A woman from Gansu Province talked about how Muslims in her hometown were portrayed as troublemakers and how she learned to understand why it was offensive to hang the Chinese national flag in a mosque. One chatroom with more than 100 people from northwestern China, where I’m from, focused on their interactions with ethnic minorities. (A favorite line: “As long as we have enemies everywhere, we have no enemies.”) More than 3,000 people joined a chatroom that was dedicated to parodying Hu Xijin, possibly the most infamous Communist Party propagandist. A group of feminists read works by feminist writers. In another, a doctoral student in sociology talked about his experiences as a meal delivery worker. In one room, a documentary filmmaker shared his thoughts on making a film about a subculture of young migrant workers, called Smart, who try to stand out in a conformist culture through wild hair and piercings. Since Saturday, I spent nearly all my waking hours wandering from one Clubhouse chatroom to another. No longer were they hearing their voices filtered through official media. One user said in a chatroom about censorship that everyone could see that all those people who in the mainland were labeled dissidents, like Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters, were real people. Some users said its format made them feel more willing to share personal stories and listen to different opinions. Clubhouse gave mainland Chinese users a chance to flock to chatrooms focused on those taboos.Ĭlubhouse allows up to 5,000 users to join audio chatrooms that disappear once the conversation is over. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, a growing number of topics have become off limits on the Chinese internet. Big online platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were blocked long ago. Over the past two decades, Beijing has developed the most sophisticated online censorship system in the world. People who had been demonized got a chance to speak out and be humanized. Likewise, mainlanders got a chance to prove that they aren’t brainwashed drones. The state media dismisses people like the Tiananmen protesters, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong or those in Taiwan who want the island to take a different path from the mainland. Those free-flowing exchanges threaten to debunk the caricatures that the state-controlled media often foists upon the Chinese people. Those conversations helped illuminate why the Chinese government blocks free speech online in the first place. They held many honest, sincere conversations, sometimes with tears and sometimes with laughter. They argued for the rights of the government loyalists to speak despite their disagreements. They lined up, sometimes for hours, to wait for their turns to speak. James will be talking with Dr Tim Stevens and PhD student Lilly Muller about the book and about why we need to take back our internet freedoms.For that brief moment, people in China proved that they are as creative and well spoken as people who enjoy the freedom to express themselves. The author shows just how far the Great Firewall has spread. As distortion, post-truth and fake news become old news. James gained unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. He was previously a reporter and assistant editor at the South China Morning Post, where he played a key role in the paper’s award winning coverage of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong. He has reported from Hong Kong, China, South Korea and Australia for outlets including the Atlantic, Vice and the Daily Beast. James Griffiths is a reporter and producer for CNN International, currently based in Hong Kong. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Once little more than a glorified porn filter, China’s ‘Great Firewall’ has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. The Great Firewall of China is the first book to expose the world’s biggest and most sophisticated system of internet censorship.
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