China has the world’s most sophisticated form of censorship in media. Censorship of the internet in China is by far the most pervasive and far-reaching on the globe. All media is government controlled and filtered; while it is censoring-out certain material for cultural, political, moral, and religious reasons, it is also restricting the intrusion of “western” media (especially via the internet) for economic reasons. By creating a situation in which Chinese citizens must rely on Chinese programming and web-material, the economy of China is bolstered and strengthened.
Several press organisations rank China in the most censored and “least free” categories. The Paris-based freedom of press organisation Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) ranks China as “very serious” in terms of their press; the Opennet initiative, which monitors and reports on internet filtering and surveillance, placed China’s internet censorship at “pervasive”; and Freedom House, which is a U.S. international organisation that conducts and publishes research on democracy, political freedom, and human rights, called China’s press “not free”—all three of these rankings are the worst possible scores for all organisations.
Obvious things are censored, such as any instance in which the legitimacy or power of the Communist Party of China is questioned, made to look less than supreme, or cast into doubt. Also censored are political issues and issues that can be suggested as incorporated into a broader political viewpoint (which basically means everything in the socio/economic/cultural world). For example, several years ago the SARS outbreak that happened in China was covered-up by the government; it was not until a fax to CCTV (China Central Television—ironic name, no?) was leaked to Western sources that the cover-up was blown.
According to a study done by Harvard University in 2002 (note that this is 6 years ago and bear in mind that censorship in China has gotten more extreme since then) there are at least 19,032 websites that are band from the public in China.
“[The] sites contained information about news, politics, health, commerce, and entertainment…[and] the authors conclude (1) that the Chinese government maintains an active interest in preventing users from viewing certain web content, both sexually explicit and non-sexually explicit; (2) that it has managed to configure overlapping nationwide systems to effectively – if at times irregularly – block such content from users who do not regularly seek to circumvent such blocking; and (3) that such blocking systems are becoming more refined even as they are likely more labor- and technology-intensive to maintain than cruder predecessors.”
By examining the nature of sites on the blocked list that are non-sexually oriented one can draw a few further conclusive corollaries about what and why China is censoring. (Click here to observe a listing of the kinds and types of sites that were blocked in 2002. It is worth reading through to gain a bit of perspective on the scale of censorship that is in effect.) One conclusion that was made is that the list of sites blocked in China is not static. It changes. Which means that the sites are being reviewed–and that the things and Others that the Chinese government find sensitive or threatening to their rule are under constant observation. Another finding was that approximately 10% of internet sites are blocked in China (this is of course statistically formulated from a sample size of about 200,000 sites). Depending on one’s classification of “a large percentage” 10% can be large or small. However, within that 10% are sites such as Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, the BBC, CNN, Amnesty International, anything remotely related to Freedom in Tibet, the defense site for the U.S. government, most governmental sites, judicial sites or information about judicial practice in democratic countries, and most religious websites.
The majority of entertainment and published media censorship is carried-out by an executive branch of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China called the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT). In a previous article about Tudou we mentioned how Tudou must adhere to the censorship of the government. Online content providers have a very arduous path with censorship. Gary Wang, the founder and CEO, had mentioned in that MIPCOM interview that Tudou “has trained college graduates who check videos 24 hours a day. We have nearly 100% compliance.”
The issue is taken very seriously by content distributors. It is not clear what the consequences could be for ‘breaking the rules’, but one thing that is certain is that all government funding and support could be dropped instantly, and in a communist country that could mean the end. An example of how these kinds of scenarios can play-out is the recent debacle over NTDTV, a free developing Chinese content provider operating out of the U.S., being shut-down by its satellite provider Eutelsat just prior to the Beijing Olympics (for “technical reasons”) and has since not been re-instated. Eutelsat is being called into question over the apparent influence that the Chinese government had in shutting-down the insurgent NTDTV company. The company is suffering greatly due to this turn of events. (Tomorrow’s article will be a feature of this particular incident as well as the latest in surveillance in Chinese internet.)
As a consequence of strict censorship of political issues in China, the quality of information conveyed and the stories covered in papers and news media in China has suffered.
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