The Great Wall Against Free Information

IF YOU HAD HAPPENED to be in Manhattan in 2004, you couldn’t have missed them. They were there in front of the United Nations building, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, across from the Empire State Building, in front of Bloomingdale’s, and in the heart of New York City, Times Square. At times sitting cross-legged, sometimes in Yoga-like postures, sometimes locked inside a cage, at times with their faces bruised, supine in simulated extreme torture, and with their fellow practitioners walking around handing out leaflets with their messages on them.

They were members of the Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement that was trying to bring to the world’s attention the persecutions they were being subjected to by the Chinese authorities.

This movement, which was started in 1992, derives its beliefs from Buddhism, Taoism and the qiqong meditative tradition and claims to have acquired over 100 million followers in 114 countries. Alarmed by its huge following and considering it a political threat, the Chinese government banned it in 1999. Over the past decade, the government has pursued a brutal crackdown on the movement, including mass arrests, torture, psychological re-education and forced labour.

Besides the physical crackdown, the Chinese government has been trying to delegitimise the Falun Gong in the  realm of public opinion, with the state-controlled media calling it an “evil cult.” The government also uses cyber-warfare to attack Falun Gong websites in the West, and blocks access inside the country to Internet resources about the organisation.

In order to get an idea of how the Chinese authorities censor the dissemination of information, open two browser windows on your computer, one that has www.google.com, the other www.google.cn (the Chinese version of Google). Search for the term ‘Falun Gong’ and compare the results in the two windows.

The first search result on both browsers will be a link to the wikipedia page on Falun Gong. The second link on google.cn states, in bold type, ‘Against Falun Gong.’ The third states ‘Handbook of Falun Gong Issues.’ Click on that and you will be taken to a page that gives a table of contents of a book by the same name, with topics like ‘Falun Gong’s fallacies,’ ‘Falun Gong Breaches Human Ethic and Morality,’ and ‘Falun Gong Impairs the Society.’ The third, in fact, is a blog that says, among other things, that “Falun Gong is a cult that brings harm to the society and an illegal organization that engages in law-breaking activities.”

Compare this with the search results on google.com, which carries links to the official page of the Falun Gong, sites that give information about the activities of the Falun Gong, current news about the organisation, etc., and you get a sense of the pervasive censorship inside China.

This cyber-censorship was part of an agreement that Google entered into with the Chinese authorities with the launch of google.cn in 2006. Under the arrangement, Google agreed to purge the search results of topics banned by the Chinese government. Try searching for terms such as ‘Free Tibet,’ ‘Tiananmen massacre,’ ‘human rights China’ - and even ‘Playboy’ - and you will face the same dissembling as ‘Falun Gong.’

But after more than three years of operating within the framework dictated by the Chinese authorities, Google is now considering putting an end to its ill-considered self-censorship. This rethinking came after Google’s computer systems were attacked in January by hackers from inside China, attacks that Google says could be backed by the government in its efforts to “limit free speech on the Web.” The company is now in talks with the Chinese government before it makes its decision.

China has a history of suppressing dissent and controlling the media. The media in China is designated as a special commercial entity. Irrespective of the investors, any media company is considered public property and, therefore, has just one shareholder: the Chinese communist government. All magazines and newspapers thus automatically come under the government’s censorship framework.

In this tightly controlled environment, it was believed that the Internet would prompt the government to loosen its control on the flow of information. Instead, the government managed to pin down a global information company like Google, which prides itself on providing “unbiased, accurate and free access to information for those who rely on us (Google) and around the world.” Words from Google’s founders, which constitute the guiding principles of the company.

Now that China is aggressively pushing ahead with economic reforms and greater amalgamation with the world economy, one would expect the Chinese authorities to relax their stranglehold on the flow of information. As former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan once remarked, “The information society’s very life blood is freedom.” One sincerely hopes that Google is successfully able to push for diminished censorship in its discussions with the Chinese government. Otherwise, it might be a long, difficult and lonely battle for the Falun Gong, and human rights activists at large, to get their messages across the Great Wall.

Anant Nath