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I wrote these articles for China Digital Times, a bilingual service covering “China’s social and political transition and its emerging role in the world.” They publish news reports as well as opinion pieces. Some of their articles are translated from other Chinese news websites. The website is run by the Berkeley China Internet Project (BCIP) out of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

China Blocked Social Networking Websites


Picture by Xianyunyehe

When the whole world is talking about the benefits brought by social networking technologies, China decides these technologies are bad and subsequently blocks the access to Facebook and Twitter from China mainland. But what’s the big deal about these social networking sites? Does it hurt that much to let Chinese people networking a bit online?
According to Huanqiu Newspaper, the Tibet-independence and Xinjiang-independence supporters who ran the riots earlier this year used Facebook to connect with each other. And Twitter managed to disseminate news about riot in Xinjiang quicker than the Chinese national news services. The Chinese government believed they would lose the control of the situation if they lost the control of information. Then immediately after the riots in Xinjiang, many popular social networking sites were either blocked or closed down.
So, several Facebook groups and tweets contributed to the fact that all netizens living in China mainland are now deprived of the right of using Facebook and Twitter? When we think about it, we can neither blame those social networking sites nor those Tibet-and-Xinjiang-independence supporters—the former simply served as communication tool, and the latter simply used the tool. The real problem here is that the Chinese government adopted an extremely negative attitude towards social networking sites. And the ordinary Chinese netizens became the victims.
In the era of Web 2.0, social networking websites rely on mass-scale online activities. It’s cleverer for a government to fully embrace new online technologies rather than to deny them. First and foremost, the Internet technologies are impossible to be killed unless a government chooses to destruct all the telephone infrastructures. Second, many incidents in the past have proved that the government can generate positive public relations through social networking sites. Take the 2008 presidential contest between Obama and Hillary as example. Both Obama and Hillary had huge number of followers on Twitter, but what made Obama a winner was he was following hundreds of thousands people while Hillary was following no one. This is certainly not the only example of the effective utilisation of social networking for political purpose. The British government has also been clever enough to ask public servants to tweet regularly. If the Chinese government was able to use the same logic, people would probably receive information about the riots from the government first, not from those Xinjiang-independence supporters.
This sort of Internet control is like a vicious cycle. The more you try to control, the more you lose. Now the Chinese netizens are dissatisfied with the tightening censorship—more and more users will start to protest if the online blockage lasts longer. Furthermore, the internet censorship in China has done huge damage to the international image of the whole Chinese nation. The Chinese Internet filtering system is dubbed the “Great Firewall”, which probably is one of the worst humiliations that the Great Wall of China has ever had in thousands of years.