The Right to Know

This is my eighth trip to China, and information control, i.e. censorship, is the tightest I’ve ever seen it, probably because there are rumors of civic unrest, and this is the 25^th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.  Google searches are prohibited as are Gmail, Youtube,  Facebook, and Wikipedia.  Multiple websites are blocked: the subjects are as diverse as world geography, linguistics, and the history of the Boy Scouts. Even a link my son sent me concerning requirements to be met by advanced level soccer coaches in the US appears to have been blocked. I am told a massive bureaucracy controls what the Chinese public may read. 

 As you may imagine, this affects the academic work one can do over here. It is disconcerting. 

I mentioned the problem to a Communist Party official at a dinner party we both were attending, and while she acknowledged that Google, Youtube, and Facebook were blocked for “security reasons,” she said the others problems were due to technical difficulties.   No doubt some of the problems are, and these are resolved by rebooting and repeating a search.  Sometimes my ETSU mail goes down for awhile, or one of Joe’s emails is mysteriously delayed, and I cannot tell why. I doubt that it’s censorship all of the time, but it probably is pretty often. I believe the Chinese government wants to conceal the extent to which things are censored.

My friends and students take the problem for granted, accepting it as a mild annoyance, like mosquitos and dragon flies.  I cannot do this.  For those of us raised in America, access to information is something like oxygen.  Back home, we never notice its presence because it is always there.