Internet Censorship in China

December 14th, 2011 by | | 1 Comment »

Internet censorship in China is a hot topic, and it is a good question to ask what are the attitudes of Chinese towards this issue. As a Chinese, here are my personal thoughts:

I am working for a foreign organization, which provides services for autistic kids in Shanghai. We use gmail as the primary email service for the company. However, as a result of the govenment intervention of gmail, it has become problematic for us to use it in China. Therefore, we plan to give up gmail, which is free, and transfer to another email service for which we need to pay. In addition to that, we need to buy VPN in order to access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc..

I see that the internet cersorship in China is both a political and economic issue. China now has an estimated 500 million internet users, more than the total population of the U.S.. According to McKinsey & Co., the internet users will increase to 750 million by 2015. This means China is a huge cake for any internet companies. As a Chinese, I hope we can bring up our own internet companies instead of totally opening the market to foreign companies. The reason for this is that I don’t think the internet companies in China are at the same starting line with those from developed countries. If we ask them to compete with Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, etc. now, they will certainly fail, and it is unfair for them. They need time to grow. There are economic gaps between developing countries and developed countries. Being able to help developing countries prosper and bring up their own companies are important to the progress of human societies. In China, we have our own internet services: “Baidu” instead of “Google”, “Renren” instead of “Facebook”, “Weibo” instead of “Twitter”, “Youku” instead of “Youtube”, etc., which I think are totally fine for most of Chinese. We don’t think our lives are affected because Google exits Mailand China and Facebook, Twitter, Youtube being blocked here.

In next blog, I’ll talk about the political aspect of this issue, which I believe, is extremely complicated.

1 Comment

December 19, 2011 at 10:49 am

That’s very interesting to read Sophia. We normally get fed with the western version of what is happening in China with internet. Could you perhaps clarify what is meant by buying VPN? What is it? How much does it cost? Is it only for companies or for ordinary people as well. Etc. Hope you are enjoying being back home!

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