Most Westerners associate the Internet in China with two things, censorship and nationalism. The media here has given lots of space to stories about the “Great Firewall of China” and the phenomenon of angry young Chinese ranting on the Internet about Japan, Tibet and and what they perceive to be Western “imperialism.” While both of these are legitimate issues, the problem is that they give only a partial and very slanted view of how the Internet is being used in China and how it is affecting the way Chinese people view the world.
Last week, one of the most respected China Hand’s, Kaiser Kuo, gave a speech at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, on this very subject. If you want to understand the real China Internet and how it is reshaping the Chinese view of the world, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you listen to the entire speech and the following question and answer session. Kaiser has lived in China for many years, appears regularly as a commentator on China’s central television station and is an authority on digital media.
Kaiser and I don’t always see eye to eye on China. But I thought this speech was practically perfect, elucidating how Chinese “netizens” perceive their American counterparts and visa versa, and giving the students in the audience more insight into today’s Chinese youth than they’d get from reading a hundred articles or blog posts. His love of China is always evident, but so is his clear-headedness and lack of prejudice, insisting that we see the situation from both Chinese and American eyes, and showing compassion for both sides. We need to remember, there is no black and white, that there are always two sides to the equation. What sometimes seems so obvious to us – raging nationalism, defense of a ruthless one-party system – cannot be understood without context and an understanding of the kind of world in which these people grew up and the extraordinary evolution of their country. And we need to understand how they see us, too, and why.
A beautiful job, and the best single discussion I’ve ever heard of the Internet in China.
For a partial transcript and further analysis of Kaiser’s speech, you can go here.
Richard Burger is the author of the China blog The Peking, which has been publishing since 2002. The Peking Duck’s posts on hot-button issues generate energetic comment threads from all sides of the political spectrum, and the site used to be a target of nationalist Chinese blogger trolls who criticized Burger for his views on China, which were often critical of the government.
Burger became an editor at the newly launched English edition of the *Global Times* in 2009, a Chinese newspaper that has a reputation for leftist, nationalist content. He is an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing to Taipei and finally back to Beijing.
