First they blocked YouTube, now Chinese censors have targeted Flickr and Twitter – what’s it like to live without Lego comedies and funny pet clips?
ONE OF THE worst social embarrassments is walking in on a group of people laughing at a joke, who then refuse to tell you what’s so funny, saying “You won’t get it” or “You had to be there”.
This is how it feels all the time in China with YouTube, which has been banned here now for three months, probably because of video posts showing Tibetans being beaten up during last year’s riots.
And the isolated feeling is getting worse now that Twitter and Flickr have all fallen foul of the Great Firewall of China, as sensitivities are heightened around the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Every day, I am sent e-mails which contain only the link to the YouTube video and a brief, often one-word entry in the subject line – “Hilarious”, “Lol”, “Funny”, or “Check this out”. I can only imagine.
Literally.
China employs thousands of net nannies whose job it is to police the internet, and I’m sure in the government building with the nameplate “Great Firewall” outside, there is a special office where a group of serious, geeky but political young men (I always imagine them to be men, for some reason) sit there writing code to block YouTube videos.
All internet content visited by Chinese residents is routinely monitored and the government can limit access at its discretion.
It’s amazing how quickly you become reliant on YouTube, and how much you miss those hours spent trawling for half-remembered appearances by The Smiths on The Old Grey Whistle Test or the scenes of Chinese people going crazy at Beijing airport when they miss their flight.
The bookmarked YouTube collection on my iPhone is now just an empty shell. My son’s favourite YouTube clip – a fabulous re-enactment in Lego of Eddie Izzard’s sketch about Darth Vader in the canteen of the Death Star, and being told that he’ll need a tray for his penne arabbiata – is now just a swirling circle.
My wife’s favourite performance of The Volga Boatmen doesn’t work any more, and her efforts to track down a Bach performance the other day, before going online to buy it, ended in frustration and irritation.
I missed most of the goals from the Premier League title run-in, and am reduced to reading live minute-by-minute reports of matches, which is nice, but not the same.
A few weeks ago, the state broadcaster CCTV was raving about the YouTube Orchestra, a crowd-sourced internet orchestra, where individuals play separately, using YouTube, a composition by the Chinese musician Tan Dun.
However, the report failed to mention that Chinese audiences will not be allowed to watch the orchestra because of the YouTube ban.
The chief reason for the ban appears to be the way Tibetan activists have been canny in using the service to publicise its campaign. Footage of soldiers shooting at Tibetans fleeing across the Himalayas, the riots in Lhasa and the subsequent crackdown and reports a year later about ongoing oppression, all of them were shown in full technicolour on YouTube. I remember watching the graphic footage of police beating Tibetans after the Lhasa riots and wondering how the hell this got past the net nannies. Within days, I had my answer, and YouTube went dark.
Iran, Pakistan and Turkey have all banned YouTube in the past and then brought it back afterwards, and China has blocked it intermittently, though never for as long as the current three-month blackout.
One of China’s top bloggers, Michael Anti, has long maintained that it would be only a matter of time before Twitter went the way of YouTube, and he has been proven right.
Banning Twitter in China is a real shame, as he points out, because Chinese Twitterland is funnier than the English one.
“A Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language – 140 Chinese characters can make up all the full elements of a news piece with the “Five Ws” (Who, What, Where, When and How),” he said in an interview with Danwei, an excellent website full of weird and wonderful information about China.
And not blocked yet.
Blocking Twitter and YouTube has angered nearly everyone, including staunch nationalists and the most pro-China foreigners you can find. There have been comparisons with Iran.
The Chinese government insists it is not blocking YouTube, but it must be. Why else is it not working? Google, which owns YouTube, says it is blocked. I know, I Googled it. That still works.
But MySpace and Facebook beware, the net nannies must be taking a very close look at you.