(photo: Sébastien Boymond-Pfahrer)
Howard W. French notices that attempts to evade and promote evasion of China’s Great Firewall –which blocks vast regions of the web from the Chinese public– are taking off inside the PRC. Li Xieheng, who coded the Firefox proxy plug-in Gladder, has recognized the fundamental weakness of censorship: it relies on the public’s specific ignorance that it is being actively controlled and manipulated.
“If you don’t know what’s on top of you, than you won’t fight back against it…It’s just like many people not feeling that China isn’t free. They’re not aware of it and feel things are natural here, but that’s just the power of media control.”
“Why don’t they just take Google down? It’s because they don’t want to have a scene and have everybody know. A lot of people came to know about the system because of Flickr, and that is something the system needs to weigh.”
(The New York Times via Boing Boing)
Censorship efforts in the United States have always failed, because while courts and government bodies can attempt to censor or restrict access to information on grounds of obscenity or criminal advocacy, they generally cannot conceal their efforts to do so. Once the public is aware that information is being withheld from it, it becomes very difficult to maintain an embargo. It’s an old story, but when it comes to knowledge, demand always favors the forbidden.
Thus the 1933 test case seizure of imported copies of Joyce’s Ulysses on grounds of obscenity, dramatically publicized the novel to an otherwise largely indifferent audience (which was Random House’s intention of course). While the government had the power to confiscate, it did not have the power to conceal confiscation.
The nature of the material banned becomes consequential in how broadly and quickly any new popular awareness of censorship can spread. By banning access to ASHC for criticism of communism, the PRC is unlikely to intrude into the realm of popular Chinese consciousness. But as Li suggests, striking at Flickr is another matter altogether. Perhaps the wall is starting to stretch too far, to sustain widespread popular ignorance that the Chinese public is living in coercive information seclusion from the rest of the world. One can hope.