With the sounds of Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun echoing in my eardrums, I departed SFO international airport en-route to Shanghai. This was my first trip to China and I, partially by choice, had very little idea what to expect. Whatever I expected, it was far more than Christina did, blindfolded as she was, ears plugged with loud, full-spectrum music selected by me to drown out any clues to our destination that might leak over the airport intercom. We were off on another of our surprise trips, and this time I was the one choosing the location.
Just a week earlier, I had gone early in the morning to pick up our visas at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. When I got there, I found a long line of people leading down the sidewalk and a convoy of news vans and police cars. The entrance to the building had been roped off with police tape and a large black mark scarred the steel shutter guarding the door. Earlier that morning, someone had thrown an incendiary device at the Consulate. The social unrest that had recently exploded in Tibet and spilled over into the nearby western provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Xinjiang had spread all the way across the Pacific Ocean.
SF Olympic Torch demonstration.
Photo: Christina
I had begun reading about the protests heating up in Tibet, after decades of active, peaceful demonstration, and becoming bloody with Chinese paramilitary police firing their weapons directly into crowds and killing many people. With the Beijing Olympics rapidly approaching, the Chinese government is trying to eradicate all traces of dissent and whitewash its appearance. As the saying goes, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”, but by now the foundation has rotted, and every strike of the hammer resonates vibrations that pop up five more. What China has not learned from history is that the harder they clamp down the more people will resist. The resistance itself is taking advantage of the international attention focused on China, brought by the Olympics, to gain it’s own visibility and sympathy.
A few weeks earlier, I met someone at a book fair who was quite a bit more familiar with China and its politics. He advised me to be careful talking about politics with the locals, especially those in the eastern part of the country, as they are quite sensitive on the matter. The guide books I read said to avoid it all together. Why is this, I wonder? Is it nationalist loyalty to the government? Or merely an apolitical stance stemming from having carved out a comfortable position in life, and not wanting to be disturbed by Tibetan separatism, Taiwanese independence, and Hong Kong autonomy. Are they just trying to thrive?
By the time we were set up in our hotel, I had already broken numerous laws just by bringing my laptop into the country, containing cryptographic programs allowing me to check my Umich email using PuTTY SSH or log onto my work’s VPN network. So what was a few more? I wanted to check out the extents of the Great Firewall of China, the internet censorship that I had heard so much about. Wikipedia was blocked. Google was not, as they have a complicit agreement with the Chinese government to block questionable content. But Wikipedia results still showed up in Google Search, including snippets of text from the blocked sites. Come on, Google, you guys are supposed to be the masters of information; I thought you’d be better at this. If you can’t even handle that, what are you going to do once all the Tibetans learn to type in l33t-speak? I attempted to circumvent the blocks by viewing Googles cache of the page, to no avail (but I didn’t think to check archive.org). Of course, it was no problem to connect to a computer back in the US over VPN and view whatever I wanted, but this is not something most Chinese citizens have the opportunity to do.
Through this all, I was reminded by my internal soundtrack of the perils of such high concentrations of power and authority. The aforementioned Red Sparrowes album beautifully tells the story, merely with inordinately long song titles and instrumental music, of the Great Leap Forward campaign and the millions of people who starved to death as an ultimate result. While weather conditions were partially to blame, the main cause was a combination of poor planning by so few by leaders, so far removed from the majority of people and separated by so many levels of hierarchy, with each level trying to ingratiate themselves with their superiors. (Which doesn’t actually sound too different from our modern corporations, just on a much larger scale.)
Nanjing Road, Shanghai.
Photo: me
How the western press can continue to refer to China as “communist” is beyond me. From what I saw and what I’ve read, China is unlike any description of communism I have ever come across. With the economic changes begun by Deng Xiaoping and expanded under Jiang Zemin, the country maintains a market economy much closer to capitalism but with many state-owned businesses mingling with private enterprises. Everywhere I looked there were influences of western capitalism and consumerism. Chains like McDonalds and Starbucks were scattered throughout the city. The hotels in Shanghai were almost entirely run by American franchises. But when it comes to governing, China is authoritarian to the core. The government tightly restricts who can cross its borders. The government tells the press what it cannot print. The government tells people what they cannot view on the internet.
Poster by Michael Parisi and Rebecca
Cadman via Eyeteeth
But despite their best efforts—no matter how many journalists are kicked out of the country, nor how much censorship the Chinese government forces on the press or the internet—once information is free, there is no way to control it. Indeed, as the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism points out, as China’s government starts blocking large, general purpose sites like YouTube just to prevent their people from seeing protest videos, they will only upset more people who use the site for non-threatening purposes, in turn spurring more people to become dissidents themselves.
The rise in information technology has brought about a democratization of information. Just as the abundance of digital cameras set free a Critical Mass rider in Minneapolis, so too will it liberate China. Every tourist has become a foreign correspondent. Any kid with a cellphone camera can be an investigative reporter. Videos and (graphic) photos depicting police suppression of demonstrations in Tibet and nearby provinces surfaced on wikileaks.org mere days after the actions had occurred.
While the Chinese government may block direct access to such websites, there is no way they can prevent the information from spreading. Peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols like BitTorrent bypass the need for central (and therefore, controllable) servers altogether and in some cases, can even provide a degree of anonymity for the end-user. The RIAA has been entirely unsuccessful at stopping the sharing of music files. How long will it be until the Chinese people have vast networks of shared, otherwise prohibited, user-created news, artwork, and opinions completely circumventing any central authority? Will the revolution be televised on YouTube?
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