There have been a flurry of articles in the last few days
that discuss the role the Internet is playing (and will likely play) in China
in terms of “opening up” the country and how the Chinese government is working
overtime to keep in check the type of information that is made available to its
citizens.
A lot of this attention has been focused on this issue recently
due to the Congressional
hearings that explored the issues as to whether or not U.S. Internet
companies who agree to censor their content are enabling “oppressive regimes in
China.”
There are many facets of this discussion, and the answer
isn’t as cut and dried as some would have us believe.
A good illustration of how the Internet is helping to
increase the flow of information in China (even information that the government would otherwise hide) is told in a Washington Post article
from this
weekend. The article covers
the story of how a senior editor at the China Youth Daily created a
major stir by posting a "blistering letter on the newspaper's computer
system attacking the Communist
Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the
editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party
officials."
The Post article chronicles how the
Chinese government pressed hard to eradicate all postings of this letter, or
postings about it, from the China-accessed Internet. At the same time, it pointed out "the
profound impact of the Internet on political discourse in China, and the
challenge that the Web poses to the Communist Party's ability to control news
and shape public opinion, key elements to its hold on power."
The “profound effect” they referred to in this case was in
reference to the vast number of Chinese citizens who quickly mobilized and used
various technologies (from email, to IM, to bulletin boards) to spread the
contents of the letter far and wide to others who would otherwise not have a
chance to read this dissenting view.
The Post article
goes on to say that “as a catalyst that amplifies voices and accelerates
events, the Internet presents a formidable challenge to China's
authoritarian political system. Again and again, ordinary Chinese have used it
to challenge the government, force their opinions to be heard and alter
political outcomes.” And additionally that “…widespread Internet use…is
changing the way Chinese learn about the world and weakening the Communist
Party's monopoly on the media.”
Add to that story Newsweek’s article “Blogger Nation”
that discusses how blogs have given Chinese citizens an outlet to exercise a
form of freedom of speech. They quote a
popular anti-government Chinese blogger as saying "Blogs are filling in
the gap between the freedom the government allows and the freedom it should
allow."
Further, they quote the founder of Bokee, one of China’s
largest blogging platform providers, as saying "There's no other use of
the Internet that will bring greater reform to Chinese society."
And blogging is definitely picking up in China. China Daily
reports
today that CBP Career Consultants Co., Ltd released a report showing that 52%
of white-collar workers in Chinese four major cities now keeping blogs (and
another 28% said they plan to begin a blog in the near future.)
Hyperbole aside, all of this demonstrates how the Internet,
and web-based communications technologies are empowering and enabling an
increasingly greater number of Chinese citizens to find their voice. This has to be viewed as a good development
to those who desire for China to become a more open, less authoritarian country (including those in the U.S.
Congress).
Rebecca Mckinnon’s op-ed in Newsweek directly addressed the value of
the Internet to helping bring more openness to China when she wrote: “China's
effort to keep sensitive information from reaching its citizens is the envy of
every authoritarian regime in the world, but it is unlikely to hold up over the
long run. The sheer volume of messages, the architecture of the Internet itself
and the cleverness of Internet users are already o
verwhelming state censors.”
So, despite the
sophistication of Great
Firewall of China, industrious Chinese citizens will likely continue to use
the Internet and Web-based technologies to play a cat-and-mouse game with the
government to try and have their voices heard and to disseminate information.
We take something
like this for granted in the U.S., but this could have a monumental impact in
China.
Overall, this
discussion comes back full circle to the Congressional hearings and whether or
not the likes of Google, and Yahoo should censor their results so that they can
do business in China. I fall in line with the people
who think that by offering the Chinese population information on 99.9% of the
topics out there today (the 0.1% of course being what the government deems
inappropriate and forces these companies to censor from their results), these
companies are doing more good than harm. And from a business perspective, I agree with my partner Jim who said
in a recent interview
about these U.S. search companies: "If they're not in
China,
you have Chinese companies that hijack their business models and the Internet
is global so what do you do?"
o, the
number of parties using Baidu's ad service rose 19% from the July-September
period to more than 63,000 showing clear interest in more and more advertisers
who are interested in their PPC model.
