Rebecca MacKinnon: 'A real contradiction'. Photograph by Joi Ito. Some Rights Reserved.
There's an intriguing little tidbit that's just come through from Reuters, running some quotes from Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN bureau chief and the founder of international blog network Global Voices Online.
The article's headlined "World misunderstands China's Web controls: expert" and details MacKinnon's thoughts on how internet repression actually works in China (she lives in Hong Kong).
"There's a real contradiction that's difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet. On the one hand, you have a lot of efforts -- and fairly successful efforts -- to control content on the Internet and control what people can access."
"Yet on the other hand, you have this contradiction that at the same time the space for conversation thanks to the Internet has grown tremendously in China."
The piece has an underlying tone of contrarianism - insinuating that, actually, Chinese internet repression isn't much cop at all (teenagers are "not acting repressed and they're not acting oppressed. They're not spinning around being angry about not being able to do this or that on the Internet," she says).
But reading between the lines, it seems that Reuters is trying to draw a bit more juice out of MacKinnon's comments - which seem to actually be an attempt to redraw the "great firewall of China" stereotype.
After all, the black-and-white media world usually equates 'repression' with 'violence' - for example in the as we are seeing in Burma at the moment. But although the fireworks grab headlines, it's arguable that the most insidious repression is the sort that starts with self-censorship: a couple of generations of fearfully watching what you say, and suddenly the people are able to do the political repression all by themselves.
