If you have any interest whatsoever in keeping up with
current events you know that the Chinese government enforces some strict
Internet censorship. No Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, or any other
unsanctioned social media/news outlet. This very blogging site is blocked.
As a foreigner, these restrictions hamper me less. I have
subscribed to a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which sends my Internet traffic
through servers in the US and allows me to access the entire Internet. If I do
my thing on the Internet, using VPNs and criticizing the Chinese government on
occasion, I am 98% sure I won’t have secret police knocking down my door. It’s
an insane level of privilege.
Chinese people have developed a vibrant online community
without Facebook. Their equivalent is QQ. If you don’t have a QQ account, you
get the same incredulous stares if you said you didn’t have Facebook in the US.
It is the way people connect online. Giving out your QQ number is the
equivalent of becoming Facebook friends, you do it as a social gesture and you
have lots of QQ friends you never talk to. China also has its Twitter
equivalent, Sina Weibo. It serves the same purpose as Twitter, mostly
self-absorbed broadcasts about oneself, interspersed with important commentators.
The state watches both of these
sites closely to remove posts and accounts that don’t toe the line.
So China has a strong online community. The problem is that
the average Chinese Internet user does not have a VPN, or the desire to get
one, and so their access to news and information free from state bias is slim
to none. Most Americans, including me, do not make enough of an effort to read
multiple sources of news bias. This, however, is our own damn fault. In a
country where you can get arrested for reading the wrong news, there is an even
larger portion of the population who swallows the government line than in the
US. Combined with the fact that critical thinking is not a cultivated skill,
you are left with a huge population that will believe anything coming from
Beijing.
My students face another hurdle entirely. They are not
allowed Internet access, period. There is no wifi or Internet access on campus.
The classrooms can only access the Internet if the teacher has a special access
code. There is an Internet café across the street from the school, but if they
are caught there, they will be punished. My students live in an information
vacuum. The only information they are allowed comes from their textbooks (which
are decidedly sub-par) and their teachers. They have no grasp on what the
outside world is like. I know more about their own country than they do.
A lot of this sort of information isolation could be solved
with a network of decent libraries, but I have not seen a single library since
I’ve been here! China has plenty of impressive public projects, but libraries
have not been part of the effort. In the US, some of our proudest structures
are our libraries, and we even have street signs pointing the way. It’s
possible there are libraries in the larger cities, but they certainly aren’t
advertized or even celebrated. It’s funny how it took me this long to notice. You don’t really look for libraries when
you can’t read the language. But it’s unsettling once noticed.
The other night I had dinner with some of my school’s
representatives. The man in charge, Mr. Dong, likes to educate us foreigners on
the finer points of Chinese history and that night the topic was the Great Leap
Forward. The Great Leap was an economic policy under Mao. He decided that China
needed to be a modern industrial country. The best way to do that in his maniac
brain? Produce steel. Tons of it. And because he was a communist, he thought
that everybody in China should produce steel. Totally logical, right? No way
that could backfire. The upshot was that everybody inflated their production
values of everything from crops to steel and so when tax time came, the
government took the resulting level of goods. But the inflated production
levels meant the central government took too much food from the countryside.
Something like 30 million people died from starvation as a result. The other
American at my school told me that there are very few people around his age
(53-56) because they all starved to death as children during the Great Leap.
The part that was frightening was that Mr. Dong told us that
the famine happened because China had to pay off its debts to the USSR. Not
because Chairman Mao was a dictator in love with his own fantasy. The free
exchange of information is critical to a thriving society but there is way for
Mr. Dong to find alternative sources of information without breaking the law.
There are no repositories of knowledge he could peruse to find alternative
narratives. There is no free Internet, there are no libraries. Libraries do not
lend themselves to homogenous idealisms or cults of personality.
I’m not entirely sure what my point is here. I would like to
say that if China had libraries, the Communist Party would fall, but really, I
know that is not true. The CCP’s grasp on power is much more insidious.
Libraries would be a step, but on their own, they are not enough. It would take
a whole change in this country’s mental attitude toward freedom and the role of
government. Like I said, libraries wouldn’t be enough on their own, but perhaps
they would be a first step.
