Paradoxes of Internet in China

                 The expression of the Marshall Islands McLuhan, the "Global village ", written in his book The Medium is the message published in 1967, is a fantasy anchored in the mentalities today. However, as in the economic or political domain, all the regions of the world are not equal. So, the world is not uniformly connected. The United States, the Western Europe and Japan are the main spaces of connection. Also, all the giants of Internet, all the big companies, are situated in California. Moreover, the ICANN, the institution which controls most of the domain names, obeys the Californian laws and, until 2009, it authorized only the use of Latin characters to create websites.

                 

                  Here is our first paradox. Indeed, the language the most used among the Internet users is the Chinese, because there are today more than 500 million users in China. It is the most connected country, and this trend is going to increase, because the government invests some billions euro every year in order to develop the new technologies, in particular those about the national information. Indeed, if internet in China developed enough late in comparison to other countries, its upgrade was fast and spectacular. The Chinese government played a large part in this process, by protecting the internal market thanks to a systematic censorship of the foreign competitors.

                  However, we can see in China an other paradox about internet: the contradiction, the paradox, between the progress of the public-spirited contents on the web, and the important censorship organized by the government. Indeed, there is in this country a "police of the Internet " which hires between 30 000 and 40 000 agents: these peoples have to close certain web sites, direct the debates in different forums, and denounce some Internet users.

But the censorship is sometimes contournable. So, for example, if the Chinese Internet users have no access to Facebook or Twitter, they possess their own social network: Weibo. Six months after its launch and with more than 200 million registered users, this service of micro blogs begins to change and to revolutionize the landscape of the information in China. The circulation and the spread of the information in China are so completely modified. The Chinese are used to using Web in a playful way, but more and more often, some Internet users make political scandals thanks their comment  on social networks. Then these affairs spread in few hours through all the country, what was impossible before 

internet, because of the censored press, controlled by the political power.

This is why the surveillance of the network is permanent. However, if it is not too complicated for a government to close a website, it is not the same with comments on social networks. The users, thanks to their "like" and shared and re posted «tweets”, already allow very numerous information sources to pass through the censorship. Furthermore, a lot of Chinese are using GG, the “national MSN Messenger”, which complicates the control of the contents.

But this relative "freedom" of the social networks is compromised today. Indeed, after  numerous rumors and false information spread thanks to internet, the Chinese government decided to censored on the “Chinese twitter” Weibo with an unprecedented scale: so, during the 1st weekend of April, it was then impossible to post comments. Moreover, at least 6 persons were arrested for "creation and distribution of rumors" and 16 web sites were closed. This operation, begun with the police of the internet on February 14th, was called "spring breeze" by the authorities.

This increase of the censorship in China shows the anxiety and the powerlessness of the government towards the new media. The power felt in danger in front of this wave of speculations and rumors, which intervenes few months before the 18th Congress of the Communist Party, which has to allow a politicians' new generation to reach the power for around ten years. Furthermore, the Chinese leaders followed with a lot of anxiety the wave of the Arabic revolutions last year in which Internet and the social networks played an essential role.

Consequently, the situation of internet in China is very paradoxical, as the situation of the economic domain: between liberalism and communism, between freedom and censorship, it is a country which is changing and which knows the instability.

But in this period, the questions of access to the information and to Web are going to become crucial. Indeed, the loss of information because of to the censorship will soon prevent the development of an economy. Thus, in China, all the professionals who are working in this sector, already use paying services to by-pass the censorship.

The overtaking of the Chinese censorship has already begun. Indeed, in front of the complexity of the current system, a whole generation of creative young people is ready to defend its rights and its liberties.