Years of Poems and Spirits

A wildly popular article (c) on NYT recently.

Highlights:
Lee Kai-Fu’s vision:
“… students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.” (As if course materials are the only thing Chinese are short of?)

Google’s negotiation/encroachment/transgression: 2 websites, notification of deletion–Google displays similar disclaimers in France and Germany, where they strip out links to pro-Nazi Web sites. (Is it what they think of “democracy” in China?)

I think people would say: ‘Hey, U.S. democracy, that’s a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that’s a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.’ (LKF)

Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail, because they find the idea of leaving messages to be socially awkward. They prefer live exchanges.

Nationalist feelings might have played a role, too, in the success Chinese-run sites enjoyed at Yahoo’s expense. “There’s now a very strong sense of pride in supporting the local guy,” I was told by Andrew Lih. (default capital of native economy in globalization)

Yahoo also was slow to tap into another powerful force in Chinese life: rampant piracy.

“There’s a famous saying, ‘The Internet considers censorship to be damage, and routes around it.’ I say, what if censorship is in the router?” — Seth Finkelstein (Technology good, technology bad–it is all about contrast!)

(Perhaps the most intriguing aspect … Self-Discipline)
One American businessman who would speak only anonymously told me the story of attending an award ceremony last year held by the Internet Society of China for Internet firms … ‘And now it’s time to award our annual Self-Discipline Awards!’
(For Chinese audience, this is about anti-porno. For American, it is censorship)

Means of regulation: registration/license (down to every user)–the possibility of being caught = the cost of transgression.

The ambiguity of regulation:
American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the government to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they must censor. They quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead, the government simply insists the firms interpret the vague regulations themselves.
(Not because the State is weak. On the contrary, this is a governing instrument akin to interigation: you have to prove you’ve told me everything. A call for submission.)

The rationale: The Chinese system relies on a classic psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive than formal censorship.

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience”:
The government’s preferred method seems to be to leave the companies guessing, then to call up occasionally with angry demands that a Web page be taken down in 24 hours.

There are taboos you can’t talk about in the U.S., and everyone knows it. (Charles Chao, the president of Sina) (What does he mean “everyone knows it”? How is the knowledge promulate? By not making the knowledge explicit, the state is inducing the public to “internalize” its policies)

Misc:
So Google’s engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit — so it became part of Google’s blacklist.

“If you talk …, they don’t care … But if you organize — even if it’s just three or four people — that’s what they crack down on. It’s not speech; it’s organizing. People say I’m brave, but I’m not.” Zhao Jing, an early blogger, now NYT staff.

Microsoft’s blogging service has no servers located in China; the company effectively allowed China’s censors to reach across the ocean and erase data stored on American territory.
(Again, thanks to globalization)

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