Web freedom.

[Vera]

I found myself getting sad over the smallest thing today.

So this is really nerdy but um, I write fanfiction and apparently some Chinese-Canadian person lifted my fanfics from livejournal and translated them to Chinese, and posted them on a Chinese message board. I go there, and through Google Translate manage to register and post a message in English, like, "Hi2u, glad you like my writing!". The responses were overwhelming - I appear to have Chinese fans, lolz - and I found out most of the girls know English but can't read my fics because China has web-banned Livejournal.

We discussed some of the stories and I explained one story title to them, thinking I was clever, I linked an article to a Chinese Wikipedia page to clarify something. One girl replies, "Unfortunately we can't access that link in Mainland China.. -_-"

It's pretty easy to be like lolz when Gulsah tells us what page she can't access thanks to the Turkish government internet regulations but in the end it's just very sad for so many of these people. I mean, my fanfics are hardly great philosophical artworks, they're semi-crappy stories and it makes me oddly sad that some teenage girl in China can't access them. Nor can they spend an afternoon Wikisurfing. I mean, will access to livejournal really make the Chinese start a new revolution? Eh.

It's all too easy to take this stuff for granted, I suppose. :(

[Mota Boy]

Oh yeah, all blog services are blocked here, but you can get around them using a proxy server. Only a few sites are hard-core blocked. However, in the run-up to the Olympics, the Chinese have been unblocking sites. Now we can get the English BBC and English wikipedia without going through slow proxies. Out of curiosity, could you link the thread?

[Vera]

No, sorry, the thread and forum in question are locked. But if you want to give the girls tips on how to get through the blocks, you can type a message in Chinese and I'll post it up.

One girl told me in German, "I have visited your journal in an illegal way!" which I thought was simultanously hilarious and cute. Chinese hax0rz.

[HornyPope]

I used to have Chinese message me on ICQ. They would usually ask me where I live, but I'm not very good at carrying conversations.

I don't think it's because they wanted to communicate with a foreign. I really think there was something in my personality they wanted to learn about... hmm, except im not sure what.

[wheelchairman]

Why would this make you sad?

Societies ban different kinds of information based on their governments. Whether it's how to make a bomb from cake ingredients to which character Harry would most likely have sex with (snape).

Ideologically speaking it's been in the favor the west to not negate the promotion of free speech on the internet. However the Chinese have always banned free speech (except ironically during The Great Leap Forward in which free speech was alright if you believed in anarchy and had an armed guard.) So obviously they have nothing to lose by continuing the policy of limited information. It's ideologically correct in their society and there is no evidence of any benefit of allowing it. Certainly economic success is not the reason (which was always the reason why capitalism was better, but Chinese commu-capitalism clearly is the Bowser of Capitalism main-bosses.)

The Chinese are hardly uneducated, I've met several abroad who have many ways of circumventing government controlled censurship. Same way any American can find out how to make a bomb out of cake materials. In fact I just listened to an interview with a man who was involved with the Tiannemen Square demonstration (the one where the government killed everybody), and the reporter was from the BBC and found the man despite the government (and despite the government being completely aware the man is a dissident). Of course the future olympics might to be blame but I doubt it on some level.

Okay I'm rambling. In short different societies filter different information in different ways. I ideologically disagree with the way the chinese do it, but as you sarcastically pointed out, fan-fiction is hardly a point of contention (unless it's about the party heads, wouldn't that be great? I imagine that Mao and Linn Biao truly loved each other but were torn apart due to politics.) Conclusion that I haven't summised very well, the methods of diffusing government intervention in information has completely collapsed internationally. There are ways around any blocks to information. And the information that's hardcore blocked can be found elsewhere.

[Vera]

Well, if you look at it from the viewpoint of the establishment, of course it's no big deal and has happened everywhere. But I was just looking at it from the point of view of these girls, roughly my age, who're perhaps not all internet-savvy enough to figure out how to view blocked sites on their computers. And it was like, "Wow, that sucks." Like it's not about the big picture, but the small things they don't have access to and it just seems so unfair.

It's not like an overwhelming sadness, it's just like this small realization that besides the grand injustices, there's also these small inconviniences that affect people. I don't know. This one girl said, in German again because her English is not so good, "I guess maybe one day things will change. It's unlikely but I have this dream." (Actually she used the verb 'sich fühlen' so like .. she feels this dream?)

For whatever reason, it just kind of touched me just then. Like you have this grand scale of awful human rights violations, and how they reflect on the smaller things and ..okay, this if making no fucking sense, I have to admit. I guess I just wanted to "record" the moment.