The most obvious form of censorship is when the government blocks a website outright. I remember the years of painful research in tenth and eleventh grade when Wikipedia was blocked, and the days that entertainment and social lives mourned when YouTube and Facebook died to all of us behind the Great Firewall. Self-censorship required for Google, Wikipedia, and Yahoo to remain viewable in China did not really affect the content any of us viewed. Very little other than items we rarely browsed for, such as Tiananmen Massacre, Free Tibet, and Amnesty International, were censored if we used the ‘.com’ and not ‘.cn’ Chinese versions of search engines.
None of theis censorships hit home until my last few months in China when Facebook and Youtube were blocked. Atthat time, there were dozens of unconventional means of viewing a video or Facebook photo: Proxy server websites, downloadable programs, and the uncensored internet connections of my parent’s office or US embassy affiliated school.
Today, my brothers in China are finding it increasingly difficult to find any proxy servers or firewall-bypassing programs that the government hasn’t found and learned to block. BBC, Twitter, and even my iTunes store were blocked in following months. I believe the ridiculous justification given for closing off iTunes and its heavenly gateway to all that is media on earth related to a Free Tibet group posting a free single among the millions of media files available for sale that Chinese do not even use. The intensified constriction of approved media was too little, too late for there to be any profound impact on my life. However, now that I am in the US, chatting on Facebook and downloading on iTunes, I can never imagine crawling back behind the iron curtain of media that is China.
TV censorship had its own impact on my life. Chinese authorities regulate public television media exposure through state-controlled media stations and easily censored satellite TV. I lived in a gated compound populated almost exclusively by wealthy Chinese and foreigners, almost reminiscent of a nice suburban American neighborhood with gleaming lawns, broad driveways, and trampolines in backyards. It was here that we were privileged to receive satellite TV - a luxury granted by the law to only the homes or offices of the wealthy or expatriates of China.
An illegal satellite on a Shanghai apartment.
A company driver, quite close to our family, bought and installed a satellite dish on his balcony on a Thursday in 2008. He enjoyed HBO and Cinemax for the whole weekend before the Police showed up at his front door and ripped the dish from his railings, slapping him with a moderate fine - nothing more than a thousand dollars. The government recognizes the dangers of having an informed, critical, West-envying local population that could someday undermine its authority. Censors on TV, are an effective way to keep that kind of population from developing.
All we received from the satellite were a few English-speaking channels: HBO, CNN, BBC, Discovery, National Geographic, and Star World (where we watch all our TV shows: American Idol, LOST, etc.) on top of all the local or national Chinese state-run channels. Even with a satellite dish run by our compound manager, the whole selection of eight or so channels were lightly censored because they received signals from a government satellite with the purpose of creating a foreigner-friendly network – apparently our American eyes needed to be censored too. Only one villa near my US embassy school, the official residence of US diplomatic families, received the US Armed Forces Network and all the uncensored news and shows that come with it as part of international diplomatic agreements.
It was a lazy Beijing Sunday afternoon in March, and all the news stations were blasting news of the riots in Tibet. CNN was covering the military lockdown, martial law, and riots through a reporter in the nearby province of Sichuan during the media lockdown of Tibet. The reporter, standing in front of a brick home, hears locals yelling at him from behind calling him a liar, he feels a little threatened and says the locals are reacting to news reports of Chinese media lying about the riots. The screen of my TV goes black with only the sound of static to go with it. I flip to BBC, and it too is blacked out. A day later, I go online to CNN.com and see a video of an anchorman reporting CNN being blacked out in China. The last part of this video shows the blacked out screens.
I was a little scared to know that all times in past years when I thought the satellite connection was bad, may actually have been government censors pushing buttons to cut me off from something important. This was censorship in its most visible form.
To put this into perspective, vertical integration of media companies in the US seems like the Great Plains compared to the state-influenced national media in China that practically owns and displaces any provincial or local reporting. In my ten years in China, it seems that all meaningful international coverage for Chinese people comes from the national channel CCTV - both heavily regulated and heavily aligned with government interests.
While I did not watch Obama’s inauguration on a local Chinese channel, I have seen instances on CCTV where speeches and interviews were cut off as such.
After Obama mentioned 'facing down fascism and communism' in his address, the address stops, the translator fades, and the anchor awkwardly calls out to an analyst on standby, stuttering as she asks "what difficulties Obama will face with regards to the US economy?” in her attempt to fill air time. What is most surprising is that she, instead of being suprised at the censorhip cut off, recognizes the censorship and moves to make the censorship more effective by switching topics to take attention off the topics.
A certain level of self-censorship based on a nationally recognized ‘code of appropriate reporting’ is most evident here – it is similar to any unwritten code of professionalism ingrained into any businesses and individual: A respect for authority and to report what is only appropriate. There are consequences for falling out of line with such a code – losing a job or right to broadcast – but there is almost support instead of mere compliance among the media for such reporting modesty. Perhaps they feel responsible to the people for keeping the media appropriate? All media companies are still somewhat privately owned, but the highly effective combination of fear of government and respect for this code seem to maintain high levels of self-censorship within all outlets.
With movies, because the government has some control over their official distribution - to be separated from the widely and cheaply available pirated market – they too can be censored. Politically sensitive movies such as Seven Years in Tibet or 100 Days in Peking will never be found at local cinemas alongside other Hollywood creations. American movies make up more than half of the shows found at cinemas in China, so censorship is taken very serious. The most hilarious and annoying instance of movie censorship I encountered was visiting the cinema to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 3. I had seen the movie previously so I knew the characters and the plot. I also remembered Chow-Yun-Fat’s role in the movie as an Asian Pirate.
Chow Yun Fat in Pirates of the Caribbean
In the middle of a dialogue with Chow Yun Fat, the movie jumps almost ten minutes ahead, completely skipping the rest of his scene. I noticed a few awkward side-glances from people further down in the audience at the huge skip in the plot. Chow is not even portrayed as a Chinese citizen, nor does he say anything slanderous, even slightly, toward Chinese. Apparently to the authorities, it seemed that the notion of a dirty, immoral, law-evading Asian pirate was just too inappropriate for the Chinese people to even consider for two hours in a tale of fiction.
All in all, the various forms of censorship seem to stem directly from government control and mandates to limit the type and content of media distribution available to the Chinese public. While blacking out channels and banning websites is a much more visible form of censorship, the physical limitation of available channels and media content through self-censorship present the most effective means of limiting the “dangerous and inappropriate” media exposure of the Chinese people.
To constantly censor and control the media is one of China’s greatest domestic policy goals. Authorities recognize the power that the media has in fostering ideas of freedom of expression, government accountability, and the truth, and all the changes that such ideas will cause. I resent the nationalization of local media, increased government powers to regulate the media - even if only benevolently - and any media moral code or conformity, because in China, these are all that keep the population silenced to the oppression and injustices of their own government.
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