Behind the 'Great Firewall': China's 'first blogger' speaks out

A new insight into China's battle with censorship over the internet is revealed by the influential blogger Isaac Mao who suggests that, "The battle of Chinese censors to block political commentary on the internet is akin to "a snake swallowing its own tail". Mao who started blogging in 2002 from behind China's "Great Firewall", on the most restrictive internet environments in the world, gives an interesting insight into the restrictive nature of China's government towards individual speech and internet user rights.

He suggests that the Government's restrictive nature may be a result of trying "to slow down people's communication", citing the censorship of keywords and access to "g-mail" accounts. Hence Mao's analogy of "a snake swallowing its own tail because the snake is trying to find the food and attack, but eventually he found his own tail." He brings up the issues with Domestic users problems accessing Google's Gmail in China as a way "to rest the tolerance of the people". He suggests that as a result of governmental restrictions, they are stifling people's creativity and access to information. Though Mao contradicts this to some degree denoting the rise in creative measures by Netizens and VPN users to circumnavigate government restrictions with the use of concepts embedded into other contexts,such as the word "Jasmine" being used in the phrase "a cup of Jasmine tea" to address the issues of the attempted Jasmine Revolution by Netizens early this month.

Mao however does not address the issue in terms of long standing internet and individual speech policies but instead suggests a balance be attempted between users and the government, "it is a kind of test from the authorities, to try to see if this type of new censorship strategy could cause economic consequences,". Thus, perhaps suggesting a formal balance between the focus on development through economic growth that permeates Chinese national policy, while enabling citizens to have access to information and to communicate their daily lives to the outside world. However this may prove to be more difficult as Mao denotes, "[t]he worst thing would be if China cut off the whole internet, and made itself into an intranet. We don't want to see that day coming," Mao said. "So we try to persuade the authorities that it will hurt the whole country's development in the future, and the economy eventually."

For the video Interview and article please see: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/03/28/China.blogger.mao/index.html?iref=allsearch