Demonstrations play out across Great Firewall
As news of protests in Hong Kong spreads around the world, narratives about the pro- democracy push are tilting in opposite directions depending on which side of China’s digital barrier social media users fi nd themselves. On Facebook , beyond the government’s reach, studentled Occupy Central has been crowned with the romantic notion of being an “umbrella movement” fi ghting for democracy. To those behind the so- called Great Firewall that censors China’s Internet, social media posts highlight Hong Kong’s hostility toward mainland tourists, and the city’s sense of dislocation following its loss of economic superiority over the mainland. That is deepening the divide with Hong Kong, where protesters are getting little sympathy from mainlanders angry at being blamed for problems in the territory and previous activist campaigns that likened them to vermin and locusts. Framing the movement as an extension of previous anti- Chinese campaigns though, helps a government keen to avoid similar democracy demands being made on the mainland, said Doug Young, Shanghai- based author of The Party Line: How the Media Dictates Public Opinion in Modern China. “Rather than wait and let the message get controlled by the Hong Kong people or international media, the government is stepping in to control the message from the beginning,” said Young. While some photos and information from protesters have slipped past China’s censorship system, posts that voice sympathy and support for the Hong Kong movement are much more likely to be deleted, according to Fu Kingwa, the lead developer of social media analysis website Weiboscope. Out of every 10,000 posts on Weibo. com, China’s equivalent of Twitter, 152 were removed on Sept. 28. That is more than double the rate for posts on June 4, the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on the Tiananmen student movement. “With the limited amount of information that people in China are getting, many are actually irritated by this movement,” said Wang Yi, a 26- year- old student from Beijing studying law. “With Occupy Central following the previous rifts, what many people see is that this is just an anti- China movement.”