China: By Journalists Eyes - Freedom of Speech in China and the Internet I

I used to live there in 2009. The year was significant for the ego of China since it overcame the United States with its 389 million Internet users, which creates the largest “Internet population” in the world. China keeps it rank until today and most recently more than half a billion Chinese are connected to the Internet.

Except a colossal CCTV (Chinese state television) and a Chinese state radio, which we walked through, we heard everywhere about the newest hit in media - the Internet. We heard lectures on the development of Chinese social networks that propagandists praised for their quality and growing popularity.

Well, lets see that! They forgot to tell us that Chinese citizen has no chance to use anything but the state’s network. The Internet that connects the globe has no place there. It is well-known that the freedom of speech has its limits in China, limits that are more and more rough. Facebook, Twitter or YouTube are inaccessible for Chinese. Calls via Skype is illegal and who do it anyway puts much in stake.

There is another gold medal related to this: China has the highest number of persons imprisoned for „online piracy “ that unravel omnipresent censors.

Some foreigners can get an exceptions – employees of foreign companies or tourists. However, even them do not avoid a strict censorship that is improving together with growing popularity of China’s largest microbloging site Sina Weibo. Simply put, the censors have more and more work.

The Party controls radios, printed media and TV channels. The only place where fighters for survival of communism cannot control is the Internet. But, to be frank, they try hard to gain control over it.

China has probably the most sophisticated Internet censorship system in the world and she is together with their crimson colleagues in Cuba and Iran the most strict Internet controlers in the world.

Of course Chinese wouldn’t put words as democracy, independence Tienanmen square, Tibet or Dalai Lama to his web search engine, let alone a name of some person the regime is uneasy with. However, even someone who would like to find “the truth” about something would have it hard – a number of censored words grows in direct proportion with growth of fans of the Internet.

Text/photo: Andrea Fantová