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Panel 5: China's Internet: What freedom/What limits? China uses Internet forums to launch attacks on West One might have thought that 1.3 billion Chinese people were against Tibet. The fact is that comments with other opinions were not posted on the forums. In China, citizens are simply not informed. What people do not realize is the impact this censorship has on Western media. I work for a television channel and we need pictures, we need images. If we have no images there is no news. In the Tibet crisis, the very first picture we got came out 24 hour after the start of the riots. Twenty-four hours may not sound like a lot, but even from Burma we got the images just two hours after the fact. So not only does China have technical resources that prevent an exchange of information on the Internet, but also by scaring the public, by preventing tourists from taking pictures, by keeping them in their hotel rooms, the authorities were successful in preventing us from seeing what was going on. We knew that about 100 people had been killed. The problem was there was no proof, and where there is no proof, as a journalist you can't really talk about it. Your information doesn't carry much weight. But thanks to the Internet and thanks to the network we have created with people in China who are not professionals, we finally did get access to images that showed that the army had shot demonstrators with live bullets. So you might say, in spite of it all, that the Internet does play a positive role in China because we would not have had these images at all without it. Despite the automatic filters, which do exist, no doubt about it, we still managed to get pictures and information and news from China. From my point of view -- and I have worked on censorship a great deal -- what was most interesting about the Tibetan crisis was not so much the censorship but what happened after the events. I'm talking about the huge wave of propaganda on the Internet in the past few weeks and especially surrounding the incidents around the Olympic torch in Paris and London. As a journalist in charge of that web site, I was amazed. Ours is a brand new web site, and we usually get five or six comments about any news item. But for each article on Tibet or about the Olympic torch, I was all of sudden getting 50 comments, and most of them came from Chinese people. There were more Chinese comments on Tibet than comments from European or American people, which is astonishing because most of the site's users are Westerners. And many of these comments were in very good French or English. I was really surprised. How was it that Chinese people had learned French overnight and were capable of writing comments in excellent French, even with all the correct accents? The attacks were quite violent. There were insults against France, against CNN and against Western media generally DELETED. I wonder -- and I don't have the answer -- where all these comments were coming from? Are we talking about Chinese people living in France who speak French quite well and who had a sudden outburst of nationalism because of the news. Or are they Chinese people in China? And, if so, how many people in China speak French that well? If they had invested so much time in studying French, why were they all of a sudden insulting France? Is it possible that some of these Internet users were paid by Beijing to launch a propaganda or public relations campaign to defend China? What we see is that China has decided to change its attitude. Usually, censorship is an admission of weakness. It is an admission that the news from abroad can really disrupt your country. It can change public opinion and trigger in-depth change. Well, now it seems as if a different phase has begun. China is trying to export its ideas -- and not just on Chinese forums. It is exporting its ideology to foreign web sites like France 24 Observer. The Tibet crisis showed that China has no hesitation over using the Internet. It uses the Internet to convey its own propaganda. The boycott in China of [the French-owned supermarket chain] Carrefour, for example started on the Internet. And Carrefour is terrified of this. So we have to see that China has become much more proactive. They are much less frightened of the news coming into their country, and they are prepared to fight it out on our web sites. I think this is something that is developing even as we speak. On our web site, there were so many comments from China giving the Chinese viewpoint that one got the impression that they had won the argument. There were all sorts of people saying that the Dalai Lama was an impostor. They had much more detailed information on Tibet than our French readers. I think this is going to be a challenge over the next few years. It is an export program of China's views and ideology in a new proactive mode, with the Internet as its vehicle. This, in my opinion, is much more worrisome than censorship. |
