Telling the Truth In Today's China

eldavojohn writes "Inside the land of the Great Firewall censorship is rampant although rarely transparent. Foreign Policy has a lengthy but eyeopening recounting of what it's like being an editor for the only officially sanctioned English business publication inside the most populated country on Earth. Eveline Chao of the magazine 'China International Business' writes in her piece 'Me and My Censor' about her censor named Snow, the three taboo T's (Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen), a bizarre government aversion to flags and how she was 'offered red envelopes stuffed with cash at press junkets, sometimes discovered footprints on the toilet seats at work, and had to explain to the Chinese assistants more than once that they could not turn in articles copied word for word from existing pieces they found online.' Anecdotes abound in this piece including the story of a photojournalist who 'once ran a picture he'd taken in Taiwan alongside an article, but had failed to notice a small Taiwanese flag in the background. As a result, the entire staff of his newspaper had been immediately fired and the office shut down.' " (Read more, below.) Eldavojohn continues: "From shoddy CYA maps to language misunderstandings to an elusive 'words group' faxed out by government censors, this article exposes a lot of the internal workings and responsibilities of a 'government censor' inside mainland China but also the ridiculous absurdity of government censorship: 'I was told that we could not title a coal piece "Power Failure" because the word "failure" in bold print so close to the Olympics would make people think of the Olympics being a failure. The title "The Agony and the Ecstasy" for a soccer piece was axed because agony was a negative word and we couldn't have negative words be associated with sports.' The magazine couldn't use images of an empty bowl for its restaurant pieces because it might remind readers of the Great Famine."

Comments

absurdity

[HPHatecraft]

All of this is absurd, like a Dada or Surrealist depiction of a repressive government. I'm thinking of the Marx Brother's "Duck Soup" or something similar. It would all be hilarious if it didn't have real, and possibly fatal, consequences. Good luck, people of China.

This is horrible

[Quakeulf]

Just think of all the man hours spent on keeping people stupid and the labour cheap so that we can all have it made in China.

Re:This is horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

i spend a fair amount of time working with a software dev team in Shanghai. they are to a person incredibly smart--your stupid people / cheap labor might apply to the uneducated unwashed masses which of course applies everywhere in the world and not just China (i often shudder thinking of the brilliant folks in the U.S. who watch and believe what they see on Fox News).

also, anyone with a wifi enabled device (pretty much everyone in every major city) that wants to read uncensored news, or access facebook/youtube from china can do so. if you have access to foreign company corporate network it is trivial as there is no restriction, if not, there are proxies that circumvent the great firewall. The government plays whack-a-mole with proxy sites, but like in the arcade game there are too many to keep up with.

one of my SH co-workers told me that in every Xinhua news broadcast you get the truth exactly twice: when they tell you the date and then the time. these people are not fools.

*This* is what big governments *do*

[Anonymous Coward]

How's this any different from banning Big Gulps?

Big overweening governments do things like this "for your own good".

While I don't agree with China's censorship...

[Anonymous Coward]

One also has to take their culture into context. THis is not the US or anywhere in the "West" for that matter, where our stand is put out all information in whatever form you want, and leave it up to the individual to determine what they want to read and what interpretation of events is correct.

China's focus is more of an "internal harmony" approach, whereby maintaing social order is a higher priority than things such as freedom of the press. Many Chinese are perfectly ok with the government censoring certain things out of the media as it fits within their belief system of internal harmony (both Zen Buddhism and Daoism maintain this concept of balance) of both the self and society. But i think far more importantly is that here in the West we are taught shockingly little history of China, but if you have ever studied it you'll see that China has been beset 5 or 6 times by massive wars, several of whcih were huge revolutions against the existing regime, and during those wars millions of Chinese were killed. Most people are shocked to think of the destruction and loss of life during World War I and II; China has had several incidents in the past 2,000 years on that scale. The Chinese have a long memory, and they more than any other society are acutely aware of the dangers of revolution and challenges to the social order, and many are quite content to let things be if that means they don't have to go through another period like that.

Again, here in the West we idolize social disturbance, and in fact I think we've done a good job overall in allowing it to come out so when it does come out now in the 20th and 21st centuries, it typically results in a political revolution instead of a violent one, and my own opinion is the Chinese approach simply represses those feelings which ultimately magnifies them and when revolution comes it blows up harder than it would have otherwise. But that's my own opinion; the Chinese seem to think differently.

Re:While I don't agree with China's censorship...

[poity]

I hate when bullshit like this gets modded up.
Do you also take the Religious Right's culture into context, and implore others to sympathize?
Do you also take the racist rural white culture into context, and implore others to sympathize?
When confronted with domestic abuse, do you say "well maybe she likes it, who are we to judge?"
When conservatives say "don't disturb the social order" do you pipe up in their defense, because they too have a culture of their own?

In your over-enthusiasm to be tolerant, you've embraced a type of paternalistic prejudice. You judge, albeit with a well-meaning heart, an entire nation of people with broad assumptions and meaningless generalizations. I find posts like yours only slightly less intolerable than overt racism.

I'll tell you this as a Chinese person: The majority of Chinese aren't followers of the same organic vegan yoga-studio interpretation of Buddhism that you might be enamored with -- they follow a mixture of traditional local paganism that has been intertwined with figments of Buddhism over hundreds of years. They are not "ok" with government censorship, but through years of being powerless in the face of the government, the majority have taken on the attitude of "there's nothing to be done, so just cope."

As you say, China has indeed been the geopolitical victim for much of its modern life, but having been bullied by foreign nations is not a argument for or a rational explanation of Chinese apathy. In fact, the government and nationalist groups/individuals have consistently relied on China's history of victimhood as a rallying cry for activism, though always for rights of the state and respect for the country, yet rarely if ever for rights of the people. There's a sentiment common among majority of Chinese internet users which I've noticed, and can be summarized as "no matter who's in charge [Imperial/foreign/GMD/CPC] we're always the downtrodden rabble." They're are not content, they merely deal with it the best they can since business, marriage, and finding a house they can afford are far more urgent matters. But that doesn't mean accept censorship, or embrace it as you imply.

And no, people in the West don't "idolize social disturbance" either. In every nation there are conservatives who want stability above all. In the US, we have at least half who are adamantly conservative, and half again more who are nominally liberal but don't dare rock the boat. Your propensity to generalize the unfamiliar I've seen in friends and family back in China. When they ask me "Do Americans really do/believe/think this?" I have to explain to them "No, American attitudes are diverse, just like Chinese attitudes here are diverse."

Re:While I don't agree with China's censorship...

[poity]

It seems Chinese (and "distant" foreigners like other Asians, Middle Easterners) have to deal with two sides of prejudice -- one end regards us as soulless and less than human, the other fetishizes us to irreproachable heights.

Chinese thought process is not much different from the thought process of anyone else around the world. Their desire for comfort, for love, for every bit of freedom they can get to live without encumbrance is no less than yours. When housing prices are astronomical, they blame speculators and mafia-connected developers; when street cops beat up unlicensed vendors trying their best to survive, they blame the uncompromising inhumanity of the law; when there is melamine in milk and kids get sick, they blame greedy companies and regulatory complicity; when government waste stares at them in the face, they shake their heads and wonder where the country is headed; when the rich do as they please without regard they take offense; when they see heartlessness towards the common man they stand with him in anger, when they see the weak treated with indecency they offer their most heartfelt sympathy.

But they cannot do any of those things too loudly, you see. They cannot desire too loudly, blame too loudly, wonder too loudly, take offense too loudly, gather together too loudly, show anger too loudly, or sympathize too loudly. It's not because they don't want to express themselves to that degree, it's because there are consequences for doing so -- consequences not only from the government, but from society itself which has normalized towards repression. Think of it this way: how publicly and how vociferously can a church member dissent within his congregation and still be regarded as faithful? He wouldn't dare, he would only do what little he can while bending over backwards to not be ostracized. It is not culture, it is a social disease, and by elevating it to culture in a pretense of tolerance and understanding you give it legitimacy.

With that said, however, those who are not Chinese cannot do anything themselves to help. Change has to come from the Chinese people. But know that when you unwittingly make excuses and give support to the illnesses that afflict China, you make the job of those Chinese who wish to cure it that much more difficult.

Re:While I don't agree with China's censorship...

[shadowofwind]

I hate when bullshit like this gets modded up.
Do you also take the Religious Right's culture into context, and implore others to sympathize?
Do you also take the racist rural white culture into context, and implore others to sympathize?

I think these are both good examples. Americans outside the religious right mostly do not understand the religious right, and see only a caricature of it. Likewise for rural racists. I'm strongly against both the religious right and against white racists. However, I still think its worth trying to see them for what they are, so as to deal with them more realistically, rather than attributing characteristics to them that they don't actually have.

Of course people who try to 'explain' China are going to be annoyingly wrong about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean its not worth trying to understand better anyway.

I used to work in the drone/surveillance/defense industry. I left it, at some sacrifice, because it became clear to me that it was wrong. My Chinese friends and family had no arguments against my views about what that industry is, but all argued against my actually doing something about my part in it. To them, financial advantages for one's own family always trump all other considerations. I realize that Chinese people I know are not a representative sample of Chinese people in China. And I see Americans of European descent to be self-serving, amoral, and cowardly in a similar sort of way. But a significant minority of white Americans at least understand what I did, whereas I haven't interacted with a Chinese person who seems to understand at all.

There's a difference between resenting censorship and actually being willing to do what it takes to change it. And it appears to me that Chinese reflexes about harmony and pragmatism do partially account for why there is censorship, even though there are a lot of other reasons also.

Sadly, I don't think modern American's have enough of what it takes to fight for certain kinds of civil liberties either. I think we're where we are mostly for historical reasons, and as we do loose our freedom there isn't much will to get it back.

Three T's my ass

[DNS-and-BIND]

Jeez, not a mention of what China actually censors. Did she actually run a magazine? I ran an English magazine in China. Here's what my censor told me:

The forbidden topics are in three categories, color-coded for your convenience. The colors have cultural significance, if you're in to that sort of thing. The first, YELLOW. Yellow is pornography (think of "blue movies" and you'll get the color reference). Don't print anything too sexy. This one's pretty easy. Moving on: RED. Anti-government activity. Falun Gong, Tibetan separatists, Xinjiang separatists, talking about local unrest, protests, etc. Anything that makes the government look bad, basically. BLACK, mafia and crime. As the mafia competes with the government for authority and taxes, this one seems a no-brainer as well. Don't report about the gambling den that takes up an entire floor of a local 5-star hotel and you'll be fine.

For all other topics not covered above, follow the lead of Xinhua News.

I know I'm going to get some dumbass in here saying something like "but Chinese publications break these rules all the time!" Yes. Chinese publications. Foreigners in China, especially those in communications, have this obsession with overthrowing the system...in English. Basically, nobody cares about what's written in English, and few people read it. Even foreigners don't usually read English magazines. The Chinese government doesn't care too much about what happens in foreign languages. In fact, they're more worried about foreign influence spoiling Chinese culture than any revolution sparked by an angry ABC managing editor. "Zhong shang Ying xia" was how they put it, "Chinese up and English down" literally, or in the American vernacular "G's up and hoes down". And you ain't the G's.

I was more disturbed by the article and how the lady was just determined to hate her censor. Why? Her Western mindset, of course, and the ingrained "hero journalists vs. mustache-twirling government villains" mentality. Censors aren't evil. They're just government workers, that's all. Actually, having a censor is GOOD because if anything goes wrong, you can point to her and say, "but she APPROVED it!" Trying to dehumanize such a person as "teh CoMM13z"...well, it's just not what I would expect from a journalist. And the part at the end where she thinks the lady is looking for a "lifeline"...bah. I've done the exact same thing before, I call it "planting the seed." You see someone who's obviously going on to bigger and better things in life and you give them a nod and say, "call if you need anyone like me." Hey, it could work, right? I've had some longshots pay off before. But this journalist is so eager to be utterly depressed by seeing her tormentor exposed with feet of clay, she never bothers to question her preconceptions.