The China Teaching Web

What’s on my menu for most days of the week?

How about the New York Times for breakfast, NPR for lunch, Drudge for dinner, and CSPAN for a bedtime snack – just in time to hear the opening gavel in the House and Senate?

Just because I live in China doesn’t mean that I can’t still feed the political junkie within me. All of these news services – and more – are available to anyone in China who has a computer, or in my case, an Iphone.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter are still blocked in China.  Although, if I really want to spend hours and hours perusing my friends’ personal lives – finding out who is sleeping with who and who threw a pillow at me – I can use a special proxy to access these services.

More on that later.

But when it comes to news and information, the growing population of English speakers in China has a whole new world in front of them. A world relatively free of the heavy censorship that controls the Chinese media.

Let’s take the issue of the famous Tiananmen Square massacre as an example. Even 20 years later, this is supposedly one of the most sensitive political topics in China.

Open up Google.cn, Google’s search engine page in China, and enter in the words ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre 1989.’

In China, some of these first 10 results are not working or they redirect to a page that clearly shows that the content has been removed. However, even on the first page, there is enough information to whet someone’s appetite.

Take this webpage, for example, which states that “following the conflict, the government conducted widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press.”

This particular page may not give specific details about what happened on that fateful day, but the farther you move away from the first results page, the clearer the picture becomes.

Like on Page 4, where Google links to a blog entry containing an English article which refers to the events on that day as a ’slaughter’ and talks about people trying to outrun tanks in Beijing.

The real question is, how many people in China make it past the first page of search results?

And then there are proxies – a  server that allows internet users to browse sites that may be blocked by content filters

I had never even heard of using a proxy until I came to China.

The first person to introduce me to a proxy was a fellow teacher, in his twenties, who wanted to access the BBC – a website that was blocked when I first arrived in China.

Anyone in China who has the desire to access a blocked website can do it with relative ease – and for free. There are literally hundreds of services that can bypass the Chinese censors.

The key to all of this, as I have already alluded to, is the ability to read English.

The Chinese government may be very efficient at erasing politically harmful Chinese content off the web and out of reach of even proxies, but it has little control over English content that is posted in other countries.

Or even in its own country – where the best way to get away with writing about a politically sensitive topic is to post it in English.

In many ways, living under censorship is not mandatory in China. It is a choice.

I am always surprised by how few of my students or Chinese friends even bother to access the numerous international news services that are available uncensored in China.

“We like our own news,” a friend explained to me. “What else do we need?”

And that is exactly the kind of attitude that the Chinese government is betting on as millions in China learn the English language.

Even when other sources of information are waved in their faces, too many people in China will continue to run back to the government run media because they have been taught from an early age to have an unwavering trust in Beijing.

Thus English should be the greatest weapon against censorship in China but it is not.

Not yet, at least.

Not until the Chinese people really have the strong desire break through the censorship and seek alternative sources of information.