We all know that when we fly to China we will use our mobile phone much less, because we can’t get access to the well-known media platforms like: Instagram, Facebook and the New York Times. Have you ever asked yourself: why is Facebook blocked in China? Well, I will explain to you briefly.
China has a communistic regime and the local government wants to have full controls over its citizens, as a typical characteristic of the communism. That is exactly the reason why Facebook is blocked. According to the local authorities, Facebook does not fit with the local law. Of course, there are reasons for why the platform does not fit the regularities. First of all, Facebook is afraid for riots in the country, caused by perceptions from outside China. They agree with the fact that when many non-Chinese people complain (or give a negative opinion) about the government, the locals will agree with these opinions, which can lead to revolts. And secondly, the government can’t control the content in the social media platform. This does not mean that China hasn’t any social media platform, but they are all controlled by the government. If Facebook would give the Chinese authorities full access to the platform, then it would be legally accessible.
Luckily, many people have find ways to enter Facebook. Via proxy-sites are citizens still able to join world’s most popular platform with all their features and photos. Hopefully, these are the first step to a national wide Facebook authorization.
Remarkably, not the whole country is blocked from international social media sites. Since summer 2013, Facebook is accessible in the Free Trade Area in Shanghai for two reasons. Firstly, to make foreign investments more attractive and, secondly, to connect China better with the Western world. For now, China does not have expand the legal access of Facebook beyond the 28 square miles of the Shanghai area.
How do you think about this? Does Facebook need to give access to media platforms like Facebook to the whole country?
Source: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/why-facebook-banned-china.asp
Source: http://www.nu.nl/tech/3583308/china-staat-facebook-toe-in-vrijhandelszone.html
Source: http://nos.nl/artikel/423549-facebook-ondanks-verbod-populair-in-china.html
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2431861/China-lifts-ban-Facebook–people-living-working-small-area-Shanghai.html
Interesting post Tom! Having lived in Shanghai for a several months, I have experienced the block first hand. As an expat I had to obtain a VPN connection in order to access the social media platforms we use in Europe such as snapchat, Instagram and Facebook and even Google. Quite shocked about the difficulty of retrieving messages from friends back home I wondered what the Chinese citizens opinion was. So I asked my colleague’s what they though about the block of western social media in China and they didn’t really seem to care. China has their own social media platform, completely separated from ours, they have WeChat (whatsapp), Baidu (Google), QQ (messaging) Sino (Twitter) and RenRen (Facebook). They also didn’t have a VPN account as they had no need to access our types of social media as theirs is tailored to the Chinese demand (which is quite different than ours) and it can be said that the Chinese social media platforms experience high switching costs compared to Western social media. Hence, it is strongly believed that if Facebook would enter the market, it would have no chance against these platforms. More so, many Chinese social media companies are even further in development and more technological established than Western social media platforms.
Personally I don’t believe it’s an ethical thing for China to block the western social media platforms and have this sense of censorship especially in this day of age where it’s all about globalization where the world is becoming more connected. However it has be said that it’s remarkable how China has created it’s own platform of various apps fullfilling the needs of it’s users and abiding the regulations of their government
Dear Tom, thank you for your blog! With the internet being accessible to so many people, I think it is always quite remarkable when a country manages to not give access to certain websites to their citizens. However, with China being a communist country, it also ‘makes sense’ for the government to cut off access. I think this will remain this way for a longer time, and that Chinese people who solely have connections in China/do not travel, will use the other media platforms available. As for foreigners or Chinese people with a lot of international connections, I think they often find their way to use Facebook despite the governmental regulations.
Thank you for your interesting post. I am very much into the topic as I lived in Hong Kong for seven months and travelled through China a lot in this period. In Hong Kong nothing is blocked, due to their autonomy as a special administrative region. It is a weird experience to suddenly not have access to a lot of western media when you pass the border.
I think it is a frightening thought, that in an era where internet usage is rising tremendously, a country is controlling what their population reads. During a political course I followed in Hong Kong, the professor gave a very interesting example. First, she showed a screenshot of the search results in google (accessed by proxy) for Tiananmen Square. The first hit: Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. When searching the same term through baidu (‘China’s’ google), all kinds of articles popped up about ‘the lies of tiananmen’.
Not only blocking certain media but also even going a step further and trying to rewrite history is something we should be very critical about.
I also think there is some form of protectionism, China is always trying to shield its market from other western countries. It also allowed them to develop their own web companies, like Wechat or Alibaba, if Facebook was available it would have been impossible for another company to compete against them. China therefore created its own web giant thanks to this ban. Wechat integrated many other function over the years and has now more than a billion users. If Wechat would try to develop itself in Europe I think it could succeed thanks to the experience it acquired in China. I also think in the future the Chinese web giants like Wechat or Alibaba will try to extend their market to other countries in order to gain even more users. On the long term they could give some serious trouble to the Silicon Valley stars. They could also be a geopolitical threat to western countries, WeChat allows the Chinese governement to access the data of millions of people, to see their conversation, pictures, and even to censure posts, what if someday it could access the data of American or European people? It would be a Trojan horse for us, but for the Chinese government Facebook is the same…
Interesting Readings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_diplomacy
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-social-media-leads-to-a-less-stable-world/