Travis Rutledge Ms.

Hoffmann English 1102 3/31/14 Internet Censorship in China and the United States Internet censorship has been around us for as long as weve had the internet, and even If you dont think its there, it is. Remember those websites that were blocked at school when you were growing up? Those blocks are a form of internet censorship. Ever since the foundations of the internet were established, the government of a particular country both set restrictions and plans on how they plan to grow and how they are to use the technology. Depending on a particular countrys culture has an immense impact on how they chose to shape the internet and their citizens access to it. You may or may not already know how different internet access is in China compared to the United States, and a lot of things we use on the internet every day that we take for granite. In the past, I have done research on various things having to do with internet censorship in the United States, like a bill that was going through the government known as CISPA. CISPA was a proposed bill that would require many different websites that contained copywriter material on their websites to be taken down, or face a fine. Having operating a website myself that contained copywrited graphics; I would have been forced to take my website down. I also had a teacher who visited China and returned with stories of what it was like over there with respect to the internet. With that said, and the things Ive heard about the internet in China, Im interested in understanding the differences in internet censorship in the United States and China, as well as what led to these censorships.

Chinas growth and stake on the internet is a unique at best. The Peoples Republic of China, had embarked on a program of economic expansion and industrial reconfiguration in the late 1970s, the nations economy had expanded at an unprecedented rate in terms of its political and cultural frameworks. Chinese leaders had focuses on the internet which lead to the worlds fastest internet growth rates, with 26 million in 2001 to over 87 million in early 2004. (Kluver) In 2010, China has the highest amount of the internet user count of over 400 million. (Google and Internet Control) When I read this, I was astounded. Once I realized that China had more people using the internet than the United States has citizens, I was blown away. Chinas internet growth however was piggybacked with efforts to limit the potential for social or political destabilization encouragement. This involved creating an infrastructure that would allow for governmental surveillance, and active censorship of any content that might present the government in a negative light. (Kluver) I wanted to know why China wanted to shape the internet in this way so I read in to it and discovered that during Mao Zedong dominance over the political apparatus, all of the different kinds of media were seen as exclusively political mechanisms. The state mainly controlled all media outlets, focusing them on further developing and improving the government. The United States did play a role in the development of the internet in China in terms of the technological architecture and the applications and uses of that architecture. The source even went on to say that the rise of the internet will ultimately lead to the democratization of China. This shocked me because I didnt know the US had a role in how the Chinese structured their internet. However, today internet censorship in China is still very strict and comes with very severe consequences. There are more than a dozen agencies that are involved in implementing a host of laws, regulations, and other tools that are meant to try to keep information and ideas from

the Chinese public. Along with these laws and regulations such as preventing people posting about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, there are severe consequences for breaking the law or crossing the line. Shi Tao was given a 10-year prison sentence for merely talking about what hes not allowed to do with regard to Tiananmen Square. Previously, I knew that there were regulations and laws against postings about the Tiananmen Square Protests, but learning that a person got a 10-year sentence for just saying what he cant do was crazy. (Chinas Censorship of the Internet and Social Media) Another person I read who was prosecuted was Liu Xiaobo, who was using the Internet to advocate for human rights and political reform. Here in the United States, we have the royalty of having the right to use the internet to express our voice for human rights and political reform and not have to worry about being prosecuted for it due to the First Amendment. In my eyes, this comes across to me as the government oppressing their people in order to maintain their socialist, state-run country, but that is just my opinion. In 2011, there was a congressional hearing on the topic of Chinas censorship of the internet and social media. In the hearing it was discussed how Chinas leadership had grown more assertive in its violation of basic human rights. With the boom in popularity of social media and popular internet sites, Chinese citizens remain under the watchful eye of the state. They are unable to voice a range of criticisms that Americans undoubtedly take for granted each and every day. The fact that China has imprisoned more internet activists than any other country in the world is a great sadness within itself. If a Chinese citizen posts a tween that talks about local corruption they risk facing harassment or even abuse. This ordeal about how a Chinese teenager could face this type of repercussions over a tweet or post relates to me greatly. I have, on countless occasions, ranted and complained about various things about the government whether it is a law or bill going through the senate; not once had worried about what I was posting. I

could only imagine how different it would be over in China. On another account, my US History teacher in high school had the opportunity to teach in China for a year and brought bake personal accounts of internet censorship. He kept a Tumblr blog as a kind of diary that contained pictures and stories from his time there, and he had always expressed how he couldnt write all of what he wanted because he could have faced consequences for doing so. He also described how certain aspects of Google were blocked and that the search filters were unbelievably strict. My intentions of this paper is not to bash the internet censorships in China, but understand why they what they are, and why they are so different than in America. An Editorial written by G.E. Gorman, an employee at the School of Information Management at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand talked about the very thing I was not trying to do. Gorman goes on to discuss how there are a mass of attacks on Chinas policy of internet control and how it isnt how it seems. He talks about how most societies censor the internet in some manor or another. In New Zealand, internet content is censored in schools, universities, and the law, CIPA, or Childrens Internet Protection Act, requires libraries and schools to filter internet content in order to receive federal funds. This really opened my eyes, to think that in China, all of the censorships may seem normal, but from a liberal western democracy, our view with regard to what content is acceptable. (Gorman) Based on my research and prior knowledge and experiences, I have learned that nearly every country that has access to the internet has some sort of censorship, whether it be content censors for schools and universities like in the United States and New Zealand or much stricter censorships like in China, from a liberal democracy point of view. It makes me wonder in the future will liberal countries such as the United States continue to pressure a country like China to change their stance to one more like their own. After reading sources that seemed to quote-un-

quote bash China and their censorships and sources that take an unbiased look at the matter, I have succeeded my goal to further my understanding of the censorships in China and why they are what they are. If you took the time to understand both sides of the controversy and look at it from an unbiased stance, how would you feel? Do you feel like the censorships in China are unfair or are they justified?