Jeffrey Wasserstrom: evaluation

Transcript context

…How much censorship is there in modern-day China by the Chinese government? There’s a lot of censorship. One of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there’s fear, which is this direct censorship thing, like banning things. But there’s also friction. She has three Fs, fear, friction, and flooding, and she says they’re all important, and I think this is true not just of China, but in other settings too. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don’t want them to get. Even though you know that some people will get it, you just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you’ll get through a search. So a lot of tech-savvy or globally minded, tapped-in Chinese people will use a VPN to jump over the firewall. But it’s work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN. So you just create friction so that, okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding. You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those exist and in operation, and I think the fear is the easiest side to say what’s blocked. So I’m always interested in things that you would expect to be censored that aren’t censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarianism. You can read Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism. You’re not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state of anything, but it’s not specifically about China. And so censorship is most restrictive when it’s things that are actually about China. Things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, there’s intense kind of censorship of that, and certain events in that way. But something through allegory, something through imagining a place that looks a lot like a Communist Party-ruled state so that people are going to read it… There were things that were banned up until the very last period of Gorbachev’s rule, things banned in the Soviet Union, that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. You’ve been able to since 1985. Again, it’s not about China. And actually, for some people within China in the mid-1980s, where they focused on the part of 1984 that’s the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people, for some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present. ere they focused on the part of 1984 that’s the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people, for some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present. And then by the ’90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren’t having fun. Some people would read 1984 and say, “Look, this is the world we’re living in. It’s a Big Brother state.” But others said, “Well, that has some similarities to us, but he wasn’t talking about a country like ours. Look, we’ve got supermarkets. We’ve got McDonald’s. We’ve got fast trains. We’re living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did, and this isn’t like that bleak world he was imagining.”…

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