Causes

This post is about the censorship and speech restraints facing the Chinese internet, in particular Google. I argue that Google is censored because the CPC controls information passed through the Internet. This is an important issue for Chinese citizens because they are unable to make informed decisions about a number of civil rights, political, and spiritual issues. Chinese citizens are unaware of the extent to which they are being censored. This is an important issue to everyone because censorship deprives people of control over their own lives. If we allow censorship to continue in China, it means that we are not respecting their human right to access to knowledge and education. This post will explain why the Internet is censored in China.

First of all, the CPC has been successful in manipulating information presented on the internet. The CPC has created a list of “black words” that can’t be searched or published online. Words such as “Tiananmen Square”, “Taiwan”, “Tibet”, “democracy”, and lately, “Egypt” are black words[1]. The CPC wants to eliminate chances of reformist or separatist movements that would jeopardize the ruling government, which consequently keeps the population in the dark regarding “sensitive” topics.

The CPC’s censorship is seen as a measure to maintain the rule of the government and suffocate any chances of an unapproved reformist or separatist ideas from spreading. Google was introduced to China in 1994. Therefore China was a “latecomer” to the popular global “network of networks” [2]. Google as well as other western world websites signed the "Public Pledge on Self Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry" in order to operate in China. The CPC could at anytime remove what they considered to be unacceptable. This “great firewall of china” means that citizens can’t access any information on the "black words"[1]. The CPC’s fear that the public would discover the country’s past failures led to the tight and constricting internet laws on Google.

The Chinese Parliament Building - goblog4me.blogspot.com

The CPC holds a vast amount of moral control over the Chinese population. Without the ability to research and question, the people of China no longer choose what to deem correct and incorrect. This gives the government a chance to determine all the cultural and economical values they wish to obtain. Google in the Western world is the largest search engine used to interact with global issues and research any given subject. China is threatened by the power of Western influence corrupting their system. Censorship occurs when one a dominant force holds a great deal of control. Google was in control of too much information; thusly it was terminated throughout the country.