China declares war on "vulgar" websites
For many Chinese websites, 2009 didn't start very well. China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre, a semi-government agency, has published a list of websites which contain "vulgar and unhealthy information" that could be harmful to the country's youth.
The whole list can be found here(in Chinese).
The interesting thing about this list is that it covered majority of the most popular websites in China. Google was ranked number one "vulgar" site, followed by Baidu and Sina. I'm very confident that every Chinese netizen have visited at least one of such vulgar websites, myself included. So after being diagnosed as psychotic under the Chinese guideline because I need to work on my computer for too long, I'm now also officially a vulgar and unhealthy person because I have visited at least 75% of the websites listed.
Most of the Chinese netizens are very familiar with such Internet Cleansing campaign as it was repeated many times in the past decade. Despite that most of the cleansing was justified under the banner of "please think of the children"(which itself is a logical fallacy) ,it's usually the adult internet users who are most affected.
Have these campaigns worked, anyway? Well, the funny thing is, thanks to the new Xinhua Search engine, an official search engine intended to censor vulgar information, if you know the right keyword, you can find as many "vulgar" information as you can expect to find in most commercial websites. I can list you an endless list of examples of vulgar information that can be found on Chinese official news websites like the Xinhua Net: this, this, this ,or this, and the list goes on, and yet they were never criticised by anyone.
It's a common sense that it is impossible to censor out all those "unhealthy" stuffs if somebody really wants to find them, as there is a market for it.
As a regular user of the most vulgar website (Google), I cannot recall not even once that Google returns me "unhealthy" information, unless I deliberately searched for it (I admit it, haha) - not to mention Google has a optional filter that censors images and texts, which is very effective in my opinion. Therefore it is hard for me not jump to the conclusion that the accusation of search engines means that creators of the list, themselves deliberately searched "vulgar" information in order to produce the list.
So now who's unhealthy and vulgar?
In my idea, protect the future generation probably wasn't the original purpose of all those internet cleansing campaigns, and the campaigns themselves, are kind of the ridiculous - find me another country on this planet which labels the absolutely majority of its netizen population as "internet addicted" and "vulgar"?
Most of the Chinese parents, including mine, are not as tech-savvy as their children, some don't even use the internet, TV and newspaper are still their major sources of information, which are still largely controlled by the state. Strangely, they are in fact the targeted audience of such campaign.
So it's not surprising that I have met too many Chinese parents who didn't hesitate to use corporal punishment to their children just because they logged onto the Internet without parents' knowledge, because deeply in their mind, the word "internet" means "evil". Sounds shocking but luckily, as the post 80's generation are gradually becoming parents themselves, use of such corporal punishment are now less common.
However, for the older generation, although their children are now grown up and corporal punishment won't work on them any more, but bear in mind that they are now the most powerful generation in China, in 40-50s(or even older), financially stable; and as they usually have the directorial positions in organisations or their work places, this group is also potentially a powerful political force.
Now the long demonisation of the Internet is starting to make sense to me.
Y'know, the more noise a person makes about morality and the evils of (the internet/TV/video games/homosexuality/masturbation- take your pick) and protecting children from all the nastiness out there, the more I suspect that person has a guilty conscience. For example, Graham Capill spent his career as leader of the Christian Heritage Party ranting on about such things, and it turns out he himself is a paedophile. And how many of America's big, loud-mouthed evangelical and fundamentalist preachers have been caught committing fraud or frequenting rentboys or whatever? Seems to me the net nanny ain't no different.
Definitely agree with you. A lot of Chinese netizens see this campaign as another case of double standards. We all know that some government officials, probably those who started this campaign are more vulgar than any of us, but what can we do? The guns are in their hands:(