Through the advancement of technology it’s getting harder for China to suppress what their people can
say or hear.
China is one of the most controlling countries in the world. However, they do have freedom of speech, but there are ways for their Government to sensor almost any news that they want.
China has a law that they can suppress any information they feel will reveal secrets to the outside world. This gives them free reign to stop any information from being printed in the news that may threaten the control of their regime.
But with the advancement of technology the Government can’t stop news from leaking out to the public. Recently a train crashed in Beijing and the Government tried to cover it up, but the people who saw it happen immediately spread word of it through the use of microblogs called weibos. This attempted cover-up revealed corruption in the railway corporation and made their government look weak for not being able to stop the information from spreading. The Chinese railway system is the fourth largest business in the world. It has more employees than Wall-Mart and the U.S. Government. They have their own court system and police force. In an attempt to cover up the train crash they buried the railway cars.
Weibos are a Chinese form of Twitter that are becoming extremely popular there, and they can spread the information to thousands of people in minutes. “I call it the microblogging revolution,” said Zhan Jiang, a professor of international
journalism and communications at Beijing Foreign Studies Institute. Zhang said that microbloggers have played more and more of a major role in coverage, especially breaking news.
Government minders frequently delete posts they don’t want to spread, but there are many ways around this problem. Weibos get reposted so fast and the screenshot gets saved making it hard for the Government to delete posts. If a post uses a word like human rights the system automatically deletes it. So far the weibos are still up and running and gaining in popularity.
The Chinese try to keep control, and they have some control over Weibos, but it is limited. Weibos do have over 200 million users, so shutting it down would make their people unhappy and would cause a huge loss in profit from advertising.
It’s sort of a steam valve for the Chinese people to let them vent on these forums. They think if people get to complain on them it will make up for their repression.
It is not certain what China’s Government will do to try to stop weibos from letting their people spread information freely. Past events have shown the amount of brutality they are willing to enforce to keep control.
The protests at Tiananmen Square weren’t successful in getting the word out to the army stationed in rural areas. With the ability of their people to communicate freely and organize quickly with weibos, we could eventually see another Tiananmen
Square.
