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On Monday, at a workshop held under the UN sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Athens, Greece, Chinese diplomat Yang Xiaokun set a new world record in cognitive dissonance as he explained in an exchange with BBC anchor and session moderator, Nik Gowing, that there is no internet censorship in China.
Yang Xiaokun: First of all, I have to say that today we have talked a lot about China, and think that's rather strange because if we participate in forums like this, I think that we should spend more time reflecting on the issues that have been raised. And -- perhaps we have talked a lot about China. There are lots of millions of Chinese that have no access to the Internet and our deepest hope is that everyone will have access in the future, so that they will be able to communicate and take part in these exchanges. We are here because we would like to promote openness. But we have not really raised the issue of how we could participate more fully and how we could have better access to the Internet. My second point is that I heard what various people here said, and collusion and collaboration and cooperation with China. The Cisco example was given. Everyone knows that there is a lot of tourism in China, and towards China. I hope that everyone will be visiting us soon. But I think that we need to also protect tourists in our country. And I have to say that I am a Chinese citizen and I feel that I need to be protected. For example, we are threatened by terrorism. We do need protection. So we should make sure that everybody can come to China, enjoy our beautiful country. And I heard with great interest what our Pakistani colleague said. Now, on the equipment use and the software in China, I don't think that we should be using different standards to judge China. In China, we don't have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that's a different problem. And I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I've heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it's blocked. I'm sure I don't know why people say this kind of thing. I work in Geneva. I am part of the Chinese mission to the U.N. And I listen to the BBC in my office.Nik Gowing: (inaudible).
Yang Xiaokun: I still have several points to make.
Nik Gowing: Could I -- may I ask you a question? How would you define, for those who are not familiar with your government's policy and the detail of it, what is the principle on restrictions of openness in China?
Yang Xiaokun: We do not have restriction at all.
Come on! (Shouting out from audience).
Nik Gowing: All right. Do you want to answer -- would you like to elaborate on that? None at all?
Yang Xiaokun: How can I elaborate on it if we don't have any restriction?
The full transcript of the workshop is available here. CNet News has more on this story.
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Man, what a job this guy has. He's like the Scott McClellan of China.
How dare anyone challenge the Word of Heaven!
Hi Rindy, I dont think it was his job to do that but he still did. I wonder if he really beleives that there is no internet censorship in China. Did none of the other attendees in the Forum talk to this guy afterwards to find if he had more to say on this?
Personally, I think this was his emotional and passive aggressive response to the panel's persistent criticism of China. He didn't really believe what he was saying, but he was embarrassed and said these things to spite the others. Read the transcript and you'll see what I mean.
He drowned the audience in a sea of words, aka "confuse and obfuscate" aka a filibuster in the US congress.
Here's a more dangerous China lie:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/01/asia/AS_GEN_China_Bird_Flu.php
I am always surprise of the capacity that many Chinese have to deny the basic reality. I think they do that either to try not to loose face (but when they do that to foreigner they loose even more face), either they simply want to stop the subject.
Can a Chinese explain us how someone can say something like that ?
99% of Chinese make up 99.7% the world's most bald faced liars.
The actual censorship takes place as local as possible. Sometimes I can see something, but my friend a few blocks away on chat can't see the very thing I'm looking at. It's probably because someone on that same connection was looking for something the government didn't want them too... so, access was denied for a while.
Google image search only turns up a few pages of results before it quits, and then it doesn't work again for a few hours. Who knows how they actually do it... and what sort of system it is that allows leaders to phrase their denials like this guy has.
So, I was chatting with a Chinese friend about Qigong. I sent her the Wiki on Qigong, and she couldn't open it. She said, "Oh, it's forbidden." I'm like, "What are you talking about? I'm looking at it right now." She said, "Hm."
So I said, "I have two questions: 1) why does the government block websites, and 2) how do Chinese people feel about this."
She just sent me a smiley face :) and moved right on in the conversation. On another occassion, she was talking about the "bad things" of the internet. I'm like, "What bad things?" She says, "You know, just forbidden things."
Do Chinese citizens actually believe they're being protected from something?
Can somone explain how the Great Firewall works?
I'm a little confused. According to my understanding, as requests are made out out of China the the Great Firewall routers look to see if it is blacklisted and if so returns a reset. What I don't understand is why ISP's seem to provide different results. Do most ISP's use their own filtering software? Is it just packet-loss from bad routing?
Good question. There was a paper released by researchers at Cambridge University in July, which describes the GFC in some detail. Here and here are articles that describe the paper. Here is another more general article on the topic.