山寨金葛/Ge Jin's Miu Log

Is Free Speech a Western Conspiracy?

Some netizens in Beijing have been sending flowers to Google Beijing Office to show sympathy, but pictures and reports about this public action are deleted in most websites including Baidu--the most popular search engine in China. What kind of Internet do we have, we already lost youtube, blogspot, facebook, and twitter, now Google might be gone too.

What pissed me off most are some comments I heard. Some nationalists are saying that Google embodies nothing but western imperialism. Its western value is of no use to us. It, like other foreign forces, is just trying to prevent us from rising as a superpower. Really? So freedom of expression is just a western conspiracy? If people are not allowed to be informed about things that shaped their life, is it better for them? For example, is Baidu a better search engine than Google? Baidu is a company that censored reports like those on the milk crisis or the violent displacements of people for real estate development under the pressure of government officials. Baidu makes its money by ranking the search results according to who pays more rather than relevance.

Some people are commenting that Google is stupid to lose such a big and promising market for political reasons. Yes Google is just a corporation from capitalist America. But it might just believes one thing many Chinese government officials and companies don't understand: that money cannot buy everything.

But Maybe I'm the one who don't get it. Maybe "Don't be evil"--Google's motto--is against our value? Maybe that's what Chinese values mean now: we respect nothing but power and money, we don't need western values such as justice or public accountabilty; we need peace and stability, for that we must get used to submission and delusion.

You Have to Look at the Bottom to See if It's Truly Rising

China has a system of household registration that divides China's rural and urban residents. The rural residents are not entitled to the same access to education, health care or job opportunities as urban residents.

My city Shanghai thrived because of this system: the rural workers come to built the highways, subways, office building, apartments and malls, but once the jobs are done, they no longer have the right to be here and Shanghai is not responsible for their welfare. This gives some of my Shanghainese friends such a sense of superiority! I often hear they say that rural workers should be kicked out of Shanghai because they just look so dirty and poor, which taints our image in front of the world (Shanghainese like to think the whole world is watching us).

My cousin's boss recently beated up a young man severely because of a dispute over parking space. This boss, managing a state-owned enterprise, is so powerful that he is able to scare that young man from suing him. This young man is a quite successful engineer, but this is what my cousin said about him: "You know what we found out? Although he can speak Shanghai dialect, he is actually not from here! Once we knew that, he has no chance, he will be kicked out of Shanghai if he dares to sue".

Also recently a foreign friend of mine, who used to be a huge fan of the so-called "China model", turns less positive about China's social system. She used to advocate the so-called vertical model of democracy in China, which basically means it's more efficient for a big country like China to let the intelligent leaders on the top decide what's good for the people than to have the endless democratic public discussion before any decision can be reached. But recently she was hurt by a rude stranger for a trivial dispute, she went to the police but this stranger happens to know some police officers, she went to some jounalists, but the journalists are afraid that they might get into trouble for writing about such a story. Suddenly she realized that the problem with a vertical system is that the people at the bottom have no way to keep those above them accountable.

All the Olympic metals China won or the 8% GDP growth during the world-wide financial crisis might impress the world, but until I see the people at the bottom living with more dignity, I cannot celebrate the rise of China light-heartedly.