Coal

If you can't see me I'm censored

Nov 5, 19:06 Travel

Does it seem strange to you that the Chinese government has censored blogspot but has reopened wikipedia? It seems strange to me. Supposedly they employ something like 30,000 people for web censorship. I wish they’d censor some of the spam flooding into my website.

The Chinese don’t mind the censorship. Unlike North Americans, they’re perfectly willing to sacrifice freedom of expression for the good of the state. I had a discussion in one of my adult classes on the topic of free expression, with Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” as the theme text. My students all agreed that it was an excellent song and a good protest. They said that freedom of expression should be allowed, as in Dylan’s song, but only with government approval. I mentioned that most 60s protestors weren’t interested in government approval; in fact were interested in directly opposing government actions at the time. This was difficult for them to comprehend. Their whole way of thinking is geared such that if there is dissonance between state and individual, the state wins out, no questions asked. There were unanimous on this point.

What about people on the margins of state policies, I asked (using very different language). What about people for whom state good simply does not coincide? They could hardly understand what I meant: of course they will submit themselves to the state, they said. We do not think like westerners about individual rights. The state good is the individual good.

Some might argue this is simply due to the propoganda of the last 50 years, but I don’t think so. Confucion modes of thinking, though altered, remain strong despite the cultural revolution which claimed to throw off old ways of thinking and living. There certainly have been changes that don’t fit with strict Confucion morality, but the general ordering of society remains the same. It will be interesting to see what happens as the one-child generation, pampered as they are not only by their parents but two sets of grandparents, and used to getting their own way, grows up.