China, Wikipedia, and Apple Pie
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen some clever westerner use Wikipedia as an example of how the poor Chinese people are denied happiness by a censorious government. CNET is currently propagating the meme, claiming that “Wikipedia missing China’s voice“.
That’s like looking at the server logs for the Milwaukee Herald and concluding that “Chinese don’t have newspapers, since not many people from China read this paper”. The fact is, millions of people in China do create, update, and read articles in the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia: Baidu Baike. It seems rather arrogant and chauvinistic for western journalists to assume that Chinese people would prefer to contribute to an English-language encyclopedia hosted in California. Baike is Chinese-language; and most Chinese people are very chauvinistic about their own language.
It reminds me of the people who did searches for “tiananmen” on Chinese search engines and were surprised to find that the pictures didn’t show army tanks as they do on U.S. search engines. (Our own dear Scoble even made this error of extrapolation). What they failed to realize was that Chinese people call it “天安门”, and the only people who would be writing about “tiananmen” are kids from Canada and San Francisco. When you search for “天安门” on the search engines in China *or* U.S., you see something very different from what’s been astroturfed by the preachy press.
April 5th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I did search for ““天安门””
You are right, after 27 pages of smiling kids, smiling Mao Ce-tung, festivals and parading soldiers there is the picture of two tanks approaching a single guy.
It shows what is important for the western media – OMG!!! The world is a horrible place, we gonna die, panice!! – and what is for the chinese media – We live in a beautiful country, nothing serious, move along comrad.
Not that it proves that there is no censure in China.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Yes, it goes a bit deeper than that. For the average westerner who has never been to China, tiananmen is associated with only *one* memory. But for many millions of Chinese, they have hundreds of memories of happy times that they actually experienced firsthand at tiananmen. So it just stands to reason that they would publish lots of happy memories about tiananmen.
Furthermore, you are right that it doesn’t prove there is no censorship. Of course there is censorship. The point is that 99.9% of the Chinese population supports the censorship, and Chinese people do not think that people should be allowed to say certain political things in public. Same for the U.S. incidentally — take Don Imus for example. In America, we support harsh action against people who say racist or sexist things. China is more permissive of some speech and more restrictive of other speech. It’s just different norms.