Lessons from China’s Delicate Dance of Censorship and Expression
jelizondo writes:
A very interesting article was published by The New Republic, which centers on the intersection of social media, government censorship and activism, China style. It is a long read but very much worth you while, as the "spring" of public freedom becomes the hard, cold winter at the hands of an authoritarian regime.
A very interesting article was published by The New Republic, which centers on the intersection of social media, government censorship and activism, China style. It is a long read but very much worth you while, as the "spring" of public freedom becomes the hard, cold winter at the hands of an authoritarian regime.
Weibo, the Chinese uber social media platform, is an unlikely vehicle for protests, demand for change and surprisingly results, in the form of government reform, changes to the law and favorable judgments in courts.
While China, and its famous Great Firewall, (built using "American bricks" in the form of technology from Cisco and others) is known for its unforgiving censorship of citizen's protests, something changed with social media. This is not to say that China has given up on censorship, some subjects are very much forbidden, for example the so called "Three Ts": Tibet, Tiananmen and Taiwan. No criticism or protest on those subjects is allowed, not even a suggestion of a protest.
Other subjects are open for debate. Some examples follow:
On a cold Valentine's Day in 2012, three women walked down a Beijing shopping street in white wedding dresses smeared with red to look like blood. (It was lipstick.) They had bruises on their faces, as if they'd been beaten. (It was dark-blue eye shadow.) They chanted, "Yes to love, no to violence." Photos of the protest spread instantly across the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo
The "bloody brides" were the invention of Lu Pin, founder of Feminist Voices, a digital magazine that had grown into a viral Weibo hub for young women unwilling to stay quiet. Activists called 2012 "Year One of the Chinese feminist movement." Women shaved their heads to protest higher-education quotas that favored men, rode the subway with placards denouncing gropers, and Li Maizi's "Occupy the Men's Bathroom," demanding more women's stalls, trended on Weibo.
These actions produced real legal and policy shifts. The Ministry of Education discontinued discriminatory college quotas, and a Beijing court for the first time issued a domestic violence protection order, ruling in favor of a U.S. citizen who sued her Chinese husband, a millionaire celebrity English teacher. China passed its first national anti-domestic violence law, and new buildings were required to add more women's bathrooms.
[ More examples follow - Ed ]
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