The fascinating truth behind all those ‘great firewall of China’ headlines

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/14/truth-behind-great-firewall-of-china-headlines

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Here’s a proposition to make you choke on your granola: the only government in the world that really understands how to manage the internet is China’s. And I’m not talking about “the great firewall of China” and other cliches beloved of mainstream media. Nor, for the avoidance of doubt, am I saying that I approve of what the Chinese regime does: I do not. It’s just that I think it is better to deal with the world as it actually is, rather than as we fondly imagine it to be.

Western media coverage of China is a mixture of three parts fantasy to one part misinformation. The fantasy bit has deep ideological underpinnings: it asserts that the Chinese are embarked upon a doomed enterprise – to build a modern economy that is run by an authoritarian regime. The Chinese aspire to industrial greatness and see the internet (rightly) as an essential tool in this modernising project. But, being authoritarians, they fear the freedom of speech that the network enables. So they censor speech ruthlessly, devoting vast resources to the task, blocking access to western media and generally doing everything in their formidable power to keep their citizens from knowing anything that the regime does not wish them to know. Hence the “great firewall” etc.

But, according to the neoliberal narrative, the Chinese experiment is doomed to fail because everybody knows that democracy and capitalism go together, like love and marriage. Or, perhaps more accurately, like horse and cart.

The trouble with this comforting narrative is that it is mostly baloney. I’m sure that most foreign affairs specialists know that, and dedicated scholars such as Rebecca MacKinnon and Min Jiang have been pointing out for ages that the Chinese have evolved a novel form of governance – “networked authoritarianism” – that appears to be working just fine. So isn’t it time that we tried to understand exactly how it works?

Enter Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, and one of the most interesting social scientists around. In August last year, he and two colleagues published in the journal Science the results of a fascinating experiment in which they had uncovered precisely how the Chinese internet is managed by the regime.

King and his colleagues had not set out to study censorship at all. They were seeking to test some computational linguistics software on what was perceived to be a particularly difficult language – Chinese. So they acquired a huge database of posts on Chinese social media. Having assembled this corpus of data, they then needed to check that the web-scraping tools employed to gather the texts were in fact collecting posted text, rather than, say, ads, from a particular page. So they clicked on the URLs associated with a sample of posts and found that some – but not all – had vanished: the pages had disappeared from cyberspace.

The question then was: what was it about the “disappeared” posts that had led to them being censored? And at that point the experiment became very interesting indeed. First of all, it confirmed what other researchers had found, namely that, contrary to neoliberal fantasy, speech on the Chinese internet is remarkably free, vibrant and raucous. But this unruly discourse is watched by a veritable army (maybe as many as 250,000-strong) of censors. And what they are looking for is only certain kinds of free speech, specifically, speech that has the potential for engendering collective action – mobilising folks to do something together in the offline world.

“Criticisms of the government in social media (even vitriolic ones) are not censored,” King et al reported, “whereas any attempt to physically move people in ways not sanctioned by the government is censored.” And the strange thing is that “even posts that praise the government are censored if they pertain to real-world collective action events”.

The fact that an authoritarian regime allows vitriolic criticism of it in social media may seem paradoxical, but in fact it provides the most vivid confirmation of the subtlety of the Chinese approach to managing the net. “After all,” observes King, “the knowledge that a local leader or government bureaucrat is engendering severe criticism – perhaps because of corruption or incompetence – is valuable information. That leader can then be replaced with someone more effective at maintaining stability and the system can then be seen as responsive.” The internet, in other words, is the information system that enables the system to keep a lid on things.

Sobering thought, eh? The paper is online and Gary King has a terrific lecture about it on YouTube. So next time you read about the “great firewall”, remember that the really interesting story is what goes on behind it.