Freedoms We Take for Granted

While there are a lot of good things happening with respect to opportunities for open source software and IT in general in China, there are many reminders that it’s still evolving. In many ways, China is “the wild, wild east” where the rules are being made up or challenged on a regular basis.

Despite all of the modernization in the last 30 years, China is not an open society and the freedoms or rights that we take for granted in the west are not necessarily in place. Yes, things have improved, but its not yet where it needs to be.

Take a simple example like writing this blog. The idea of Freedom of Speech is ingrained into western culture and guaranteed in the US in the First Amendment of the Constitution. (I recently became a US ctizen and, yes, this was on the test.) So I take for granted that I can write pretty much whatever I want in this blog, and that InfoWorld or other online sites or print media can publish whatever they want. (Yes, there are some areas limited by libel laws, obscenity laws and the like.)

Those freedoms are not in place in China. While they do have bloggers in China, most newspapers, radio and TV are government controlled. Magazines and web sites are subject to government censorship. Don’t expect open discourse on topics like religious freedom, democracy, Falun Gong, Tibet or Taiwan. Its easy to forget that the Internet is censored in China, so you can’t visit subversive sites like playboy.com, bbc.com, LiveJournal.com, or even Wikipedia.org. The so-called “Great Firewall of China” limits what you can and can’t see on the Internet.

I was in China during the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of June 4th, 1989. In Hong Kong there was a candle-light vigil with over 20,000 people commemorating the event. But there was no press coverage or memorials in mainland China. You won’t find articles, photos, or videos on the Internet about it either. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to know anything had happened. And that’s the way the government wants it.

The censorship is not foolproof though, and people I spoke with did not seem particularly bent out of shape about it. There is an increasing network of proxy servers that makes Internet censorship into a bit of a cat and mouse game. And most people appreciated that there is more freedom now than there was 10 years ago, so as long as things continue to evolve, they seem to respect the government’s position. Admittedly, the penalty for not accepting things is likely a prison sentence, so maybe that explains things.

Meanwhile, there continues to be uneasy cooperation between the Chinese government and US-based companies. After all, who do you think is supplying the technology for censorship? What ever happened to “Do no evil?”

Lets hope that open source does more good here than harm.