“Goodbye,” I said at last. “I can linger no longer.” The parting between me and my beloved Facebook, as I prepared to depart for China, was thick with surreality. A hurricane was bearing down on my small home in the Virginian town of Williamsburg as I readied myself for the coming months of isolation. I had heard all of the rumors. The Great Chinese Firewall would prevent me from connecting with my friends, would slam shut the numerous open ways and byways of the Internet. It would be farewell Facebook, see you later Twitter, adieu Youtube. Or at least, so I thought. The reality in China, in spite of American stereotypes, is quite a bit more nuanced than what one might at first suspect.
About a week after I arrived in Beijing, I had access to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the Internet. This was a surprising anticlimax: instead of glorious isolation I had expected, I was once again connected. How did I tunnel under the Great Chinese Firewall? The truth is that having a firewall blocking various sites for political reasons would hurt China’s economic growth, because businesses need easy access to any and all websites in order to fully integrate into the world economy. The Chinese Communist Party has a strong aversion towards any policy that hampers the country’s continued growth, so the government has authorized the use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). Originally designed for businesses, these can be used by anyone who wants to bypass the Firewall, for whatever personal reason. As soon as I arrived in China, my professors urged us all to purchase a VPN (it comes relatively cheaply— about $5 a month), since it would make research easier. Most people in my program ended up purchasing VPNs for the 4 months we were in the country —although the real motive was hardly academic. Unsurprisingly, about a week after we arrived, we all wanted to use Facebook to make plans to see each other. In the coming months we found that even though we could access all of our favorite websites, often they were so slow that using them became impossible. Still, so much for the Great Chinese Firewall.
Well then, why have a Firewall at all, if it’s so simple to circumvent? In response to this question, it’s important to understand that the Chinese government’s goal is not to stop anyone from getting into a website that they really want to visit. The internet is so nebulous that this would be an impossible task. What they want to do is prevent those who might be interested in a dangerously political topic from developing their interest any further —they make it just difficult enough for an average Chinese citizen to access certain pages that he or she just gives up—it’s not worth the effort. Think of a child, for example, who heard their parents talk about the Tiananmen Square Incident (as it’s known in China), and wanted to learn more. The Chinese government servers would prevent any such searches from being completed. The child, confused and maybe a little annoyed, but not bothered enough to search further, simply gives up and moves on to other topics.
Furthermore, the foreign visitor will find that Big Brother is always tracking the internet use of any user, VPN or not. When opening the internet on my college’s wifi network, I would be redirected to a splash page that had me put in a username and password connected to my passport. Similarly, any personal internet wifi connection installed in one’s home needs to be registered with a government issued ID, so whenever someone logs on from a given computer in that network, the government knows exactly who is browsing the internet. In addition, my friend and I spent some time playing video games on high powered computers in a nearby internet café. The cost of logging onto a computer was cheap —about 30 cents each hour —but you couldn’t log on if you didn’t have a passport or government issued ID. The Party keeps track of all computer access across the entire country, an impressive feat for a country with more internet users than the entire population of the US.
That’s a staggering amount of people online. How do they feel about their own restrictive internet culture? Many of them couldn’t care less. After all, the bulk of internet users aren’t getting online because they want to be politically active. Most people, just like in the U.S., use the internet to shop, socialize, and play video games. Furthermore, they have access to their own versions of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube in the form of the popular sites Renren, Weibo, and Youku. In other words, most people are perfectly happy with their internet access.
However, when they want to, the Chinese people have also been remarkably adept at using a type of code language to get past the censorship apparatus of the Chinese state. For example, if writing about Tiananmen, a blogger could simply write the word for six (liu) and four (si). These innocuous numbers together reference the date of the Tiananmen Square Incident —June 4th —but cunningly bypass all of the Chinese government apparatus. This is in part because the Chinese government servers act on a keyword basis. Certain keywords or search terms are blocked or flagged, so a blogger who wrote about massacre at Tiananmen or some such would quickly find his website blocked. But, just looking at the case above, how could the Chinese government block all websites that mention the numbers six and four? It would be ridiculous. Another amusing example comes from President Hu Jintao’s use of the phrase “Harmonious Society,” which was supposed to be representative of his philosophy of a new China. Bloggers quickly took to labeling phrases as “harmonized” in ridicule of this new policy, upon which the key word was swiftly blocked. Not to be outdone, bloggers started to use the phrase “river crabs,” a homonym for the Chinese word for “harmonize.” All over the internet, bloggers scorn “river-crabbed” phrases. The Chinese government is aware of this derision —but what can they do? Block river crabs?
The picture that emerges of the Chinese Internet culture is more complex than an outside observer might at first suspect. The Chinese people have their own social websites, and their cunning use of code language allows for careful political discussion. So be aware! If you find a website with reference to river crabs, or even mud grass horses, try and dig a little deeper. It may not be all that it appears to be.
