RSS 2.0 FeedThe Internet: Gateway To Freedom
by Doug MataconisToday’s Washington Post has a fascinating article discussing how China’s technology entrepeneurs are finding ways to surpass their country’s Great Firewall:
GEDONG, China — There was no sign, but Gedong’s teenagers knew the way. Down a dusty alley just off Jicui Park and a few minutes’ walk from local schools, the curtained door beckoned. Inside, in a dingy back room off the kitchen, a clutch of adolescent boys crowded around six computers and stared at the images flickering on their screens.
For the equivalent of 35 cents an hour, the youths were playing computer games in an underground Internet cafe, one of a half-dozen information-age speak-easies in this little farming and coal-mining town in Shanxi province 220 miles southwest of Beijing. For those unable to afford their own computers — the vast majority here — going online in a clandestine dive has become the only option; the local Communist Party leader banned Internet cafes nine months ago as a bad influence on minors.
“If they dare to reopen, we might launch another campaign to shut them all down again,” proclaimed Zhang Guobiao, party secretary for the surrounding Fangshan County.
Zhang’s ban, which was reported by several Chinese newspapers, was regarded as extreme even by the censorship authorities in Beijing. But it was emblematic of the Communist Party’s determination to retain control of what this country’s 1.3 billion people see, hear and read despite the vast changes in other realms brought on by economic reform over the last two decades.
As the article details, though, the cafes have reopened underground and people are finding ways to get around the ban. I particularly like this quote
“You can’t just block the river’s flow,” he said, continuing the comparison to the Yellow River. “You have to let the water out. The same is true of the Internet.”
And freedom.
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