China Bloggers: Truth Above All ... but Community Firstby Uriel Wittenberg (uw@urielw.com)October 5, 2004
If we were to imagine a taxonomy of World Wide Web information sources, one relatively intriguing species might be that of English-language China bloggers. Belonging as they do to the much larger genus of Blogger, they have an instinctive ardor for free speech. But China bloggers also live under, or focus on, the world's greatest information-censoring regime. Inevitably, the topic of censorship gets frequent play, and it goes without saying that disapproval is the prevailing sentiment. It is therefore fascinating that several of these China bloggers unabashedly practice censorship themselves. The Communist Party has an obvious motive for censorship: They're the bosses of a big country and they want it to stay that way. (In addition, they have a "social stability" rationalization which is at least not immediately implausible.) What are the censoring bloggers' motives? Who can be sure? But it is conceivable that they are not indifferent to inbound hyperlinks -- and that the warm regard of their blogging peers takes precedence over a terribly strict application of abstract ideals of freedom. The furious interlinking between this tiny community's members (how many active English China bloggers are there -- maybe twenty? thirty?) is suggestive of a hill tribe divided from the outside world by dense jungle. Members can be seen echoing each others' reports about strikingly unstriking items, with links galore. As I write this, for example, I see that the current edition of the Living in China blogzine refers readers to A Report To The China Blogging Community, an Oct. 4 item appearing on community member Joe Bosco's blog. The gist of Bosco's Report, succinctly rendered in the Report subtitle as "'Danwei' Is One Cool Dude!", is that Bosco and his wife had dinner with fellow blogger Jeremy (whose blog is known as Danwei), and that the occasion was most agreeable. Still, given that censorship is known to be such a heathenish practice, could mere mutual backscratching account for the alacrity with which multiple bloggers have suppressed non-happy-making content from their sites? One wonders whether there is not a more formal mechanism at work, perhaps a contract along the lines of:
Paragraph 17. But this is idle speculation. Let me stick to the facts I know.
I have previously documented the eagerness of two blogs, Peking Duck and China Digital News, to censor information that has displeased their fellow blogger Joe Bosco. (See Joe Bosco, Blogger, and Hypocrisy at Berkeley Journalism School's "China Digital News".) Before presenting the latest instance, Censor #3, I take pleasure in recognizing a couple of honorable violators of Clause 17A -- China bloggers who have demonstrated a willingness to expose non-conforming information to their readers, thus allowing the prospect of open debate together with all the unpredictable, uncomfortable, cherished-illusion-toppling revelations that free information can produce:
Everyone blabs about the wonderfulness of free speech. Hats off to bloggers who match action to rhetoric.
We come now to the furtive elimination by blogger Fons Tuinstra of information that might have caused displeasure at China Digital News (CDN). How would it cause displeasure? By revealing the simple truth that CDN practices censorship -- which, as everyone knows, is bad and shameful. Fons Tuinstra, whose "China Herald" blog describes him as a "Shanghai-based journalist," can be a tough ass-kicker in the hearty blogging tradition when the target is remote, like Google for instance. In connection with the controversy over Google's support for the Chinese government's censorship, he recently posted successive blasts with the titles "Google's fake arguments," "Google sticks to self-destructive argument," and "Is stupidness evil?" (He and I exchanged a few comments on his blog about these topics.) But on Oct. 3 he posted an item about how Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Beijing University, had been punished for criticizing the government. The item quoted a fellow blogger, "ESWN," who'd written that "Jiao showed a blind admiration for the American political system, using it as the standard towards which everybody else ought to be moving." This prompted me to post the following response:
"Jiao showed a blind admiration for the American political system, using it as the standard towards which everybody else ought to be moving." I checked back on China Herald about 12 hours later. My comment was gone without a trace. Journalist Fons Tuinstra had quietly removed it, without a word to me and without any indication to his readers. We have become familiar with the idea that money and power are increasingly corrupting our information sources. But the ideal of truth may have sunk lower than we realize. While money and power are strong inducements to corruption, the China blogging scene suggests that even the petty pursuit of inbound links is enough to defeat the truth.
FOLLOWUPAnother China Blogger Grapples with Free Speech ConundrumOctober 11, 2004
Readers of urielw.com have already fleetingly encountered Adam Morris, the blogger who risked, then drew back from, arousing the famous Bosco temper (see Joe Bosco, Blogger). Morris's brainysmurf.org is another member of the China blogging mafia, one that is frequently cited by other members of that select group. Having worked in China for five years, Morris has been pushed around and stepped on plenty. But it's not the Chinese who really get his gander, he tells his blog's readers:
You know who the worst people are? No, not the policemen who have confiscated my property and fined me for doing nothing more than moving in. Nope, you know who? The foreigners who have contact with the country and turn into bastards of a different beast entirely. The worst people I've met are people like the Canadian who told me I had to vacate my apartment the next day. With nowhere to go and no friends having recently arrived, I slept in the Internet bar. What is this bastard of a different beast company, you may well demand to know. Morris is prepared to name names: Google. Google, whose leaders have "sold their soul" by doing business in China in a way that complies with the Chinese government's wishes. Google, by excluding banned sites from search results for Chinese users, has in effect been practicing censorship. Morris is damnably displeased about that. His Open letter to Google pulls no punches:
I work and live in the PRC and am aghast at how many times westerners are willing to lower their standards to despicable levels just in having contact with the country. I am equally baffled at the new inventions foreigners come up with for justifying their kowtow floor-board crawling. But Morris will not stand idly by to witness this travesty. At whatever risk to pool and pork, Morris's brainysmurf.org stands ready to safeguard the free flow of ideas in China. The same open letter announces:
If Google isn't interested in creating a website that will allow anybody, no matter where they are, to search for news in the Chinese language without worrying about blocking, then I am. Morris has already begun this project by publicizing the techniques he uses to evade the government's "great firewall" and access forbidden websites. A bemused fellow blogger, Simon, posts the question:
But Adam what would you have Google do? They can either not offer any service at all, or they can work within the constraints China imposes.... I don't think they pretend to offer a window into dissenting viewpoints for China's netizens; they merely offer a partially censored news aggregator. It's part of life in China, just like $5 pork chops and all night pool. It is a discussion topic with fertile possibilities. What a signal to the world if Google, famous for its "Don't be evil" maxim, were to relinquish its China operations and all associated profits rather than accede to government censorship! Has mankind's infatuation with Mammon ever been so intense, so feverish and obsessive as in our current era? Business! The art of making moolah -- the worshipful ass-kissing launching a thousand sighing breezes every minute, the ceaseless supplications, the pandering and the hubbub, the rainbow-hued currencies streaking electronically all about our little planet, the constant clinking, shuffling din! Ohhhhhhhh ....
I've got ninety thousand pounds in my pyjamas, What a precedent it would be if Google were to issue a tiny, perfect statement. No corporate equivocations. No qualifications. Simply:
We say NO to bullshit. And NO to China. Thank you, and good night. It would hit China like a thunderbolt. No sunbaked peasant, tilling soil on the hillock over by the far side of the barren field, would fail to hear of it. It'd be a brick in the head to the U.S. too, kicking back-burner questions no one but a few musty academics have spent more than a second thinking about onto the national agenda:
And so on. Fertile ground, as I say, for an interesting discussion. However, dear Reader, I have some sad news. There are undoubtedly interesting discussions going on somewhere in the world. But one thing's for sure: they are not going on on the Internet. And "brainysmurf" did not blaze any new paths in this regard. Morris's response to Simon's "what would you have Google do?" query was:
I'm saying they've sold their soul. Obviously, they "shouldn't" have done that. I think we're talking about two different things, me about the morality of it and you about the business of it. I don't think they're mutally exclusive though. And with that, the discussion could be seen to be rapidly fizzling. Except that I appeared:
>The worst people are the people who lower their standards even though they should know better. Morris's consternation can be imagined. But he could hardly zap the comment. Not in the midst of his own anti-censorship tirade. He replied:
Uriel: Bloggers have a right to delete comments as they see fit. This is a hobby, there are other places for uncensored chat, personal blogs simply aren't one of them. Individuals own it, and things are diverse, which makes them great, but that means that comments are going to be deleted. I prefer to police my comments instead of just deleting them, but hey, I don't own every blog and I don't pretend to want to. I failed to discreetly disappear:
Hi Adam, This was getting more than a bit awkward. Morris remained silent. But yet another China blogger -- Brendan O'Kane of bokane.org -- entered the fray:
Uriel, you're full of it; your argument is logically equivalent to saying that if somebody spray-paints slogans all over my house, I'm then morally obliged to let them stay there. Your writing makes it clear that you can't possibly be that stupid, so I'll assume that you're just being disingenuous. The spray-paint analogy was so lame I merely told O'Kane we could discuss it at bokane.org if he wished. Instead he initiated an email exchange. Before long, I returned to the brainysmurf discussion to post this followup:
Well, Brendan (O'Kane) did pursue this -- not at bokane.org but via email. But ... what was this? Brainysmurf appeared to be broken. The text box for entering new posts had disappeared from the You know who the worst people are? discussion. After my initial puzzlement, however, I understood. Morris had held fast as long as he could. He had deleted nothing. But he had quietly "locked" the topic so no one could post anything further. "How tiresome you people are," I emailed Morris, "with all your secrets and your terror of turning over the rocks all around you. Here's the followup I would have added. But your caution will preserve your readers from these disturbing thoughts." And I added the text I'd intended to post. The China pundit replied:
I turned off the comments to the post because the comments went off topic. I'm glad you didn't have the opportunity to post what you wrote below because it has nothing to do with what I wrote but everything to do with you two and your problems with the Chinese blogosphere. I'm not going to host that kind of discussion. Ever. Morris also posted this "Update" to the You know who the worst people are? discussion:
The comments have been turned off because the topic was going off topic. Also I feel that someone violated Address complaints to me. Again, this is my blog and I have my own comment policy, and I'm in charge of enforcing it, and I'll do it when I want to. Then Morris posted a new "Comment Policy" topic:
Comment policy. I had to close the comments of a post I wrote earlier. It's the first time I've ever done so, and it's because of a single actor going around accusing anyone who bothers having a conversation with him of various personality defects. "Troll," for those unfamiliar with Internet terminology, is a label functionally equivalent to "communist" in Joe McCarthy-era America or "liberal" in U.S. politics today. The unnamed "actor" involved with the unspecified post was, obviously, myself. But what comments had been deleted? And what were the "errors"?? Morris's meaning was clarified by a further note he'd affixed to my first entry in the discussion:
(-ed note: Uriel originally left a URL to his own site and I've since learned that he uses his site to propogate information about other bloggers and friends that compromises their identity, so it has been removed. These "other bloggers and friends" are actually one fellow -- the proprietor of Peking Duck ("Uriel, you're a menace, and many other Chinese bloggers know it"), the first of China's many censors to have captured my attention. I refer to him by his (straightforwardly obtained) real name in my Joe Bosco, Blogger, rather than the richard-with-a-small-r moniker he uses for his online persona. This "compromising of identity" was the justification Morris had been seeking. He could now proceed on principle. And he assiduously removed all references and links to urielw.com from the discussion. He also took care to remove my surname, apparently fearing that brainysmurf visitors with a lust for compromising information could otherwise track me down by googling my name. Otherwise my contributions remain -- a mystifying voice of dissent attached to a disembodied "Uriel", confined to brainysmurf like a dissenter under house arrest. What's my feeling about all of this? Well, I'm aghast. Aghast at how many times Westerners are willing to lower their standards to despicable levels. But even more, I'm dazzled. Dazzled at the new inventions foreigners in China come up with for justifying their kowtow floor-board crawling.
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