Will Free Speech in China Ever Truly Exist?

Rebecca MacKinnon argues that the internet is a tool for political change in China. "Given the right circumstances, online citizens’ media such as blogs may indeed facilitate, amplify, and accelerate these causes. But blogs will not be the cause." She is under the assumption that people acting in large numbers under confident, persuasive leaders will be the cause of political change in China.

Blogging and freedom of speech are important to ensuing political and social change; however, with China owning "the most extensive, technologi-cally sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world" (OpenNet Initiative 2005), the Chinese government has a lot of control over what type of information it's citizens can see.

Take the example of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. This event began with some intellectuals and students protesting the Chinese political system. The group of protestors eventually grew to be well over what the Chinese government believed was reasonable, and subsequently planned an attack on the protestors. Chinese military began approaching the square from all corners of the city. Protestors ran into the streets to block military tanks and vehicles, but were met with open fire.

The Chinese government reported 241 dead and 7,000 wounded; however, a document in Soviet archives suggested the actual death toll was around 3,000 protestors. The worst part is the the Chinese government tried to erase this massacre from its history.

The country has blocked all access to information about the massacre inside country lines. The government even blocked pages of the Economist which featured an article about the 10-year anniversary of the incident.

Can blogs create social change? Not when the government's technological sophistication mixed with its relentless communism block the majority from conspiring to have a voice. In order for this to change, the political structure of the government has to drastically change. However, communism has been running deep in China's blood fro quite sometime now; I don't see it erupting into anarchy anytime soon.

-Kate