China Fights to Tame Internet During
RiotsTuesday, July 07, 2009 at 12:10 PM EDT
China’s efforts to limit access to information about ethnic violence
in
the country, which has resulted in over
150 deaths, shows that the Internet is more difficult than traditional
media to control, but not impossible. The OpenNet
Initiative reports that China has completely shut off access to the
Internet in Xinjiang province and blocked access to Twitter throughout the
country. The
New York Times also reports that links about the riots have been deleted
from Fanfou, the Chinese version of Twitter, as well as popular forums such as
Mop and Tianya. The Times also argues that, similar to SMS
during post election violence in Kenya last year, the Internet may have
helped mobilize rioters:
Internet social platforms and chat programs appeared to have
unified Uighurs in anger over the way Chinese officials had handled the earlier
brawl, which took place in late June thousands of miles away…photographs
that appeared online after the battle showed people standing around a pile of
corpses, leading many Uighurs to believe that the government was playing down
the number of dead Uighurs. One Uighur student said the photographs began
showing up on many Web sites about one week ago. Government censors repeatedly
tried to delete them, but to no avail, he said.
‘Uighurs posted it again and again in order to let more people know
the truth, because how painful is it that the government does bald-faced
injustice to Uighur people?’ said the student, who spoke on the
condition
of anonymity for fear of retribution from the government.
A call for protests spread on Web sites and QQ, the most popular
instant-messaging program in China, despite government efforts to block online
discussion of the feud.
If history
is any guide, the Chinese will likely ease their online restrictions when
the riots end, but the cat and mouse game will continue. As Michael
Wines argues:
Chinese experts clearly have studied the so-called color
revolutions — in Georgia and Ukraine, and last month’s protests
in
Iran — for the ways that the Internet and mobile communication devices
helped protesters organize and reach the outside world, and for ways that
governments sought to counter them…As the Internet and other media raise
new challenges to China’s version of the truth, China is finding new
ways
not just to suppress bad news at the source, but also to spin whatever
unflattering tidbits escape its control.
In regards to the resources at China’s disposal, Jonathan Zittrain
may
have said it
best, “Given that it’s a game of cat and mouse they could
bring
to bear a lot of cats if they had to.â€
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