This is my another extra credit for this class.

I did the survey about the censorship in China because I posted about this topic before but I’d like to research it more.

This is my review.

Then, I curious that what do Chinese and people who ever been to China think about the censorship.

I sent a survey through Facebook which was made by me to people who are Chinese or ever been to China. Fortunately, I could get question from 5 people. (Male 2, Female 3 / Chinese2, Japanese2, Chinese American1)

Here is the question.

1. Are you Chinese or people who ever been to China? (If you went to China, how long did you go there?)

2. Do you know about censorship in China? (If so, please write about it as much as you know.)

3. Do you think that censorship is bad or good?

4. Do you feel that is your life style of censorship in the internet is stalking or protecting?

5. Have you or your friends ever get problem with the censorship when you are at China?

Here is the answer.

Chinese / Male

2. I know because my father is a journalist he told me that there is a filtering system for the news they report. They don’t fake news but they will only report them selectively. The internet Censorship is well known and hated in china. They have a type of police man called internet police. When they find out people are writing things against the government, they will delete the article immediately.

3. I personally hate the censorship, because the government promised freedom, but what they are doing is fooling people, people won’t know what freedom is. They stopped using Facebook in China for few years also is good example( u can google it)

4. People in china don’t really care about protecting, what they really care is to see what they want to see. In fact, many of them know what the government is doing, they are not stupid.

5. We never got in problem though, they only delete and filtering things, maybe because there is a law actually says that you have the right to do whatever you want on the internet, so if they come to you, they have no reason to put u in prison.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Chinese/ Female (She live in Japanese for 12 years)

I have no idea about this topic…. but I’m sure that Chinese government is not doing their best to help for Chinese. Also, it’s unfair everywhere.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Japanese/ Male

1. I’ve been to Hong-Kong 11 times and to Macau 15 times.

2. I just know the censorship on internet, and know that we cannot use Facebook and Twitter in China.

But, Hong-Kong and Macau is the Special Administrative Region, so I could use them when I stayed there.

3. Bad. However, China is known as one of the country of socialism, so it’s not a bad policy to maintain their belief.

This is a problem of Chinese people, so we, foreigners, have no right to accuse this.

Even we ignore that basic outsiders’ position, usually we tend to argue over on the point of democrats, but this is wrong principle.

Chinese built China on the socialism, so on their position, “socialism is wrong” itself is wrong.

Again, the censorship itself avoids the freedom of speech, but the word “freedom” is for democrats. In China, the censorship is not bad.

4. If we do not harm others’ rights or profits, we are not blamed in Japan.

5. I cannot contact my friends in China via Twitter or Facebook.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Chinese American/ Female

1. I’m American but I have relatives in China. I visited China for about 2 weeks.

2. I don’t know much about it, but I do know that the Chinese government discourages the dissemination of information by censoring anything that would hurt their country’s reputation. This leads to limited freedom in speech / writing.

For example, my father told me that Chinese people do not openly embrace Sun Yat-sen as the Father of the Nation (even in front of friends or family) because it is considered blasphemous towards Mao Zedong.

Also, they censor a lot of sites so that you cannot get any news about taboo topics such as Tibet. One Chinese American who wrote about the conflict between China and Tibet was demonized and her parents living in China were harassed by both locals and the government. 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo is also a forbidden topic and he is currently jailed for criticizing communist single-party rule in China.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites were made unusable in order to hide information from their citizens as well as stop activists from uniting.

3. I think it’s bad. Keeping your citizens ignorant to make your corrupt government look better may quell possible rebellions but has many dire consequences. Stories about kidnappings, mental illness/suicides, organ harvesting/murders, defective food products, and pandemic diseases are not reported in mainstream news. Hiding this information harms both China as well as other countries around the world. My friend from HK told me that China’s decision not to publicize cases of SARS led to the deaths of nearly a thousand people (SARS began in Guangdong province of China and was spread to Hong Kong and other countries by infected Chinese citizens). It seems that Chinese and HK locals are both aware of certain news but I would assume Chinese cannot badmouth their own country in public while HK citizens have no restraint on what they can say.

4. The Chinese government is only worried about protecting their own image but as you can see, there are too many flaws with this.

5.  Censorship was inconvenient because I couldn’t use sites like Facebook or YouTube. Also, I wanted to find an article for my friend about an old woman who sued a man that helped her and won (a prime example of China’s corrupt legal system), but government officials censored it so it was hard to find…. I ended up finding it on a Singaporean site.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Japanese/ Female

1. I was in china for 6 years

2. Yes, the government doesn’t want their citizens to see certain stuff on web so, some of the materials are blocked. (ex: fb)

3. I don’t think it is good because i think everyone has the rights to “know” what is actually going on. Also, I think this censorship problem is causing Chinese people to misunderstand their country and all of the other counties in the world.

4. Stalking, I don’t think anyone has the rights to violate one’s privacy.

5. Yes, I could not get on Facebook or some of the other websites.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

In addition, I did record on SoundCloud from my Chinese friend.

As you can see this survey and recording, my friend agree with my opinion that censorship is not good for the citizen.

However, even they think so too, they cannot say that on the internet. Keeping this censorship of the reason is that China is communisn.

Unlike Japan is democracy so they have a right to say freedom.