What does China Censor?
Here is Part 1 of an email I sent after arriving in Beijing. Looking back, this was my first experience with China Censors. It is now 5 years later and I will be making comments about what had happened.
I am having the biggest problems with the internet. Everything here is censored or at least it seems that there are things interfering with me and communication. A weird thing is television here. One day there is a channel and the next day it is gone. (At this time there were protests in Tibet. All the new stations or websites that had key words around anything that could relate to the protests it was decided in China to censor those sites. Since this was big news, and many sites were covering this, it seemed to me that everything in China was censored, but turned out to only be temporarily blocked. Weeks later many of the sites were uncensored and accessible. An interesting thing was YouTube was still available at this time for another couple of months until it was censored permanently)
One of my language partners’ friends just came back from a tour of the US and had a ton of questions for me. They visited New York, Los Angeles, and Washington. The first question she asked me was if all Black people in the US asked people for money on the street. She said everywhere that her friends went they were harassed and they pretended not to speak English, but the people just kept on harassing them more and more. She said that they loved New York for the shopping, Instant noodles were the greatest food, and they went to a church mass and said the songs were very beautiful. (In China the homeless hardly ever approach people and ask them for money except on the subway where they walk by people. The homeless in the states I feel are definitely more aggressive then in China. The comment about black people in America was very shocking, but other than on television this was the only time they would have ever seen anyone of African descent so even if it was only one person it probably would have seemed like it was everyone to them.)
I am continually amazed at how many people here speak amazing English. I mean these people have never practiced with a native speaker and are able to have a full conversation in English that would rival many of the high school students in the states, (at least in my opinion). (I change this completely now. I was studying at the number one Language University at China at the time so of course everyone there could speak well, they were the best of millions of students. In reality people there have high levels of reading and large vocabularies but for speaking it is pretty bad.)
My buddy the other day took me too a place he found where he was exploring in the middle of the day. It was this really dodgy alley which had three pool tables at the end. We ended up playing a couple of games against the local people, which were hilarious. It started off just two on two. Then it turned into two on three and then two on 5 or so with guys on their team rotating in and out with new guys showing up on their scooters all the time. The last guy to show up was this little 13 year old on a scooter with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It really reminded me of the movie Bad News Bears with that one kid who is the punk of the town with the motorcycle and is the champion of baseball. This kid was pretty good at pool, but still no match for my team which ended up barely winner and being the Beijing dark back-alley pool champions. (yeah it was fun)
I am not sure what is going on with Tibet right now if anyone out there knows please give me some info. There is nothing on the news here, but a foreigner told me that this week there has been a lot of protest in Tibet and several hundred protesters have died. I am wondering how true this is. (The funny thing is it was the censored news that made the expats start to ask questions and then start to ask their Chinese friends what was going on. It was this that rumors started and only then did many of us actually here about the protest.)
So there was a suicide at my school and no one knows about it. A Chinese girl jumped from the eight floor of a building at 10 in the morning. The only reason I found out was because my language partner friend was friends of the girl. Other than that it is as if it never happened. It is crazy. I asked my partner about suicides in China and she said that there might be a lot, but she didn’t know. I also asked her about the websites here being blocked (BBC and a of other news ones) she said that she was a girl and girls don’t like that stuff so it didn’t matter. (There seemed to be suicides all the time there. In almost all the Universities you would here on one or two a year. Never murders or violence, just students taking their lives; at the school I attended they gave us a suicide lecture when we first arrived and we all thought it was funny. Later on a Korean student killed himself.)
