Death by censorship in China
FREEDOM OF SPEECH ... NOT JUST AN ACADEMIC DEBATE. — MARNI SOUPCOFF
Classes have stopped but learning will not. That was the phrase China’s Education Ministry used in a notice it issued last month after schools in the country were closed in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19, which has caused the deaths of more than 3,000 Chinese people, and infected more than 80,000. It was an optimistic sentiment.
With in- person lessons on hold for everyone from kindergarteners to university graduate students, the Education Ministry had created thousands of free online courses in order to keep vocational and undergraduate studies going strong during the shuttering, which would be a much easier thing to do if they didn’t live in a country that is massively invested in auditing every word exchanged on the internet and unafraid of excising any content that might, possibly, maybe displease the ruling Communist Party.
The country’s extensive censorship of online expression — entire social media platforms such as Twitter are blocked — is well established and understood, but the folly of the suppression is highlighted to a painfully humorous degree by the troubles befalling the academic lecturers who are now obediently trying to carry on their teaching in group chats and livestreams. In an article Thursday, The Associated Press profiled a Chinese professor whose delivery through voice messages of an apparently straightforward, apolitical lecture about the analysis of complex biological data ended earlier than anticipated when the Chinese system unceremoniously cut off the group chat for violating China’s internet regulations in ways only Big Brother can know.
The professor’s conclusion: “I guess we touched on some sensitive topic.” Which one was anyone’s guess, and it’s hard to say if the stories of online Chinese biology classes being blocked for containing “pornographic content” are an example of more or less absurdity than the bioinformatics professor’s experience of being gagged apparently arbitrarily; the clarity of why the system forbade the revelation of the basic facts of anatomy only highlights the inanity of the reasoning.
At the present time, stuff has gotten real for the rest of the world in terms of dealing with the new coronavirus. So, it’s easy to dismiss China’s bowdlerization of its own education resources as a facepalm- worthy little anecdote that we don’t currently have the luxury to muse on, busy as we are confronting a possible pandemic, but the two things are not unrelated.
“( China’s) manipulation and suppression of information is what allowed widespread of the novel coronavirus in the first place,” global affairs analyst Michael Bociurkiw reminds us in an op-ed for CNN.
It’s futile to try to push back a virus if we ignore or minimize one of the most elemental causes of its proliferation. If freedom of speech is not recognized as one of the crucial ingredients for fighting COVID-19, the time before another outbreak is upon us could be short.
But the Chinese people don’t need reminding of this. They were vocal on social media after the death of Li Wenliang, the Chinese “whistleblower” doctor who raised the alarm about the new coronavirus early on, only to be detained and muzzled by Chinese police who said he was spreading false rumours. “A system that won’t allow truth finally kills an honest, brave, and hard-working citizen,” read one post about Li’s death — until the post was promptly deleted by Chinese censors.
Most crucially, which should be most alarming to everyone, we have many indications that the Chinese government has not learned its lesson about gagging speech, all the recent examples showing the familiar aggressive state censorship of anything that is even remotely critical of those in power. And of many things ( like biological data analysis) that are not.
The entire issue of freedom of speech — the idea behind the right to express any opinion without restraint, which has come to be seen in some circles as quaint, simplistic and overrated — is about preserving a means for the oppressed and powerless to oppose tyranny and ultimately to save their own lives, as they were prevented from doing in Wuhan, China, this winter.
In the West today, we think of freedom of speech as a matter of whether a controversial speaker is permitted to give a talk on a university campus without being uninvited after pressure from protesters. COVID-19’S course in China is a reminder that at its heart, freedom of speech is about matters more elemental and crucial to survival; it’s not just an academic debate about how to handle statements deemed hurtful by student snowflakes.
That’s why China’s Education Ministry is wrong. The learning there has stopped. And it can’t start again until the Chinese people are free to express themselves about everything from the anatomy of human reproductive organs to humanity itself.