Information

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.