China Internet Censorship…take another look

China says you cannot has internets

Freedom of Speech?

Many people, particularly viewers and commentators from the West are writing never ending stories and spewing diatribes about China, and it’s forthcoming economic tidal wave of global dominance, like some prophetic second coming; no doubt in a effort to rekindle the kind of fear and anxiety that gripped many a western nation at the height of the cold war and the throughout the rise (and eventual fall) of communism. You just have to look at the cover of Newsweek, week in, week out to realise that a lot of journalist have swallowed the Kool-Aid and now all they can do is squeak. If it’s not the economy, it’s the rampant consumerism, if it’s not that, it’s rare earth metals, if that, human rights and censorship and China as a lead part on the global stage.

However – this for me, doesn’t represent a balanced, or a fair case. A lot of the journalists will have never lived in, let alone visited China and experienced first hand exactly what is dragging China along these days. What exactly constitutes this drive to dominate the world and so forth.

Control

The first and most obvious reason for any kind of internet censorship provided by most people would be to protect an incumbent government from criticism, to limit subversive communication and to severely limit the way in which people can “anonymously” air their thoughts without recrimination (as we all know this is becoming increasingly difficult in the so called “free countries”). I posit to you that whilst the Chinese government does of course want to exert a serious level of control over the internet and its citizens’ ability to communicate with the outside world., offering a sanitised and party approved version of the world to the masses, it is increasingly taking a back seat to that of another motive, another agenda.

On the inside of a cirlce

What exactly is censored and what is not is one of the most difficult things to pin down in China. Ex-pat forums are awash with stories about different access levels to external websites in several different regions, provinces and cities throughout China. It’s like some kind of “black-box”, there is no such thing as a blacklist – this would be far too rudimentary and by far the easiest to circumvent. By it’s nature this would mean the government playing cat and mouse with websites moving names, IP addresses and an exponentially swelling blacklist that would soon expand out of control. It’s clear to anyone living in China that the government takes a somewhat “heuristic” approach, that is monitoring some keywords and trying to block things that may be offensive on “the fly” as it were. The blacklist exists of course, but only for major sites like Facebook and Youtube, as they are unlikely to try and tackle the government head on.

The problem with this approach is a desperately unreliable and frustrating internet experience for those surfing China-external websites from inside China. The key word blocking, packet inspection and bizarre censoring practises often mean image searches on sites like Google and Flickr are routinely interrupted and censored. Click a link that somehow has offended the Great Firewall and you will find you connection dropped for several minutes. You may find that a website that includes cross site content that does not meet approval and therefore does not load that part leaving large gaps in content. You may find that a website starts to load and then the heuristics kick in, saying a big “NO” to the content and interrupting your connection. Experiencing this kind of seemingly random censure is at best a frustrating niggle and at worst an hellish annoyance as you try to get work done or look at a friends link.

Ironically, it’s this kind of “black-box” approval process that allowed the press to level such criticisms at Apple, with their draconian, bizarre and what can only be imagined as Byzantine app-store approval process. Here in China, I can only imagine the powers that be believe it increases the power and mistique of absolute control of resources. “We know what’s best for you, and we always will”.

“Google doesn’t understand the Market”

I recently read an article over at the Register UK where the Baidu chief Robin Li has gone on record confidently pronouncing that his Chinese Google competitor search engine has 99% coverage within China. Further to this, in a great leap of hubris he states that “Google doesn’t understand the Chinese market”. Whilst I am not keen on any company with plans for world domination and existing monopolies I feel this is unfair and smacks of arrogance.

Baidu is a Chinese company, with Chinese government backing. The Chinese government is in all but name the world’s biggest corporate enterprise. It only falls short of being recognised as such by not being listed on several stock markets. The way that China does business with the rest of the world, in conjunction with having a closed internal, state controlled economy (and an outwardly capitalist agenda) means that it’s simply not a level playing field.

Through the Looking Glass

Here you have to examine the nature of the Chinese “Intranet” as one observer has put it. Google has struggled to penetrate and capture the Chinese market because it offers a limited service compared to Baidu. Google has image search in China, as does Baidu (of which is constantly interrupted by the firewall), but on Google if you search for music or videos you will be offered links to sites such as YouTube or iTunes, last.fm etc. Baidu does this fundamentally differently. It offers a video and MP3 search engine that catalogues and offers DIRECT links to pirated and / or copyrighted material. The crux here is that outside of China, a person using Baidu for this service will be offered sanitised results without a link to the material. This is obviously quite disingenuous but should this become global knowledge they would be ridiculed on a global stage.

You could bet your bottom dollar that should Google start to offer such a service, even within China they would be lambasted, in the media outside of China, by the courts and copyrights holders outside of China and then finally the public and other commentators for appearing two-faced (such as the attention they got for offering a self-censored service in China the first time).

Google are fighting a loosing battle, not because of a lack of understanding of the market and not even because of their staunch refusal to go by the rules of censorship of the government. The is a much simpler and more obvious explanation. Google will not succeed in China because it’s not an open market. They are a wholly owned foreign company in a country whose sole interest is themselves, their power and their sovereignty. Baidu are Chinese, Google are American. In China, Baidu will continue to dominate, Google will fail or always be mediocre.

The Why of China

Corruption is endemic in China. Money speaks the loudest and in China everybody listens. Business, government, jobs, construction are all controlled or carried out by the countries rich and powerful. Businesses have to go through torturous layers of bureaucracy, deals are brokered over expensive lunches, not on merit and offerings of beneficial services. Preferential treatment and access to resources are all offered on the basis of 关系 guanxi (lit. “relationships”), a phenomenon within China and little can be done to penetrate this unless you have money or social status. Favours, red-envelopes of cash are the bread and butter of the Chinese business world.

Google are a foreign company, with a “home-grown” Chinese competitor. This warrants the question “What do YouTube, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and other “Web 2.0″ services have in common?”. Ditto Google; All of the countries have a major Chinese competitor within the Chinese market. What they don’t have in common with Google is that they are all blocked or access is severely hampered on the Chinese Intranet. And the reason for this is touched upon above. Economic protectionism.

Our country, our rules

The fact that these services are mostly social services, with the ability for near-instant, real-time communication allows them to be shrouded in the deceiving cloak of censorship from political freedoms. However, the truh is much more insidious. When Baidu came along it was a Google clone. Facebook had some meagre success in China and more importantly , then xiaonei.cn (lit. little campus) appeared. A “home-grown” competitor. I say “home-grown” because when it actually came on-line it was a pixel for pixel clone of Facebook, down to the smallest detail. Like Facebook, it was originally intended for university students only. As its popularity increased, it soon expanded its services to the rest of China and re-branded itself 人人网 renrenwang (lit. everybody’s net). Just like Facebook. Twitter has it’s clones that are now hugely popular in China. Same goes for YouTube, it has it’s competitors in YouKu and TuDou. Foursquare which recently became blocked has exactly the same and there are a host of other sites suffering the same fate.

You make ‘em, we’ll copy ‘em

Somebody recently said to me “In the old days, you used to invade a country and never leave. That was conquest;, now China is simply buying the world.” It’s true that China’s economic investment outside of China is staggering, particularly in the Middle-East and Africa and it’s not going away. But flippant remarks aside it’s clear that the internet in China is just another extension of the Chinese brand of “communism” with a twist. A tightly controlled economy where they manufacture everything for the world, but won’t let those products be consumed in China for fear of destroying the market or pushing up prices; whilst cloning everything and offering the knock-off products to the populace. They’ll let the foreign companies make ‘em, then they’ll copy ‘em and not let anybody else in.