Google Censors China Search: A Dangerous Game - A National Threat
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A National Threat
Even before the recent actions of Google and the various reactions which followed, numerous groups and individuals believed the issue of Chinese censorship to be beyond the bare ethics of censorship. In fact, they believe it to be a matter of national security. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission was created in 2000 by an act of Congress, and its job is to analyze the effects of the relationship between the United States and China on national security. It releases annual reports to Congress on national security, and its most recent one contains some surprising claims about Chinese censorship and its effects on national security. The section about Chinese media control begins by explaining censorship's effects on diplomatic efforts:
The Chinese government’s extensive and persistent controls over the flow of information in the media and over the Internet pose an ongoing security concern for the United States. Through these controls, China’s government plays a commanding role in the formation of public opinion about the United States and U.S. policies, which can in turn undermine U.S. diplomatic efforts. These practices also risk creating an environment prone to misunderstanding and miscalculation in the bilateral relationship, particularly during times of crisis.
If censorship has such an important effect on America's relationship with China, then the importance of the recent search engine events suddenly increases. The report then talks about the complexity of China's Internet censors, and in the key facts section, it says that the presence of up to thirty thousand Internet police officers has been reported, a figure which is chilling to think about.
However, the report then goes on to describe the situation in more momentous terms, describing the cultural effects of censorship:
China’s control of information media exacerbates and perpetuates a xenophobic—and at times particularly anti-American—Chinese nationalism. The Commission remains concerned about the long-term effects of these practices on a new generation of Chinese citizens who have been persistently subjected to a highly controlled and manipulated information environment.
If the report is indeed correct in its claims, then the issue of censorship gains a lot of weight. It is no longer a trivial item that occasionally pops up in the news. Negative long-term cultural effects are not something one should look forward to. The report also provides some more details on how the United States is portrayed in China:
China’s nationalism is concentrated on perceptions of Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. An aversion to U.S. policies considered hegemonic and imperialist flows naturally from early communist descriptions of Western powers as plundering empires, and from later assertions by China that the Soviet Union and the United States were unjustly attempting to control and subjugate other countries. Given China’s strong emphasis on economic growth, contemporary nationalism often paints U.S. actions as intentional impediments to China’s development—for instance, claiming that the U.S. interest in human rights and environmentalism is solely an oblique attempt to constrain or deny China’s growth.
As the above excerpt illustrates, the information that gets through China's censorship does not paint a pretty picture of the United States. China's people simply do not have access to the same information as citizens of the United States or the Western world do. They are limited to what their government wants to show them, and their government obviously does not want anything that threatens its power to be viewed. The anti-American attitude that censorship is facilitating poses a very real threat to America's national security.
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