Scaling the great information firewall

The recent 180-degree turnaround in Covid policies in China had an interesting prelude to it. While much has been reported about the protests against zero Covid in China by assorted global media outlets few, if any, voices have attempted to put the protests in perspective from a native Chinese standpoint. One such perspective was shared recently by the ChinaTalk podcast in its periodic newsletter. In the newsletter, the host of ChinaTalk podcast Jordan Schneider shared an English translation transcript of a YouTube video in Chinese posted by a certain Wang Zhi’an. Based in Japan, Wang’s China native credentials arise from his having served as a reporter for the Chinese state television network CCTV.

While the YouTube video essay focuses substantially on the events leading up to the zero Covid protests that he terms the “A4 Revolution”, the transcript is interesting for its insights into the role played by information circulated over the public internet outside China and in particular the content that was shared across major social media platforms, which otherwise remain banned in China. Tracing the origins of the information factor in the A4 protests, the essay speaks of an article that first went viral on WeChat that raised several questions on the fire incident in Ürümqi and a viral video of a speech by a man in Chongqing giving expression to the angst underlying the protests. Highlighting the role played by smartphones and viral videos in spreading the protests at the Foxconn facility, the essay brings out an important aspect of how Chinese-language Twitter became the gateway and conduit for this dissemination. It is interesting to note that despite the so-called information firewall of sorts and the censorship by the Chinese state on its native platforms, Chinese-language Twitter became the receptacle for videos out of China despite being fragmented and isolated from mainland China. According to Wang, the scale and pace of the protests was made possible due to ordinary Chinese citizens finding ways to browse content on Twitter and YouTube outside the ambit of the great Chinese information firewall.

While it is expected that the Chinese state will devise further measures to restrict access to information in Chinese language on platforms such as Twitter and YouTube in mainland China, it is noteworthy that the demands of a global economy and the presence of a widespread diaspora that consumes content in Chinese language on these global platforms would make it ever more challenging for China to control the narrative. This is of particular relevance to us in India for a couple of reasons. The first obviously is on the role global technology platforms can play in domestic politics even in the most restrictive of states. An open democracy like India is far more susceptible to such viral protests as was seen in recent years during the CAA related violence and the motivated incidents of violence to sabotage the Agnipath scheme. As a democracy, this is a challenge India will have to build state capacity to deal with, without resorting to the kind of censorship the Chinese state routinely employs. The second reason for relevance is, however, of greater geopolitical significance and needs further elaboration.

The recent incidents along the border with China in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang region near the Yangtze river have been the subject of much debate in India and amongst western geopolitical observers of India. Without getting into the specifics of the border incidents and the dynamics between India and China in managing the Line of Actual Control, LAC, it would be pertinent to examine a question posed by one western geopolitical expert on whether India has an effective deterrent against such Chinese transgressions. The answer to this question perhaps lies in the video essay of Wang, for if there is one thing the Chinese state fears more than anything else it is information on the open internet in Chinese language. It is striking that while India is the subject of substantial news and current affairs information in Chinese language available on the open Internet, none of the sources for these news items are of Indian origin. A cursory look at the kind of content aggregated by Google News on its Chinese language edition reveals that most of the news on India is from either mainland Chinese sources or Taiwanese media apart from certain Hong Kong-based outlets.

The near-zero presence of Indian-origin sources of news and other content in Chinese language ought to be a matter of grave concern. While certain Indian media outlets such as <The Hindu> have long had veteran Indian journalists reporting from Beijing and Prasar Bharati’s Beijing-based special correspondent has consistently reported on issues of Indian concern such as entry restrictions on Indian students, almost all of this reporting is for audiences back home in India. There is an acute need for developing multiple independent Chinese-language content sources out of India that can be flooded into the Chinese-language open Internet to raise costs on the Chinese state in response to its frequent border transgressions among other possible counter-measures.

While the open internet is a soft spot for a large democracy like India, it can also be an effective geopolitical deterrent when free availability of information is most feared by your hostile neighbour.

The writer is former CEO of Prasar Bharati