Outside Google’s Beijing headquarters
Photo: René Vandergoten, China Digital Times
One of the scariest things about China’s censorship of the Internet and other media is that the government has effectively erased whole chapters of Chinese history. Many—and I dare say, most—20-somethings in China, for example, know little about the turmoil and violence of the Cultural Revolution, and virtually nothing about the bloody massacre of democracy protesters near Tiananmen Square in 1989.
But no amount of censorship can totally wipe away a nation’s conscience. The announcement that Google gmail accounts were attacked by Chinese hackers, leading Google to reconsider its presence in China, has led to an outpouring of Twitter commentary by Chinese praising the internet company for doing the right thing—finally. @xuxiaoxuxiao pretty much sums up the Chinese Twitter response so far: “Respect Google for: 1 Doing what you should, even if it’s not easy 2. Protecting your heart and your clients .”
A group of daring Chinese netizens even laid flowers at the Google office in Beijing, and Chinese bloggers also praised Google for finally ending its cooperation with Chinese government censors. (Google's history in China is shameful: To get into the country, Google agreed in 2006 to delete banned topics—Tiananmen, Tibet, etc—from search results.) See this video of Chinese bloggers, taken by Guardian correspondent.
So why does any of this matter? As Rebecca McKinnon, a Chinese internet expert, writes, "This censored environment makes it easier for the Chinese government to lie to its people, steal from them, turn a blind eye when they are poisoned with tainted foodstuffs and cover up their children's deaths due to substandard building codes." It also allows people to forget history. And if we don't learn from the mistakes of our past, what's to prevent them from happening again?
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