and watch every day CTV (Canada Television News) on its internet site (which includes not only Canadian but American and world news), or read and watch Microsoft Bing news every day, or read USA Today every day, or read npr American and World web sites every day, or The Jerusalem Post, or even read FOX NEWS if I wanted to read bullshit, or read Crooks and Ladders extreme left web site for a morning laugh, or so many other sites that the article indicates are blocked in China, and so many other international sites that I don't even bother with. I get to see both sides of stories, and the rest of the story, which the others on NT are not interested in even having an inkling about.
Granted I cannot open some major American sites like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, sites that have a biased agenda to propagate (which is why I'm unable to open the rest of the above article that finishes with "Continue reading the main story" because it's too much effort to actually post the whole thing, after all, I'm no example to follow because I actually make the courteous effort to do so).
I get to read and see almost everything I want to see and read save for a couple of exceptions, which is not as huge a deprivation as the article seems to indicate. Many know about my love of movies, and I watch them here and lots of English language movies are shown over 7 different channels here along with other foreign movies - French, German, Russian, Spanish, etc. although China adheres to international copyright protocol and does not air a movie until it is at least 3 years old. I really didn't give a shit that I couldn't see the protagonist's tits in The Shape of Water, didn't even see a black dress that the author said was used to cover her, yet it was made perfectly clear that she bared herself for the aquatic creature and who needs more? Porn addicts?
A lot of classic movies have been shown lately, and I always preferred classic movies. In fact my original movie group was called "Classic Cinema" and I focused primarily on them. Recently I watched The Big Country starring Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, Love in the Afternoon starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier, and yesterday the original 1949 version of All the King's Men.
Yes, a couple of things were an inconvenience, bur one must accept the inconveniences along with the conveniences and benefits they enjoy in any country they are in. I wanted access to YouTube because it has considerably more to offer than bilibili (I have no idea what the "pinks" are - guess that's strictly in the Chinese text) and Youku is another source but one has to put up with commercials on that site. The one that did make a big difference to me was the recent banning of IMDb, which was the major source for my preparation and scoring of movie quizzes. There are some lesser alternatives, but IMDb is the Encyclopedia Britannica for movie info. Interestingly, it was banned once before, but such a noise was made by Chinese movie lovers it was reinstated - this time, I doubt that it will be.
So as I have tried to explain, everyone in the world has to put up with some inconveniences in their lives, but if the benefits outweigh the inconveniences it isn't the end of the world.