Jimmy Wales meets with China's 'net censors about Wikipedia-blocking

Rebecca McKinnon blogs...

Last week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had a meeting with Cai Mingzhao, Vice Director of China's State Council Information Office - the government body whose "Internet Management Division" is in charge of censoring online content. They discussed Jimmy's concerns about censorship. No deals or agreements were made, but Jimmy tells me that the meeting has opened a channel of communication and dialogue between the Wikipedia community and the Chinese government.

Many Chinese wikipedians and bloggers first found out about the meeting from the State Council Information Office's own website, which posted the picture above along with a brief text that said only: "On the afternoon of September 25th, the State Council Information Office Vice Director Cai Mingzhao received the founder of the American Wikipedia, Mr. Jimmy Wales. Liu Zhengrong of the Fifth Division and others also accompanied the meeting." (The Fifth Division is in charge of the Internet. Liu famously told the world in 2006 that Chinese Internet censorship is no different than what goes on in the West and most other countries.)

Read the rest of her post, which includes an email Q&A she held with Wales to ask more about the meeting (which the Chinese officials had apparently not intended to make public): Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales meets China's censors (rconversation)

• [caseyd]

  This must of been part of the summer WEF – the China “Davos.”

• [freetardzero]

  I find all the complaints about Chinese blocking of various Internet sites a bit amusing. It’s been demonstrated that American public schools and libraries have much tighter ‘net censorship (oh, but it’s called “protecting children”, isn’t it?) than China does. I assume it’s only because China is a potentially lucrative market for Internet advertisers that they tend to bleat loudly about its Great Firewall. How often do we hear about the great firewall of Saudi Arabia, or Iran?

  I work in a public school district’s technology department in Canada, and fortunately, we don’t have the CIPA to tie funding to filtering. We still have some blocks up, but they’re rarely legitimate sites. We refuse to block YouTube and Facebook and other social networking and ‘infotainment’ sites just because ‘something bad might be seen’; also fortunately, we have our board’s full support for our policies in this regard. And if a legitimate site does get blocked by the filtering company, we will immediately request a lift on the block, and this is usually done within a couple days. For some reason, though, I can’t convince them to unblock Suicide Girls…*grin*

  I hear many people say that CIPA and laws like it are necessary because we need to protect children form the evils of the Intertubes. Yet these are the same people who argue that full disclosure is the only way to go when it comes to sex ed- “Kids are having sex, so we need to help them make wise choices!”. Does not the same logic apply to the Internet? When those kids go home in the afternoon, they’re not for the most part running behind safewalls. A few might be, but not the majority. Would it not be better if teachers had the opportunity, the ‘teachable moments’ as it were, to help kids understand their roles and responsibilities in a digital world?

  I suppose this sounds like a rant against censorship (which it could be), but it’s more a rant against ignorance. All the Chinas and the CIPAs and the purveyors of filtrationware are focusing on the wrong part of the problem: education is the answer, not ignorant blinders.

• [kodabar]

  Yeah, it all seems like a bit of a waste of time. Mr Wales has little idea of how the Chinese operate. And saying “American Wikipedia” is probably more correct than one might imagine. It’s not like Mr Wales has written any of the articles in Chinese.

• [Trnck]

  It’s funny that most Chinese can’t visit wikipedia, yet there are many Chinese Authorities trying to manipulate the information wrote in different languages about the “bad” things about the government and something bad about the country.

  Does Tor Browser works in China?
  Can you browse most websites using it?
  Is it possible to somehow track the user using Tor?

  In fact, I have a friend in China who wants to see more, though he’s afraid of being tracked by the officials…

  You know, they could put someone in jail for no reason…

  God I am so happy to live in Hong Kong, probably the best part in China at least with a lower level of media control and censorship.

  Thanks for whoever answer this questions, that should help my friend in the mainland China.

• [js7a]

  Trnck, please see [[WP:TOR]]

• [Anonymous]

  Very cool… though I find the title “American Wikipedia” an amusing extra bit that they put in there.

• [nerdkiller]

  #9

  You’re right. No one seems to have read my post. All this stuff about the great fire wall is quite exaggerated. Blogspot sites are blocked. And I do send emails to China that never get there, or take hours to arrive. Otherwise I’m reading wikipedia, watching youtube and browsing flickr (only in the past year) anytime I want.

  And as far as TV goes. All the hotels have international cable news, and it is very easy to get an illegal satellite installed. No one I know has gotten into any trouble for having one.

  I will say that googling tiananmen square uprising will get you no results.

• [Linds]

  Tor works very well for getting around the firewall, close to 100%.

• [nerdkiller]

  I travel to china often, mostly to medium / small cities. In the last year I’ve found flickr and wikipedia accessible. And contrary to some reports, I’ve always been able to access boing boing.

  The blogs that are blocked seem arbitrary. I think they block blogspot across the board, cuz I can never read peroxidecomics.com . Also find I can’t get onto gawker media sites.

• [Anonymous]

  Hiya, China user here.

  Most of the English wikipedia is accessible here. Or rather, non of the articles I visited were blocked.

  Chinese censorship is mostly just really really annoying. It slows down your internetspeed considerably whenever you try to visit a foreign website and it seems utterly random in the websites it blocks. BBC, New York Times and BoingBoing are perfectly accessible, but the government doesn’t want people to visit Livejournal or play Knytt Stories… yeah, go figure.

  If there are any people planning on going to China and don’t want to be annoyed by the blocking, try Your Freedom. It’s free for connections from China and it works perfectly for me (ahh, let’s not curse it :) )