There are more than 210 million Internet users in China, and according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly all of them want Big Brother watching over their shoulders when they surf.
From the report:
Many Americans assume that China’s internet users are both aware of and unhappy about their government’s oversight and control of the internet. But in a new survey, most Chinese say they approve of internet control and management, especially when it comes from their government.
According to findings from the fourth and most recent of a series of surveys about internet use in China from 2000 to 2007, over 80% of respondents say they think the internet should be managed or controlled, and in 2007, almost 85% say they think the government should be responsible for doing it.
That sounds like a heck of a lot — anyone who’s ever been on a committee knows all too well that it’s damn near impossible to get 85 per cent of any group to agree on much of anything. Once you break down the numbers though, it seems that people generally just want protection from gambling, pornography, violence and spam. Only 27 per cent of Chinese apparently want the government monitoring their online chatting, and just 41 per cent want “political” content policed by the state.
If those numbers still seem high, it may be because they’re inflated as well — if you were living in a country with zero tolerance for “anti-patriotic” leanings, how eager would you be to share your distaste for state censorship with a pollster? A poll like this one seems likely to produce a lot of false answers, much like asking people if they tend not to trust “ethnic types,” or whether or not they play with themselves.
Still, some Chinese netizens clearly do want a state watchdog filtering their content, and not altogether unreasonably — there are indeed some scary things out there. But much of what the Chinese government blocks isn’t scary to anyone but the Chinese government, like reports of police brutality, information about the continuing Chinese colonization in mineral-rich Tibet, and criticisms of the growing rich-poor divide in the nominally socialist country.
According to Harvard Law School, the long list of blocked, filtered or government-altered sites includes everything from the news media (Irish Chronicle, ABC, Yahoo! News, Radio Canada International), to international and government bodies (UNICEF Canada, the U.S. Judiciary, the Taiwanese and Japanese governments) to educational institutions (MIT, Columbia), to the seemingly innocuous Red Lobster restaurant chain and the Red Mountain ski resort in British Columbia — perhaps because of their flippant use of China’s revolutionary colour.
Reasonable people and reasonable governments don’t shut out dissenting views — they address them through public dialogue and debate — but that’s the subject of a post all its own. For now, I’m just hoping this little site stays low enough on the Google rankings to fly under the Chinese government radar.
Story via Slashdot.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Chris Trudeau // May 14, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Hey Mark…
Interesting article. I also wonder if the inflated numbers are in part because of the company carrying out the survey. It sounds like Pew Internet and American Life Project is a group with their own special interests, part of which might be convincing people that tightly controlled internet content is not so bad after all!
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d still like to know what the organization’s agenda is.
2 mark // May 15, 2008 at 9:39 am
Hey Chris, I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought of that. Pew is actually pretty respected, but if anything, I’d seen them as having the opposite bias, as an American organization looking to pressure the Chinese government into bowing to its citizens’ demands for expanded rights and liberties. Doesn’t look like they were able to do that, though.
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