Censorship hasn’t stopped the Internet from becoming a force in China
Plain Dealer Chief Editorial Writer Joe Frolik is in China on a Gatekeeper Editors trip organized by the International Reporting Project, an independent journalism program based in Washington, D.C., and affiliated with Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
There's a euphemism that Chinese dissidents use for when they get a visit from a government official telling them -- sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly -- to cool it. They say they've been asked "to have a cup of tea."
When we asked Ran Yunfei if he'd ever had a cup of tea, the well-known blogger from Chengdu laughed long and hard. He assured our Gatekeeper Editors group that he's had enough tea to float a boat. He hears from local officials periodically, he said, and assumes his telephone is tapped. He said he was denied a visa to travel to Hong Kong last year, and isn't sure if he can leave the country even now.
But unlike some of his friends -- including Tan Zuoren of Chengdu who had organized parents whose children were killed in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake to demand answers from the government, and Liu Xiaobo of Beijing, who helped drafted the Charter '08 reform manifesto -- Ran wasn't been jailed. The reason, he thinks, is that although he criticizes China's powers that be every day on a blog that's hosted in the United States and draws millions of Chinese readers, he has never tried to organize any political activity. That, he said, seems to be the bright, red line.
"In one sense you could say China's a big jail," Ran said through an interpreter. "And so I could be in the big jail or the little jail."
Make no mistake, Ran is glad to remain in the big jail. At 45, he's a relentless critic of the Communist regime that still rules every inch of this country's political infrastructure, but he maintains an idealistic belief that someday, somehow -- without violence, he insists -- American-style democratic competition will emerge here. And when it does, he's convinced the Internet will be a big reason why.
"The Internet is the biggest challenge the government has ever faced," said Ran, who makes his living as writer of books about almost everything but politics and has the perfect base for his blustery style in Chengdu, a city filled with teahouses where opinions fly freely and loudly. "They can't control it."
Oh, but they try. Critical Web postings are frequently deleted, and the government is believed to pay people to put up comments supporting the official line -- whatever it might be that day. Just last week, Internet access was restored to western Xinjiang province 10 months after it was shut off in the wake of ethnic violence last summer. Google closed its shop in China because of government interference.
When our group of journalists met with in Beijing with Wang Chen, head of the State Council Information Office, which oversees state-run media and the Internet, he flatly declared that the Web was "fully open" in China." Then he added that because China has laws against disseminating certain kinds of information, including pornography and communication that might foster hatred or discrimination, it does "filter" the Web. But there's no firewall, he flatly declared at one point, only to add moments later, that if there is one, people who want to get around it can do so easily.
That, at least, seems to be true. Ran said many of his readers use software developed and distributed by the Falun Gong group that Beijing despises. High-tech entrepreneurs privately dismiss the government's controls as amateurish -- in part, they think, because as much as Communist leaders may fear the Internet's political potential, they fear even more damaging their country's reputation as place to do business. Other sources suggest that with an estimated 200 million active blog sites in China, there's only so much censoring that even the most ambitious government can manage.
So Beijing walks a tightrope, cracking down one day (especially after social unrest), pulling back the next. Really loud chatter seems at least occasionally to result in policy changes, though often not until the chatter dies down -- the government certainly doesn't want to make the blogosphere feel too powerful. Even the information chief admitted that as China develops, it is likely to adjust its regulations.
Ran isn't waiting. "I do what I do and I do it with a clear conscience," he said. "My goal is to affect society."
One last note: After a Sichuan "hot pot" dinner with Ran, I returned to my hotel room and Googled his name. The search resulted in 114,000 hits. I tried to open some, but the answer was always the same: "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage." If you're reading this in the United States, maybe you'll have better luck.
Plain Dealer Chief Editorial Writer Joe Frolik is in China on a Gatekeeper Editors trip organized by the International Reporting Project, an independent journalism program based in Washington, D.C., and affiliated with Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
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