China, Wikipedia, and Censorship's Perils

The mainland Chinese lost a key tool for communication and debate when censors blocked Wikipedia. Search engines aren't immune, either

by Eva Woo

China's Internet censors have been busy in recent days. Google's (GOOG) Chinese search engine was shut down (BusinessWeek.com, 10/22/07) for parts of Thursday and Friday, a spokesman for the company says. There were reports of similar actions against the search services for Yahoo! (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT). And one Chinese blogger reported that YouTube, the video service that Google recently bought, had been blocked last week. "Is that true another top website is going to leave us?" wrote Shi Zhao, a 34-year-old chemical engineer, on his blog.

There are no official statements explaining the crackdown. But it seems likely that China's censors have been particularly sensitive because of the gathering of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing (BusinessWeek.com, 10/1/07), an event that occurs every five years. In addition, the blocking of American search engines comes shortly after President George W. Bush met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. Web surfers who tried to reach Google.cn ended up being forwarded to Baidu (BIDU), the Chinese search engine that dominates the market in that country.

Before the "Great Firewall"

The latest actions have been brief, with Google already back in business in China. But the experience of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, shows how long-term censorship can hamper Internet companies in China and can interfere with the growth of a community that stretches across national borders. China cut off access to the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia in late 2005, part of the construction of the Great Firewall (BusinessWeek.com, 1/12/06), and Chinese elsewhere bemoan the loss of their brethren. "Barring mainland Chinese users behind the Great Firewall crippled our site," says Titan Deng, a legal counselor for a newspaper in Taipei, Taiwan, who is actively involved in the Chinese-language site.

Deng and others recall fondly the days before the crackdown. Wikipedia gave Chinese-speaking people a forum for discussing and debating a wide range of topics, since the Web site allows people to post not only their own entries for encyclopedia topics but also justifications for their entries. The discussion forums allowed them to debate serious issues like Taiwan's independence and Falun Gong, both taboo subjects in mainland China, and to discuss more mundane topics, including the three different ways of saying "bus" in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. For many, it felt like the formation of a Chinese community transcending geographic borders and political differences.

After several years of relatively stable access and rapid growth in the number of users, Wikipedia saw a major shutdown by China's censors in late 2005. Service has been sporadic since then, but the Web site has been blocked consistently in recent months. As a result, the number of users and contributors from mainland China has plunged. The proportion of visitors to Chinese Wikipedia from the mainland dropped from almost half two years ago to less than 10% now, according to a Wikipedia survey.