by Aurélie Plaçais
The Internet censorship in China has been an important issue for quite a while now - one of the most obvious examples being the ban of many major foreign sites from China. Major human rights and newswires such as Amnesty International, the BBC, Wikipedia and the China Digital Times are currently not accessible to Chinese web-users who cannot access the pages unless they are professional hackers. It is not breaking news per say- information has been controlled and restricted for ages, but what worries me is the ever increasing restriction of access to the blogosphere. I am currently living in China and as a blogger I am facing censorship everyday. I first realised it last November when trying to update my own page (most western providers were closed down at that time, but have re-opened ever since). Likewise, some of the most popular Chinese ones were banned in 2004 until they ‘agreed’ to implement a filtering mechanism to control the content of blog posts. These news come at a bad time, since the interest shown by the Chinese population in blogging is growing extremely fast. A recent survey shows that:
“China is the most blog-aware country in the Asia Pacific region, with 88% of respondents saying that they had either blogged themselves or visited blogs” (study conducted by the PR agency Edelman).
“Blog users reach 17.5 million, active blogs reach 7.7 million, and blog readers reach 75 million…” (see complete report here).
If the authorities are concerned about the blogsphere, it is mostly because it has become an important platform of expression - a focus is put on political blogs which are so easy to create but difficult to control. As opposed to websites, creating a blog does not require any previous authorisation: Chinese dissidents and free thinkers can easily spread their opinion on the web, which is too threatening by Chinese authorities. Recent cases such as Zhao Jing's one are also frightening, as they imply that Microsoft is somehow involved in the censorship of his blog.
Services providers like Yahoo and Google have also faced criticism coming from human rights organisations such as Human Rights In China, or Amnesty International. If we have been facing the first steps of blog censorship in China in the past few years, but sadly this trend shows no sign of dissapearing.
