Trilight Zone

[tricore]

Today, both Tech News World and CNET’s own Little Red Blog posted stories about China unblocking Wikipedia and allowing surfers coming from China-hosted IP addresses to use the popular encyclopedia service. Their stories are slightly, different, though: The Little Red Blog claims that although China did unblock Wikipedia, it has since shoved it back behind the wall just as unceremoniously as it pulled it out from the darkness.

So which is it? Is Wikipedia accessible from within China, or not?

It’s probably a bit of both. This is merely standard operating procedure for the Middle Kingdom where, according to several people I met while traveling there earlier this year, there are more than 30,000 employees of the Chinese government working on restricting certain sites and un-restricting others.

To be honest, I like to romanticize it a bit as a wall of millions of eyes, all blinking independently of each other, with closed eyes representing blocked sites and open eyes being unblocked, because contemplating the true nature of what China is doing runs counter-intuitively to the free nature of information on the Web.

It’s not just Wikipedia that has an uncertain future for China’s Web surfers. Any site, and possibly every site, can suddenly find itself on the wrong side of the Great Firewall. As the CNET article notes, and I can confirm from first-hand experience, Web mail and blogging sites have had a particularly rough time.

Hotmail is usually non-functioning from within China, and even Gmail, run by the same Google folks who earlier this year tried to extricate themselves from the tangled bed sheets of the Chinese government, occasionally goes on the blink. The firewall situation must be doubly complicated for Google in part because of the existence of Gmail.cn, which looks to be a non-Google affiliated site, and then complicated by the utter lack of freedom of speech rights in China.

Now, every country has its restrictions on freedom of speech. England has an “official secrets” act. One of Japan’s many media taboos involves criticizing the Imperial household. In America, it used to be limited to slight variations on yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, although with King George the list of forbidden subjects has been growing obscenely fast.

In China, though, there is no privately-owned media that hasn’t been subjected to severe government restriction. It just doesn’t exist. The Internet, on the other hand, is freely accessible. Net cafes, except in Beijing, are the cheapest I’ve seen in all of Asia, with most charging either two or three yuan (25 to 40 cents) per hour, and you can just as easily surf to a news site as you can pornography.

Political tensions between China and other countries gain government support through this censorship. Certain URLs containing references to Japan in them appear to be permanently disabled. The Japan Times Web site is accessible, but this blog is not. My own travel blog, Big In Japan.org, was also blocked from within the firewall. Thanks, Chairman Mao.

There doesn’t seem to be any guiding ideology or any other reason for why a Web site gets banned in China. It’s not as if the Chinese have banned all sites about Japan, or all Web-based email, or even all blogs. And given the nature of doing business with the government, where bribing is as common as breathing, it’s possible to infer that having the government approval, like Google does, doesn’t necessarily benefit the end-user or the company.

The broadband network throughout China clearly works well enough for the thousands of Net cafe patrons and denizens to kill enormous chunks of time playing MMRPGs that need fast connections for the quick response times the games demand.

So if it’s not bribes, and it’s not connectivity, and it’s not ideological censorship, what the heck is it?

While the problems in China are multi-faceted, it makes me cringe when I hear people talking about how the financial bottom line is the deciding factor for the Chinese. If it were, we’d see a freer market, where nobody would really care what you were selling as long as it made money.

The actions of the Chinese government, censoring whatever sates their capricious whims, clearly indicate that the market is not the bottom line here; maintaining their hold on power is. At the beginning of this summer, The Da Vinci Code was pulled from every theater in the country about three weeks after it was released, because the Vatican complained about it. If that movie is worthy of censorship — in a country notorious for bootlegging and flaunting copyright laws — then anything is.

While none of this should be news, what is distressing is how willing foreign companies seem to be ready to compromise on their U.S. or “Western” values to make money there. The ubiquitousness of KFC and other fast food chains and the eagerness of the 20-something Chinese to look to Japanese and Western styles indicate that if the foreign companies investing in China began talking to each other, as well as the Chinese government, we might see some real change there. They might be able to encourage alterations in environmental regulations, citizen’s rights and maybe, just maybe, the Great Firewall of China will go the way of the barrier that used to be in Berlin.