BEIJING - A conversation via Google gchat, I was in China, she was in the United States:
[08:52] Erica M: Why are you going to be on a radio show?
[08:53] chris e: I just commented on a couple newspaper pieces for English radio. A girl I know saw a Chinese blog I wrote about not being able to surf facebook in China. She thought I'd be good, I guess. So I talked about cellphone apps used for teaching rural kids Chinese characters and plans to starting building below ground to maintain green space in Beijing.
[08:54] Erica M: Tell me about all the things that are blocked in China.
[08:54] Erica M: facebook? twitter?
[08:56] chris e: Essentially every major English language video site is blocked. Sometimes you can watch some footage of Yahoo news. twitter, facebook, MySpace; almost anything besides email that allows people to collaborate and communicate online that is not a Chinese company in blocked. Google docs is also blocked sometimes.
[[08:56] Erica M: So no videos in google? No online chat?
[[08:56] Erica M: Why don't they want you to see videos?
[08:59] chris e: Its a way to organize opposition to the government quickly. Chinese sites self-censor themselves so they stay in business and don't get shut down.
[09:00] chris e: Facebook, twitter have been blocked since over 200 died and 2000 were injured in ethnic riots in northwest China in 2009. It is believed the Uighurs began to riot after organizing via emails and txts, spurred on by the rape of a co-ethnic woman in another province.
[09:00] Erica M: So that Chinese people don’t start to think for themselves?
[[09:00] Erica M: What?
[[09:00] Erica M: Oh.
[[09:00] Erica M: Organizing via social media?
[[09:00] Erica M: When was this in 2009?
[09:01] chris e: July 5. I could send you Sociology article on earlier organizing if you are really interested.
[09:02] chris e: Maybe its a little esoteric, but there is school of sociology about imagined communities and imagined nationalities and how media plays a role. Benedict Anderson wrote a book about this called Imagined Communities, and Arjun Appadurai talks about this in Modernity at Large. For example Appadurai cites Koreans in Philadelphia using Korean satellite feeds to watch the Seoul Olympics. But when you have riots like this, I don't think its so esoteric.
[[09:02] Erica M: I don't get it.
[09:05] chris e: China has 56 nationalities. In the home many languages and dialects are spoken other than standard Mandarin. Even the money has about 5 languages on it including an Arabic script. Communicating via text, email, newspapers, you might stay within your own little ethnic minority world, even though those you connect with might be thousands of miles away from each other. So you think of yourself as x minority, not as Chinese, and this is made easier because social media allows you to stay in touch with fellow ethnics. Joshua Meyrowitz wrote a book called No Sense of Place that explains how electronic communication challenges social norms while making physical distances irrelevant. Many days I think Chinese officials block social media because they have read this book.
[09:06] chris e: Or in the US, taxi drivers listen to prayer tapes from North Africa, so they still think of themselves as part of a mosque community from North Africa. They don't think of themselves as a Chicagoan. There are limits to this, off course. When you have to get a driver's license, buy food you are a Chicagoan, but through media you might spend almost your entire day in a mother tongue that is not commonly spoken where you live.
[09:09] chris e: Or think maybe of the Amish who speak German in the US, they are completely removed from US society because they are largely removed from English language media. I don't think Obama or Glenn Beck are often talking about troubles of Amish. But imagine the Amish are spread out, and then are able to link up via the Internet.
[09:11] chris e: Maybe I can write a future blog about this. A guy told me to take the low-hanging fruit, I could probably talk about this for awhile.
[[09:12] Erica M: I am getting it now.
[[09:12] Erica M: And the Chinese government wants to put the smackdown on minorities gathering?
[09:13] chris e: True.
[09:14] chris e: There remain very serious tensions, particularly in the two westernmost provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang. It is harder to think of these places as China. Whereas you can say that much of central and eastern China has been thought of as part of China for thousands of years.
[[09:14] Erica M: I see, I see.
[[09:15] Erica M: So all over China no social networking?
[09:15] chris e: No English language.
[[09:15] Erica M: Are there other ways that China limits social interaction of minorities?
[[09:15] Erica M: No English at all?
[[09:15] Erica M: You don’t speak English?
[09:15] chris e: Very few English networks, particularly recently as tensions have escalated with the protests in Northern Africa. Chinese networks exist, but are self-censored. QQ, has more members than Facebook, is used from the countryside to the subway.
[[09:15] Erica M: They don't learn English?
[09:16] chris e: All Chinese learn English starting in middle school. But probably it would be the elites who most want to use facebook or twitter; those, who more regularly link up with outside NGOs like free Tibet groups.
[09:16] chris e: Chinacan't censor facebook like it can the Chinese copy of facebook (Renren), so it just blocks it.
[09:17] chris e: Oh, interestingly Kindle is not blocked. So if you want to pay a couple thousand Chinese dollars, $300 US, you can surf freely, because it runs on Amazon's network, but I doubt many will do that. You can also pay about $5-6 a month for a VPN that circumvents the Great Firewall of China, but lately most of these have not been working either.
[[09:18] Erica M: Whoa!
[09:20] chris e: I wonder if I could just copy and paste our dialogue, change the names and give this to my editor as a blog post?
[[09:20] Erica M: YES
[[09:20] Erica M: Do it!
[[09:20] Erica M: So interesting!
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