China and its Information

Caption that appeared when a term searched for in Google was censored. (From Le Monde.)

Largely unnoticed at the time that it happened in December, Google China removed the feature from its browser that allowed users to know that a term they were searching was censored. Some specialized websites have highlighted the contrast between the relatively large diffusion with which the anti-censorship tool was introduced in May 2012 and the lack of information regarding its elimination. Apparently, this was only made public in the West thanks to the Greatfire.org, a censorship-monitoring in China organization. Later on, the news was retrieved by the press.

It is not so easy to assess how to understand this move. The blog of the British paper The Telegraph reads it as an act of cowardice or surrender. Chinese censors were able time and again to fight back against any tools proposed by Google to counter walls in the national internet. Therefore, Google got tired of it and decided to give in to censorship. Even more, Chinese authorities would have threatened Google with completely blocking its services if such anti-censorship tools were not erased. The Telegraph reminds the reader that although the presence of Google in China is relatively small (around 5% of all internet searches), it still represents 25 million users. It might be too costly to close such a market. The muteness with which the anti-censorship tool was removed is a point in favor of those arguments.

Except for the concerns originally raised by Greatfire.org, there seems not to have been much opposition against Google’s move. This contrasts with a set of protests in the rapidly industrializing city of Guangzhou, in the southern province of Guangdong (Canton). Here, some journalists and citizens have called for more freedom of expression and democracy, supporting the efforts of the local weekly publication Nanfang Zhuomo, which called in its New Year editorial for China to undertake political reform and become a full and real constitutional government. Authorities have had a clear reaction: many communiqués have been issued, blaming “foreign forces” and dissatisfied former employees of the publication of organizing the protests.

These incidents show that the Chinese government is apparently in very good shape to exercise control over information in its territory, either by making the best of the very large market its population represents or by making it clear that freedom and democracy are topics not to be discussed in the public space. This further strengthens the idea that the Chinese government is aware that one of its potential vulnerabilities is the free flow and discussion of information.