Posts Tagged ‘tibet’

It’s official: China is now the largest Internet market with 253 million users. The number is only 19% of the Chinese population, well behind the 70% of Americans who are Internet users. Recent years have seen a noted increase in Internet penetration, especially among younger citizens. The rapid economic development of China has led to a significant segment of the population which has both the time and the money to be online.

There are many obstacles to the realization of international connectivity; among them:

• the difficulties of deploying digital infrastructure,
• the high cost of connections,
• language barriers, and
• cultural differences.

The first two barriers are certainly complex tasks which rely on technical, political and economic variables, but my gut feeling is that they are not as important as the other, less tangible hurdles. Undoubtedly someone with a more sophisticated understanding of network deployment could tell me why the Internet’s global penetration is not a guarantee, but on this topic I am optimistic. There is a hearty demand for the information-bearing networks and, in tow, a swarm of would-be ISPs, web services and advertisers seeking to support the demand. With development, we will see the digital divide crumble.

The cultural divide is what worries me.

The instantaneous, global spread of ideas is unprecedented in human history. Sure, the Silk Road is a fascinating example of the globalization of products and diseases; even a few ideas made the journey. Sure, by some measures the world was just as globalized prior to WWI. But the scale and extent of the current global information society dwarfs historical comparisons. For the first time in history, ordinary citizens have the capabilities to connect across the globe to people of wildly different backgrounds, histories and interests. It was supposed to be a sovereign realm unto itself where “governments of the industrial world… have no sovereignty.” Nationalism was supposed to disappear, to dwell in history with the horrific wars and conflicts it supported.

The reality, is quite different. The Economist notes that, “the very people whom the Internet might have liberated from the shackles of state-sponsored ideologies—are using the wonders of electronics to stoke hatred between countries, races or religions.” How can these painful distortions of humanity be limited in the digital realm? The answer, of course, isn’t clear, but my intuition is that it will not depend on hardware or software. A future free from conflict – digital and physical – will be paved by breaking down the cultural differences and coming to understand the reasons for differences of opinion.

One area technology may help is in breaking down the language barriers which make meaningful conversation difficult. Tools like Google Translate are a good start, but they are far from perfect and understanding the nuance behind political differences requires much more than what is available now. Instead, we must rely on human translation which introduces a level of bias (no matter how innocent the translator) and, oftentimes, shifts discussion to another location, as is the case with Global Voices.

Take the example that the New Yorker did in a recent piece on China’s rising cybernationalists. By all accounts, Tang Jie is on his way to becoming an accomplished academic who has a firm understanding of the West and the current international diplomatic scene. Tang is also the creator of an incredibly popular video which capitalized upon and created a nationalistic uproar earlier this year following the Tibetan protests in March and Olympic torch debacle in Paris. The video, embedded below, is full of crescendos of dramatic music, potent imagery and conspiratorial suggestions of a new Cold War run by a “cabal” against China.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=MSTYhYkASsA]

But below this sensational 6 minutes, as Evan Osnos’s excellent article explains, is a sophisticated, thoughtful thinker who approaches political disputes openly.

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship. “Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

However, although Tang and his friends point out valuable discrepancies in how America runs foreign or trade policy, the truth of the matter doesn’t get translated into his video. What has happened is a cultural homoginzation of tools, but underneath remains a cultural deviation of values. Both Students for a Free Tibet and Tang Jie communicate with supporters via online videos, but the underlying differences are masked by the same sensationalism that poisons CNN and Tang’s video.

A screenshot from Tang's video

In a rapid-fire media environment, the sort of enlightened exposure between thoughtful objectors needs to be cultivated – on both sides of the Pacific. Grace Wang is one of those enlightened thinkers, but the crazed online mob got in the way:

At Duke University, Grace Wang, a Chinese freshman, tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters on campus. But online she was branded a “race traitor.” People ferreted out her mother’s address, in the seaside city of Qingdao, and vandalized their home. Her mother, an accountant, remains in hiding. Of her mother, Grace Wang said, “I really don’t know where she is, and I think it’s better for me not to know.”

Although I’m beginning to sound like a Luddite, I am anything but. For a long time I was outspoken in my belief that China was acting horribly in Tibet. The Internet, and listening openly to others, has given me a deeper, more levelled understanding. I think attentively designed conversations will arise in the amazing information landscape of the Internet. We just need to consciously recognize the technical and cultural inputs to do so. And we need to recognize that they may not be universally embraced. For example, although the American tradition is steeped in recognizing freedom of expression as a foundational element of political discourse, a majority of polled Chinese approve of government control of information. So, I’m reminded of Rebecca MacKinnon’s headline during the recent Tibetan protests: Is discussion possible? It is a question of acute importance whose answer relies on both the technical and cultural.

Though I don’t often read it, as my recent post shows, I occasionally stumble upon a great piece of journalism in Rolling Stone. Naomi Klein’s recent piece about Chinese surveillance is one of those. In it, she confronts the massive, systematic effort by the Chinese government to maintain stability through the surveillance of its country.

Like most of the facts that come out of China, the scale is staggering. The megacities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou have become the test cases for centralized governmental networks of cameras which are often camouflaged as street lights and installed in the tens of thousands on streets, in Internet cafes and even Tibetan monasteries. The $4.1 billion Chinese market for surveillance cameras is growing rapidly as the government seeks ways to sustain its “command-and-control capitalism” which produces enormous wealth disparity and social upheaval: in 2005 alone, the government reported 87,000 large-scale protests.

“With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country’s elites?”

It turns out that the government is becoming adept at using the same technologies as dissidents to monitor and punish those who threaten their regime. Even while cell phone cameras and text messages shed some light on the March 2008 protests in Tibet, police were using the same systems to capture images of protesters and spread government messages. Further, footage of particularly violent dissidents were spliced together and aired on state-controlled media.

The issue then, becomes “freedom after speech.” Entrepreneurial Chinese, increasingly aided by American biometric firms like L-1 are utilizing facial recognition advances to mine government databases for those captured by “internal security.” One business man who is competing for lucrative government contracts says that 95% of government use is “regular security,” but admits he receives interest from the secret police who come looking to identify grainy images of protesters.

Klein’s article takes special interest in American firms who see the massive Chinese market for surveillance technologies as a potential pot of gold. Although laws passed after the Tienanmen Square massacre ban the sale of crime control devices or technology to the Chinese, Klein finds that L-1 has been able to use intermediary companies in China to raise their profile there. There have been recent hearings concerning technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco but it seems these lesser-known biometric firms are receiving little scrutiny due to their ties with American government agencies.

This is, however, a two way street and Klein notes that the American government is observing Chinese techniques as they continue to tighten security in the name of counter-terrorism.

What emerges from the article is a frightening picture of a future where Big Brothers in disparate countries share information and techniques in a spiral towards increasingly perfect enforceability of law and order.