The Great Firewall..well not so great actually

Photo by MLDD.

hen I was lined up waiting to cross the Macao border into China for the first time, I was honestly scared. From everything I’d read about the police and the central government in the papers, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that they were going to just arbitrarily arrest me, jail me, and execute me. I was being paranoid, I guess, because I finally got through immigration without incident and took my first step into the mainland.

As time went on I began to realize that it was actually OK to criticize the government in public here, that emails and instant messages were most likely not being monitored. Even as an artist, you can get around censorship somehow because the Chinese art market is soaring and the government is proud to finally have a valid cultural export again. Usually, if you mind your own business and not theirs, daily life is pretty much free. Sometimes, however, crossing paths with the government is unavoidable. That’s when you find out just how serious it can be.

I moved to a seaside city called Xiamen, which was formerly known as Amoy, at the beginning of this year because it is rated as one of the top three most scenic and comfortable places to live in China. I think it’s more likely that this is one of the top three “livable” places left due to the country’s recent development, which has left the environment apocalyptically devastated.

This past March, information began leaking out that a Taiwanese-run chemical plant was secretly being constructed in Xiamen. According to many scientists, the chemical Paraxylene (PX), which the plant would be producing, is a highly polluting and carcinogenic petrochemical that would damage the surrounding environment as well as increase the chance of fetal abnormality during pregnancy. Not a good thing. In addition, according to text messages that were being forwarded from person to person around the city, if there was an accident at the factory, it would be like “dropping an atomic bomb on Xiamen Island.” In the past, the company had plans to build a factory in Taiwan but was rejected by their own government because it was deemed too harmful and unsafe. Apparently though, it’s OK for China even though the plant is being built less than a mile from the nearest residential area and only four miles away from downtown Xiamen. According to international standards, PX manufacturing should be kept at least 62 miles from any major urban settlement.

Protest photos by “Tina” (she didn’t use her real name for fear of government reprisal).

 

n May, most of the residents of Xiamen, myself included, started hearing about an illegal demonstration that was planned to take place on June 1. The PX project was government-approved so, in their eyes, if you oppose PX, then you oppose the government too. People started avidly discussing the situation using blogs, emails, instant messenger, BBS, and text messages while the government’s internet police did its best to block, ban, and monitor anything containing the two letters PX. Seriously. For a couple of days, a Chinese acquaintance of mine named Zhezi, a college student and clothing designer, went around spraying graffiti that read, “I Love Xiamen. Everyone is an island. Everyone is Xiamen. Anti-PX.” Around the same time, he posted photos of an Anti-PX t-shirt that he had designed and was planning to sell on his blog. “The next day six men came to my dorm room,” Zhezi told me. “Some of them were from China’s Ministry of State Security, some were from the Department of Urban Construction, and some were part of the university’s security department. They confiscated my t-shirts and warned me not to attend the protest if I still wanted to graduate this year.”



As June 1 approached, the government’s fear of a mass demonstration grew. Word on the street spread that the police, armed guards, and the military would be deployed and that the government would fire any of their officials and employees as well as any university and school teachers who joined in the march. Furthermore, any students who were caught attending were threatened with expulsion. The government defended itself by saying that it was not being entirely unreasonable because they were allotting a special area in the municipal government’s parking lot where a legal demonstration could be held. There was just one little catch: Demonstrators were going to be expected to line up, get their photos taken, and have their personal information recorded by officials before they could start demonstrating. Then on May 30, a day before the rally, the government announced that construction on the billion-dollar petrochemical plant would be temporarily put on hold. Some believed it was just a ploy to pacify the people but, according to state media, nearly 1 million text messages were sent to the government urging them to abort the project. But even after the government announcement, the demonstration was not canceled.

Protest photos by “Tina” (she didn’t use her real name for fear of government reprisal).

 

n the morning of June 1, “there was only a small group marching,” a protester who wishes to remain anonymous reported to me, “but there were many people on the sidelines watching. The mood between the protesters and the police was tense at first, but once everyone realized that it was safe to march, many people joined in. By the afternoon, if you counted the marchers and the spectators, there were about 10,000 people there. The police force and the military were outnumbered. They tried to form lines to blockade the roads, but it was easy to go around them. Actually the police didn’t show much resistance because it looked like they secretly agreed with us.” My protestor friend showed me photos that he took of the march, and I could see that there were many kinds of people including lots of kids. “Overall, it was very peaceful because the people of Xiamen are really laid-back,” he told me. “There were police officers giving bottled water to the protesters, but the people refused, saying they would not drink water from the enemy.” He laughed when he told me that his friend who works for the Special Police (the Chinese equivalent of the FBI) told him a few days after the rally that he saw him at the protest and joked that he could get him arrested if he wanted to. In the end, the demonstration lasted two days without any major incidents. I asked if anyone got arrested and he said that he heard that a few of the major organizers were detained.



I was stuck at home trying to get an idea what was going on through my computer. If you are a foreigner and get caught at a public demonstration in China, you will immediately be deported and denied entry back into the country in the future, and I don’t want that to happen to me. During the protest, there were many people uploading photos of the event on the internet. On average, about five minutes after a photo had been posted, the entire site or page would be blocked by the internet police. Eventually people started putting photos on Flickr, which probably lasted the longest (approximately a day or two) before their page and account were inaccessible. On June 7, the entire Flickr site was blocked across most of China. Flickr posted a statement on their website that they “definitely care very much about our friends who cannot access pictures. We have been contacting people to hopefully get a positive resolution with restoration of photos,” but after doing a little research, it became clear to me that China is making a deal with Yahoo! to make a Flickr China, which means the government will have tighter control over users. Now there are rumors swirling around here that YouTube will be blocked and replaced with YouTube China in the near future. They’ve already got Google. Can MySpace and Facebook be far behind?

PAT PAT