Several days ago, a friend of mine (in China) changed his MSN status to this line:
??????????? ??, ??????????. ???, ?????????. ??, ?????, ??????????????????.
It can be translated as:
Our instructor asked as about our dreams, and I said: My dream is to be a citizen. “It’s so easy,” he replied. “Well, ” I added, “my dreams is, to be a citizen who can browser the Internet freely (free as in freedom)”
You might be curious: why the freedom of accessing information is so critical? To me, it can be explained in twofold.
Human beings, as every living things in the world, have to get feedback from our environment anytime to adjust to it. It’s for sure that insufficient knowledge to the surroundings will impair our justifications. Being ignorant to the outside world will eventually meet a brick wall in front. Moreover, insufficient information would be misleading too. I have a friend who helps high school students go abroad every year. He told me that, rather than lacking of money or ambition for a child to study abroad, the biggest problem why so few students can get the opportunity to study abroad came from the ignorance of the policy and the procedure of higher education systems abroad. Therefore, if you have such a dream, please try to get necessary information and don’t let the environment confine you. Actually your environment will never be a restriction if you can get outside information constantly and thereby decreases the entropy of the environment.
This brings another question: what kind of information you need to get to achieve your goal? My answer is : be an independent thinker and get the key yourself. I can understand that one in the early 20s is eager to explore the unknown world and trying to syndicate all the useful information for him/herself. To my experience, two frequent questions used by them are “which book should I read” and “where can I find that information”. My suggestion for them is almost, if not always, the same: “think about it twice, and you will get the answer”. In my opinion (maybe sort of paranoid), if you haven’t known what kind of information you should take to help make decision, you are not prepared for success. There might be someone in the world that can answer the question about “should I do…” or “how can I do..” for you perfectly, but you have to be the one that have a full sense of the outside world with respect to your own situation. In U.S., people usually say: “Do some homework first”, which means you have to gather some necessary information yourself. Be brave, nobody can help you in figuring out what kind of information you need, even they can help you in making decision in when you are in labyrinth. So don’t panic, dare to know the outside world, even it’s painful.
Free accessing to information is important for self-development. Sadly, in China, mainland, this pre-requisite is not true. For some reason, some useful websites such as Wikipedia are not accessible. Moreover, the network infrastructure is not so developed. Nevertheless, those shortages have now been partly resolved via some not-so-hard techniques. Thus, I encourage my readers to explore the wonderful unknown world via your browser and search engines. Your future is on your hand.
yeah , we Chinese are painful when exploring the net
if i wanna go to youtube.com/wikipedia.com , i must get a proxy server first.they’re blocked in China for some damn reasons.
lol, This is China! Though it has changed a lot on giving freedom to people since the age of Open and Improve!
Thinking that we are standing on a land which is with feudalism as its society background, other than capitalism, you can understand it deeply.
Anyway, it will be changed in your generation. I hope!
Feudalism. That’s right!
People living in big cities are always trying their best to forget their brothers and sisters living in small cities or country sides. They keep telling what kinda ignorance they suffer from, and just neglect what kinda ignorance there is outside the big cities. If ignorance is just like radiation, we’re living under the shadow of Chernobyl. But at least cities are like shelters, protecting you from radiation. If you don’t want to live here, just move out.
Anyway, there’s no way to clean out radiation. If you’re living in shelters, just don’t complain about it. Because even if you can clean out your shelters, you will still bring radiation from the outside world. So just stay away from radiation, and stop complaining.
Wait a minute, what’s the point about city and shelter?
One word. Just one word. Feudalism.
You think that visiting Wikipedia is ok for you, but actually it’s not ok for everyone in China. Most Chinese people don’t share the same level of understanding as you. This civilization is still too easy to fall into the victim of.. have you ever heard of this:
The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.
- Adolf Hitler
You assume that every Chinese is as smart as you are, and they wouldn’t fall into lies. That’s not right. Even Hitler himself was elected by people.
OK, but please don’t make any assumption about crowd’s IQ and don’t make any assumption about the outside world if you don’t actually know it. There are lies on the Internet, but not everywhere. It is the Feudalism that make the people in a country be victims. I am not very liberal, but at this point, I would ask: is Wikipedia venomous for Chinese people? I mean, Wikipeida is rated for everyone in all other countries but rated PG-13 in China?
No. In China, we have only two rates: one for everyone, and one for nobody. Unfortunately, some websites are rated as the second one. Crowd’s IQ is ok, our government’s propaganda is not ok. They don’t know how to build consensus with citizens, while some or their enemies are very talented in doing so.
Let’s talk about the Xia’men June 1st event. Do you think that all Fujian citizens knew the truth? They were using SMS broadcasting some fake info, while nobody would like to do some research on it. Why? Because they were panic! You just need to make people panic, and they will be easily united to fight against something.
How about JFK? Do you think that you can find true info about this assassination on Wikipedia? Do you think that there isn’t any power doing their best to cover it up?
OK, our propaganda is not OK so that not all people can trust the “always right” party, what a nice argument.
Let’s talk about Xia’men. Even the message itself is fake, what the media really need to is to tell the truth rather than hide the truth and then censor every message they think untrue.
Wikipedia is not the ultimate place for you the find the truth, it’s invaluable source for you to get information. 1. If there are some cover up about JFK and you know it, why not you edit it and tell others the truth, or you just “assume” that there are some cover up? 2. Even there are some cover up, does it really hurt Chinese people so that GFW will censor it? 3. What is the exact power that want to cover something in China????
Your argument based on the assumption that people could be faked by propaganda can be easily handled via tell them the truth, instead of keep ignorant of all the information and hide the truth. What’s truth? Do people ever know?
BTW, Don’t assume that we have enemies all around the world unless you really know.
I didn’t say that you should trust anyone, and anyone includes both government and mass media. I just say that government doesn’t express itself clearly, so that citizens are easily fall into lies from other sources.
Our government should only censor fake info. Yes, that’s true, and even if that’s totally not affordable.
We all know that our society should be ruled by laws, not people. But is that affordable? Every speeding driver should be taken to the court like in the US, instead of just giving him/her a fine ticket? That is not affordable in China. So that’s why whether you’re speeding is judged by some policeman, not the law.
The same logic applies to which website or even which info segment should be banned. Because judging each piece of info costs a lot, so some people out there just take some rights which shouldn’t belong to them and then say, this should be banned, and that shouldn’t.
Point 1: It’s the problem with gov. not people. It has nothing to do with people’s IQ.
Point 2.1 How to define “false info?”, who has the right to judge? Majority or minority?
Point 2.2. I didn’t see any relationship in between your example and Internet censorship. Obviously you are using one extreme to attack the other extreme. The argument is, is network censorship an outcome of lacking of money of our government, so just the it’s fear? Or just say, if a government as rich as US or Japan, are doing perfectly censorship and banned wikipedia much better than China??
Point 2.3. We talk about the reason of censorship, not the way how to do censorship. We are discussing about why it censor the content and why it’s decided by solely government/party. Every law, like speeding law, is passed by people, not the autocrat. If something on the Internet is like promoting speeding driving, which is illegal, of course every country should protest it. However, this is not the case here. Core question is: why something perfectly legal in other nations are illegal in China? Are any nations in the world all enemies of our country?
Point 3. Same logic applies to everything. Because Internet is harmful, why not turn down all the website, it will be better in terms of cost. Or: since alcohol is harmful, why not ban it absolutely ?
I guess I will stop the debate here because I can’t quite follow your logic. Your assumption moves from “people in China are not so clever” to “underachieved government propaganda can’t make people clear so we need to keep other information away and let our media tell them what to do again” to “It is expensive to do piece by piece censor so we’d better shutdown the whole Internet”. In your argument, the purpose of the censorship varies from “protect people from outside lies” to “someone want to cover up something so that we have to censor the coverup” to “it’s costly to censor piece by piece so we have to ban them totally”. To be frank with you, my friend, I can’t quite follow the logic line.
Fairly enough about this discussion.
Great post.
The degree of censorship experienced in China is something that I’ve never experienced before (or can imagine experiencing). Call me naive, but I can’t believe that such a great resource like Wikipedia could be blocked.
It makes some of the things I complain about (e.g. Australia’s workplace relations laws) seem very very insignficant.