InternetCensorship


 * Internet Censorship in China **

China has the world’s largest Internet population--over 450 million users. But the Great Firewall of China prevents them from accessing any information deemed controversial or harmful to the government’s image.  Chinese Internet users at an Internet cafe //History: //

In 2005, Microsoft agreed to censor its blog writing tool for China, and Google also set up a censored version in 2006, but later that year, they were both criticized in a U.S. Congressional hearing for giving in to China's pressure. Finally in November of 2006, China set up the Golden Shield Project--the first part of the Great Firewall of China--to block illegal sites. This prevented citizens from accessing information that the government didn’t want them to.

China launched its own version of MySpace in April of 2007, which banned and censored “inappropriate” topics, such as the Dalai Lama, Taiwan’s independence, and just religion and politics in general. MSN and Yahoo were forced to sign a pledge to limit what users could say online. In 2008, a law was imposed that said everyone in China using an Internet cafe had to have an ID and a picture taken of them prior to going on the Internet, and Internet police began monitoring what was being said online.

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2008- Talks about how Internet police have recently been reading and filtering private conversations

In March of 2009, YouTube was blocked due to videos of Tibetan monks being beaten, and a few months later the Green Dam filtering software program was introduced, which was to be implemented on every new PC sold in the country after that point. In addition, Twitter and Flickr--a photo sharing website--were blocked on June 10th because it was the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, and the government didn’t want people looking at footage from 1989. Early in 2010, Facebook was also blocked, as were keyword searches for “Urumqui”, a city where commotion was unfolding.

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2009- A news station interviews Chinese citizens about websites and chatrooms that were recently blocked by the Chinese Communist Party

Later that year, Google threatened to completely withdraw its service from China, due to recent cyber attacks on the email accounts of human rights activists, but a few months later, it instead just redirected all its users to an uncensored version of the site, which was based in Hong Kong. China still defended its right to censor the media, though, and Google soon changed its site so that people only went to the uncensored page if they voluntarily clicked a link.

//How serious is this? //

This issue is very serious because it prevents Chinese citizens from reading points of view that oppose the Chinese Communist Party and it also prevents them from expressing their own political points of view. If the government is preventing people from learning about new political ideas and concepts, the country will never progress. It's also very serious because it's simply a violation of people's basic right to say what they want and to have privacy.

//Effects: //

One short term effect of this is that people will be ignorant about the cons of their political system. The government does this so that it can eliminate opposition by not allowing people to be exposed to ideas different from the ones they want the public to believe and support.

A more long-term effect is that because the Chinese Communist Party isn’t even allowing the people in the country to be open to new political concepts, the country certainly won’t be open to political change for a long time.

//Solutions: //

I think that there could be a solution to this problem if China’s government just let it’s citizens say and read what they wanted--taking down the Firewall. I think it’s only fair that people are allowed to make their points, or else there’s only one side to every debate, which isn’t just. Information shouldn’t be withheld. If the Communist Party was really the perfect government for China, it wouldn’t need to block out all other sides of the argument; the fact that they have to have such extensive censorship of the Internet only proves that there are flaws in the county’s current political system, which they don’t want the public to learn about or talk about.

I don’t think that America should help China block out information by setting up censored versions of Google, Microsoft of Yahoo for them. A better approach would be to protest the policy by not letting China have any access to these net giants besides the complete, uncensored version. I think this would encourage the government to stop trying to censor the information on the Internet. However, I don’t think that the U.S. should go out of its way to leak information onto the Internet in China that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t approve of, because that will only create hostilities between the two countries, and will not have as much of a positive effect on citizens of China’s freedom of speech as it would if the censorship policy were completely abolished.