A New Take on Censorship

Internet freedom means different things to different people. Given the expansion of Internet technology, it is understandable why a state like China, with the world’s largest population of Internet users, would resort to censorship as a means to forestall the Internet’s harms.

Within the framework of personal liberty, the idea that a state would censor to protect is positively Orwellian. The government of China has taken condemnable measures and abused the powers of the Internet for totalitarian gain. They have banned dissent blogs and have hacked into the email accounts of human rights activists and allegedly even Pentagon computers. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was justified in chastising China for its Internet censorship last month in a speech that propelled Internet freedom to the forefront of the United States’ diplomatic agenda.

However, to view the issue of Internet censorship as simply another blatant violation of human rights by the Chinese government is to impose our Western values on a country that considers its heritage and culture of benevolence to be superior to a culture based on property and rights. Such moral universalism is ethnocentric, and, might I add, it is also part of the reason why Google’s move to challenge China’s censorship laws has strained Sino-American relations.

The Chinese government views Google’s decision to challenge China’s censorship laws by threatening to leave the country as yet another instance of Westerners denying China its sovereign right to govern. Furthermore, while some of China’s laws may abridge freedoms considered essential to democracy, their legal weight does not diminish simply because they are the product of a legitimate, albeit authoritarian, regime, instead of the sanctioned handiwork of a puppet government propped up by the United States.

On Dec. 29, China carried out the execution of Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen convicted drug smuggling who became the first European to be executed by China in 58 years. The British government cried foul and protested on the grounds that the man was mentally ill and was not given a proper assessment of his condition during his trial. Many Chinese nationals see this incident and are proud that after half a century, China has finally grown enough of a spine to stand up to the Western imperial powers that defeated them in the Boxer Rebellion and the Opium Wars.

China’s defiance in the face of Google’s threats and Secretary Clinton’s remarks stems from similar sentiments. While the end goal of China’s censorship is probably not as benign as protecting children from molesters and the like, it does serve a purpose within the larger context of effective governing and elevating the quality of life for its massive population. This is no different from United States’ justification of torture in the grander scheme of the “war on terror”. As such, these censorship laws, as well as China’s judicial system, should be conferred some degree of respect and not be immediately delegitimized by the Western standard of human rights.

However, respecting China’s censorship laws does not entail agreeing with them; it simply entails an understanding that China is facing tough challenges as it develops in an era of lightning-fast information flow and is dealing with them through the only means it knows how. I fully support Secretary Clinton’s crusade for greater Internet freedom in countries like China, but I would like to see the process carried out in a more sensitive, less accusatory tone. I admit that it is hard to be neutral when human rights are involved, but employing the rhetoric of human rights so freely is actually counterproductive. By invoking human rights to argue for every policy change that we would like to see from Beijing, we delegitimize the Chinese government by implying that it does not care about the welfare of its citizens. This does not bode well for the future of Sino-American relations.

Dozens of columnists have unofficially hailed 2010 as the start of the Chinese decade. In the Financial Times, Prof. Niall Ferguson, who coined the word “Chimerica” to describe the symbiosis of China and America, lays out a grim prognosis for the Western hegemony, suggesting that this may be “the decade that tilted east.” As a culture, the Chinese do not readily accept praise. Instead of lavishing unrealistically high expectations for China, we should try to view the East through a broader framework than that of our own Western values.

Marion Liu ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a molecular and cellular biology concentrator in Dunster House.