Internet Censorship in China
FYC
Ruoxuan (Catherine) Yuan
Internet Censorship has negative effects on China
Censorship in China has gained much attention recently because of the conflict between Google and the Chinese government’s self-censorship policies. In fact, censorship has been practiced since ancient China and the intensity only increases by the years. Nowadays, the most notable measure of censorship is being done on the Internet. More and more restrictions have been put into actions by the Chinese government, which make the life of Chinese Internet users, the Chinese netizens, very inconvenient. With the intensity of censorship increasing and the censoring technology improving, Internet censorship has mainly negative effects on Chinese society.
To start off, the current censorship situation needs to be described. In China, censorship is determined by the ruling party, the Communist Party of China, so Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, special administrative regions that are mostly self-governing, are not fully affected by it. But in mainland China, Internet censorship has great impacts on the society. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which people use everyday around the world, are banned in mainland China. Every time a Chinese netizen tries to open these sites, a blank page with bold words “404 not found” appears. This is very inconvenient for Chinese netizens. Moreover, the number of websites that are inaccessible is increasing. Also, Chinese government has forced search engines to adopt the self-censorship policies that force them to filter the search results for certain words. This triggered the withdrawal of Google from the mainland Chinese market. Attempting to search those “sensitive” terms not only results in little or no information being displayed but also in the shutdown of one’s Internet connection for a short period of time. Some people even suspect that doing so may lead to being spied on and arrested by the government. With so many coercive protocols, Internet censorship
Ruoxuan (Catherine) Yuan
Internet Censorship has negative effects on China
Censorship in China has gained much attention recently because of the conflict between Google and the Chinese government’s self-censorship policies. In fact, censorship has been practiced since ancient China and the intensity only increases by the years. Nowadays, the most notable measure of censorship is being done on the Internet. More and more restrictions have been put into actions by the Chinese government, which make the life of Chinese Internet users, the Chinese netizens, very inconvenient. With the intensity of censorship increasing and the censoring technology improving, Internet censorship has mainly negative effects on Chinese society.
To start off, the current censorship situation needs to be described. In China, censorship is determined by the ruling party, the Communist Party of China, so Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, special administrative regions that are mostly self-governing, are not fully affected by it. But in mainland China, Internet censorship has great impacts on the society. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which people use everyday around the world, are banned in mainland China. Every time a Chinese netizen tries to open these sites, a blank page with bold words “404 not found” appears. This is very inconvenient for Chinese netizens. Moreover, the number of websites that are inaccessible is increasing. Also, Chinese government has forced search engines to adopt the self-censorship policies that force them to filter the search results for certain words. This triggered the withdrawal of Google from the mainland Chinese market. Attempting to search those “sensitive” terms not only results in little or no information being displayed but also in the shutdown of one’s Internet connection for a short period of time. Some people even suspect that doing so may lead to being spied on and arrested by the government. With so many coercive protocols, Internet censorship
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